Category: Politics

Well, that was a big waste of everybody’s time.

Not just because the impeachment of Donald Trump is going to be nullified to whatever extent allowed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch “the Bitch” McConnell, but because House Republicans acted as though on this day, December 18, their actions would actually have some effect on the outcome. Because even IF the Senate had 67 votes to convict Viceroy Trump, that WOULD NOT overturn the 2016 election. It would simply mean that the elected Vice-President takes over.

But almost every Republican who got to speak on the House floor tried to outdo themselves, as though the more ANGRY and HYSTERICAL they got and THE MORE THEY SHOUTED AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS, the more objectively valid their arguments would get. They seriously acted as though this was the worst thing in the world, as if the other party were only impeaching their president for totally partisan reasons, and AS IF that had never happened before. But it is not the worst thing in the world. Unless Mitch knows something I don’t, he IS going to quash this thing in the Senate. And if he doesn’t, the Republican President is Mike Pence.

And the impression I got from the Trump Organization employees who used to be the Republican Party is that the most horrible thing in the world, the thing that we MUST avoid at all costs, is letting Mike Pence become president.

Maybe they know something we don’t.

But really, when it came to raving like a fanatic in the throes of supernatural possession, the real cherry on this seven-layer shit sundae was the appropriately named Representative Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, who actually said, “When Jesus was falsely accused of treason, Pontius Pilate gave Jesus the opportunity to face his accusers. During that sham trial, Pontius Pilate afforded more rights to Jesus than Democrats afforded this president in this process.”

This may seem like a strange question to ask of a conservative Christian, but: Has this guy actually READ the Bible?

And I’m guessing he’s not a Catholic, but does he know the saints?

Saint Valentine: “I heard confessions and was sent to prison by the Romans, where I died.” Saint Sebastian: “I defended Christ and was shot full of arrows.” Saint Lawrence: “I protected the poor, and was roasted on a gridiron.” Saint Donnie: “I did everything for these Christians, I gave them two Justices, I got the embassy moved to Jerusalem, and the Democrats hated me before I was even elected, and then I twisted Zelensky’s arm for dirt on Joe Biden, which is totally legal and very fair, and they impeached me!! Treason. Very unfair.”

“…Wow, dude. Must be tough.”

But face it Democrats: this really IS all your fault. You know that the Republicans don’t have any original ideas. First they stole everything from the libertarians, until they figured out that there aren’t any libertarian votes, at which point they stole from left-populism, which in their hands is Huey Long at best.

In this case, the lesson they stole from Bill Clinton and his Democratic Party was: Never give up. Always defend your Leader. No. Matter. WHAT. No matter what comes out after you stake your position. No matter what he does to embarrass himself, and by extension, you. No matter what the risk that you will lose your job next year so that he can keep his for one more day. Will you be vindicated by history? No. By God? Maybe not. But you’ll get to keep power for a little while longer, and you’ll never have to admit you were wrong. And really, aren’t those the most important things in life?

In choosing to repeat history – the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy – the Republicans have not absolved the Democrats of their historical error, but in choosing to compound it, they have made the Democrats look relatively less corrupt in comparison, which in this political environment may as well be the same thing.

They have their legacy, Republicans. And you have yours.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment, and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

-Edmund Burke

I don’t want to deal much with Viceroy Trump anymore, because there’s not much new to say, and the subject is just depressing. And not just because of the Right, but because of the whole two-party dynamic. As the House Judiciary Committee passed two Articles of Impeachment Friday, some people were sending signals that some Democrats in pro-Trump states were willing to compromise by suggesting that censure would be preferable to impeachment. In fact one Democrat who refused to consider impeachment, New Jersey’s Jeff Van Drew, is deciding to join the Republican Party. But there was another thing that happened during the case earlier in the week. On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did a press conference with Adam Schiff and Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler to announce the two articles of impeachment, but about an hour later she came to the cameras again to announce that Congress had agreed to the updated US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (or as the Administration calls it, USMCA).

Republicans have been whining all this time that Democrats have hated Trump from Day One, which is certainly true, and that they’ve been plotting to impeach him from Day One, which is not necessarily true. If legislation like the trade deal was more the rule than the exception, impeachment might not have happened at all. After all, Democrats really hated George W. Bush for his Electoral College victory, but they worked with him. They even authorized his war in Iraq. And that’s because they didn’t want to be seen as going against the president. Which only points up the fact that whatever you think of W, he at least tried to be the President of the United States, and not the unilateral boss of a Trump Organization that happens to include a government.

The other factor in this is that under Bush the two parties were actually cooperating to a certain extent on legislation, as opposed to Trump, who goes back on deals simply because he can, and because he actually thinks that the definition of ‘fair deal’ is “I get everything I want, and you get nothing.”

With the USMCA, 75 percent of automobiles sold in North America must be produced in the region, and 40 percent of cars must be made in factories that pay workers at least $16 an hour. The Trump Administration got the deal it wanted, but also made these concessions to Democrats and labor unions. Democrats also got the removal of a provision protecting the property protections of big pharmaceutical companies. At the same time the Administration got the Democrats to lift their demand to remove liability protections for Facebook and Twitter. Legislation got accomplished because each side got at least a little bit accomplished. Some of you might be too young to know this, but that is how the two elected branches of government used to work.

You’re not going to see that kind of compromise on impeachment. A censure resolution would have been the sensible bipartisan compromise, but if the two factions of the duopoly were still capable of such, we wouldn’t be here. It is true that some squish Democrats would like to have a censure instead of an impeachment, but their political future is not endangered if they go one way or the other. Whereas for a censure resolution to pass, Republicans would have to join it, and the entire Party has staked its entire identity on the defense that their sweet little boy never ever ever ever ever did anything wrong. Even a censure would undermine that defense, and any Republican who voted for such would be branded a RINO, and all the redcaps would be, perhaps literally, screaming for their blood, and trying to primary them out of the Party with anybody they can get, even if it’s just a mannequin with a tape recorder of Trump’s speeches inside it.

You know, like Matt Gaetz.

The fact is that the likely result is the best and most practical compromise that’s going to happen: The Democrats in the House will have a party-line vote to impeach, the Republicans in the Senate will have a party-line vote to acquit, the Democrats will get to tar Trump going into his re-election campaign and the Republicans will still get to have their little boy as King. Plus which, if getting legislation accomplished under a Republican President is apparently a liability for Democrats, then the last thing they should want is to let Mike Pence complete Trump’s term, because he might get more negotiation accomplished since he does a better imitation of a human being.

You got a compromise on the North American trade deal because both parties could get something out of it. You will not get a compromise on impeachment because Republicans will not get anything out of it and Democrats have no incentive to back off. And you have to consider, Democrats: if you’re asking Republicans to agree with your position that a sleazy pathological liar is morally unfit to be president, (a position, as with white supremacy, where your two parties seem to have switched places) I have to ask why they would. Republicans do not agree with you on taxation or redistribution of capital. They do not agree with you on abortion. They do not agree with your “diversity” and social agenda. And you are asking them to help you remove the best advocate they have.

I nevertheless have to ask Republicans: Best advocate for what?

On December 10, paleoconservative website The American Conservative published a piece by Daniel Larison, simply titled “The Case For Impeachment Is Overwhelming.”

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-case-for-impeachment-is-overwhelming/

Larison says, “The case for Trump’s impeachment seemed quite strong more than two months ago, and the evidence provided to the House’s impeachment inquiry has strengthened it further. The president’s abuse of power is not in dispute. It is clear that he used the powers of his office in an attempt to extract a corrupt favor for his personal benefit, and this is precisely the sort of offense that impeachment was designed to keep in check. It doesn’t matter if the attempt succeeded. All that matters is that the attempt was made. It is also undeniable that he has sought to impede the investigation into his misconduct. The president has committed the offenses he is accused of committing, and the House should approve both articles of impeachment. ” He then says, “The president doesn’t have a credible line of defense left. That is why his apologists in Congress and elsewhere have been reduced to making increasingly absurd and desperate claims. The president’s defenders want to distract attention from the fact that the president abused his power, violated the public’s trust, and broke his oath of office, but these distractions are irrelevant. “

That doesn’t stop them from trying, even in this magazine. In reaction to the Conservative victory in British elections, American Conservative writer and senior editor Rod Dreher looked at the liberal media culture in this country that rooted for Labour, and said “these NYT clowns are just daring me to vote for Trump”. He earlier said, in reference to an internal debate within conservative Christianity, that “While some Evangelical leaders have gone way, way over the top with their Trump enthusiasm, it is an inconvenient truth that the short-fingered vulgarian from Queens, who has given no evidence of being a Christian in anything but name only, is the only major Republican figure who seems willing to side with us deplorable Bible-thumpers on these matters. “

A while ago, after a vacation in Spain, Dreher did an analysis of the state of Christianity there, finding it to be a hollow shell in a secularized social-democrat culture (like the rest of Europe) and reviewed it in terms of how it got to that point, only a few decades after the death of dictator Francisco Franco. Dreher examines the Spanish Civil War largely in terms of how awful the Socialists were, but concludes not only that “had Franco not won, Spain would almost certainly have fallen under left-wing dictatorship, and been no better off — and perhaps worse off” but “Franco was not a good man, and that there’s really no way for Christians to get around that fact.” In reviewing a Franco biography by Peter Hitchens, Dreher grapples with Hitchens’ question: “How do we defend what we love without making false alliances with cynical powers?” Even then, Dreher says after returning from Spain, “We have already seen, in the example of Trump, that conservative Christians will embrace politically a bad man, not because they have any love for him but because unlike left-wing leaders, he doesn’t despise them, and seek to demonize them.” (Of course, simply because you’re exploited for your votes rather than demonized doesn’t mean that your manipulator doesn’t despise you, and I’m not sure Dreher admits this to himself.) And that while Dreher would prefer not to choose a “lesser evil” in such a way that it leads to something like the Spanish Civil War, and seems to blame the Left for letting things get to this point, “I also deeply wish that American Christians would recognize that our strength in American culture, political and otherwise, is superficial, and politics alone cannot sustain what has decayed from within.”

TAC writer Grayson Quay reaches a similar conclusion: “After all that bloodshed, repression, and censorship, the best that can be said is that what would have happened in the ’60s happened instead 20 years later with a slightly more punk-rock flavor. In fact, he may have done more harm than good. To this day, Spanish Catholicism and conservatism are, in the minds of many Spaniards, tainted by Franco’s legacy. … At the time of Franco’s burial, the unmistakable message of the basilica that served as his tomb was that Satan’s minions had been vanquished and the Caudillo could enter eternal rest secure in the knowledge that he had saved Catholic Spain. After his exhumation (in October), the message for us is that the Christendom that endured from Constantine until the middle of the 20th century cannot be preserved, certainly not by force. If we try, we’ll only make things worse. “

If we are to agree that Francisco Franco was not a fascist, but simply a pragmatic right-winger who took extreme but necessary actions against radical socialism, and we are to interpret Trump on the same lines, then by Dreher’s own analogy, the best-case scenario is one where the public abandons traditional religion and embraces hard-socialist politics within a generation after the death of El Caudillo. Again: that’s the BEST case scenario, because Franco was actually competent. For one thing, just because Hitler helped him get to power, Franco didn’t feel obligated to become his puppet in foreign affairs. Trump is another story.

I know that Pat Buchanan and maybe Rod Dreher would prefer Francisco Franco to Barack Obama, but Trump is not General Franco. He’s Archie Bunker without the intellectual depth.

So on one hand you have a respected hard-right website where one of the senior columnists says that even if conservatives should prefer Trump to a Democrat opponent, the case for impeachment is overwhelming. And then you have an editor at that site saying essentially, “to hell with the facts, I have faith.” And then he laments that the next generation considers faith to be morally inadequate.

I quote Rod Dreher this much not just because he is probably the most articulate advocate for the “trad” position in political writing, but as a writer who touches on politics as much as religion and culture – because of course they are all related – he is also one of the more articulate advocates for what I call the Trump rationalization. Unlike outright Trumpniks who embrace malice and anti-logic, Dreher presents his case from the view of a principled man who feels forced into his current alignment by the impression that the only other path in the political system would be far more immoral – which is of course the same presentation as a lot of other conservatives who use a lot less theology to get there. But this presentation is based on the critical error of assuming that Trump is like Franco in being a ruthless pragmatist in defense of what could be seen as a greater cultural crusade. Trump only cares about his own self-preservation and indulgence, and was very much a part of the secular culture he now aligns against. He only picked up with “conservatives” because he shares many of the same prejudices. He is lying to them in the same way that pre-Trump Republicans lied to libertarians, only with far greater consequences, not just because of numbers because traditionalists and populists are far more inclined to use government to punish the people they hate. And Dreher repeatedly brings up how Franco’s ruthlessness in defense of the Church only served to taint the Church by association. When Trump is gone – or if he ends up losing the next year and taking the Senate with him – Dreher and other traditionalists will be in the same position as Trump’s Atlantic City creditors, along with his two-and-counting ex-wives.

Dreher may think the popular culture hates people like him now, but before 2017, there wasn’t that much rationale for such hatred. But when you push a bill to re-implant an ectopic pregnancy when all medical knowledge says that’s impossible, it makes people think you don’t actually care about the welfare of the unborn. And when you wail about the precedent set by Bill Clinton’s perjury and adultery and wish to absolve Donald Trump of far worse, it makes people think you weren’t serious about morality and precedent the first time. It’s almost as if Christians DON’T believe that there is a supernatural authority that judges us in the afterlife, because they sure don’t act like it.

Dreher is correct when he says leftists would hate people like him regardless, but that just means that all you can control is your own actions. Apart from supernatural revelation, the only way you can judge the morality of Christians is by their actions. And just as Dreher himself left the Catholic Church over its corruption, many people have judged that religion is not a moral guide and is in fact destructive to moral growth. And just as the Church tainted itself by association with the authoritarian Franco, professional Christians are creating a better advertisement for socialism than the socialists themselves could accomplish with their limited imaginations. It doesn’t help when “conservatism” has embraced all the intellectual vices that both conservatives and Objectivists had observed in the Left.

Republicans were so obsessed with their hatred of Clinton Democrats that they decided that the only way to beat them was to become them. Not just in the sense that they worship a slick, superficial salesman, but that they offer the exact same excuses in his defense, such as “you can’t impeach a president who’s committed no real crime when the economy is good!” They were so jealous of the success of postmodernism that they embraced it (‘truth isn’t truth‘). And they were so obsessed with Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals that they embraced its amoral pragmatism as a how-to guide, so that any trick is fair as long as you win (‘The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical’) and that the opposition must be not simply opposed but literally demonized (‘[Christ] allowed no middle ground to the moneychangers in the Temple. One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other’).

But if there is any sentiment in the “conservative” movement that combines secular error with magical thinking, it’s a certain flimsy New Age-y pop philosophy that “only the present is real.”

While one could make a case in philosophy that the present is the only reality, this has never been a conservative argument. G.K. Chesterton was famously quoted as saying “tradition is the democracy of the dead.” Edmund Burke is counted as the father of conservatism in the Anglosphere, and he is quoted as saying “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” (He is also quoted as saying: ‘the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.’) But more broadly, a disregard for the past is a disregard for how things got to a certain point, a disregard for the idea that actions have consequences, and a disregard for the very concept of causality. Forget Judgment Day: To act as though Republicans themselves had not impeached a president for far less than Trump’s acts is to deny the precedent they set (just as Democrats ignore the precedent they set in enabling Clinton’s criminality). It is to deny their very agency in the matter. It is to act as though we are not setting an additional precedent and that by sheer stubbornness and will, we can stay in the present moment forever. As such, Republicans are not simply Donald Trump’s defense team, but his co-conspirators.

And if conservatives persist in defending the unlimited powers of Donald Trump, as if the office were only synonymous with him, and that is a legal precedent that stands by their actions, then when a future Democrat President signs executive orders jacking the top tax rate to 95 percent, or mandating federal funding of abortions, then the eternal present for conservatives will be full of tears, and very, very long indeed.

Fuck You, Rand Paul.

This is the first time in this essay that I have used the words: Fuck you, Rand Paul. There will be many more.

Because Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky appeared with Donald Trump on Monday night at a rally to get out the vote for Republican Virginia Governor Matt Bevin – and you already know where this is going – and decided to impress his boss. He told the crowd, “We know the name of the whistleblower,” referring to the hitherto anonymous White House insider who first reported Viceroy Trump’s call to the president of Ukraine – and later told reporters, “I’m more than willing to (name the whistleblower) and I probably will at some point…There is no law preventing anybody from saying the name.”

So let me begin my remarks with the words: Fuck you, Rand Paul.

I say this because as at least one journalist pointed out, Rand Paul HAD said, in 2014, ““We’ve got so many millions of government contractors that when they see something wrong, they should be able to report it without repercussions”.

2014 Rand Paul: thinking about ways to "expand the whistleblower statute to government contractors."

“We’ve got so many millions of government contractors that when they see something wrong, they should be able to report it without repercussions,” https://t.co/pbqQ69lpyI

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) November 5, 2019

The Daily Beast reported on November 6: “Shortly after Sen. Paul tweeted out an article that speculated in considerable detail about the identity of the whistleblower—with a photograph, a name, and details about the purported political history of a CIA professional—Russian state media followed suit.  As if on cue, the Kremlin-controlled heavy hitters—TASS, RT, Rossiya-1—disseminated the same information. But unlike Rand Paul, one of the Russian state media outlets didn’t seem to find the source—Real Clear Investigations—to be particularly impressive, and claimed falsely that the material was published originally by The Washington Post. “

According to Politico, within American media, “only a small cable TV channel supportive of the president and an ostensibly nonpartisan news site have each published the purported name of the whistleblower.”

So fuck you, #redpaul.

If I ever got one of those deep interview shows like Bill Maher or Henry Rollins or Zach Galifinakis, and I got the chance to interview Rand Paul, the first question I would ask him is this:
Senator, at what point in the Trump Administration did you decide that libertarianism equals kissing Donald Trump’s ass?

That isn’t even the worst of it. Rand Paul has been a dillhole for reasons completely unrelated to Trump. Most conspicuously, just this July Rand Paul and Mike Lee (R.-Utah) put a procedural hold on a bipartisan bill to help cover the medical costs of 9-11 first responders on the grounds that it was adding to our growing deficit. Jon Stewart, who has spent much of his time since The Daily Show advocating for 9-11 firefighters in Congress, told journalists, “He is a guy that put us in hundreds of billions of dollars in debt…. And now he’s going to tell us that a billion dollars a year over 10 years is just too much for us to handle? You know, there are some things that they have no trouble putting on the credit card, but somehow when it comes to the 9/11 first responder community—the cops, the firefighters, the construction workers, the volunteers, the survivors—all of a sudden, man, we’ve got to go through this.” In response, Paul referred to Stewart as “a scalawag and a ragamuffin.” (That’s another question I’d like to ask: ‘Senator Paul, on the scale of 19^th Century insults, is ragamuffin a more or less insulting word than mountebank?’)

When I try to tell people that we’d be better off with a more libertarian approach to government, their usual reaction is that the premise of libertarianism is not freedom and tolerance for everyone, but “Fuck You, I’ve Got Mine.” And you know why they think that? Because YOU, Rand Paul, the most prominent elected advocate of libertarianism, think this penny wise-pound foolish approach to spending is an example of fiscal responsibility.

You cut off that aid – knowing that you couldn’t do so for long but that every day you did hold it up would cost those men medical care – and THAT is the hill that you choose to fight for fiscal conservatism and saving money? When you don’t say Jack over squat about the fact that Trump is on track to rack up more money in taxpayer-funded golf trips in four years than President Obama did in eight?

Fuck you, Rand Paul.

It is time for the libertarian movement to admit that Rand Paul is to libertarians what Kanye West is to black people. Seriously, he’s just like Kanye West: all it takes is a big fat ass to change his mind.

Which gets to the other relevant subject.

As we know, incumbent Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin lost his race to Democratic challenger Andy Beshear, son of the previous Governor. Which meant voters said not only Fuck You, Rand Paul, but (obviously) Fuck You Matt Bevin, Fuck You Mitch (the Bitch) McConnell, and especially FUCK YOU, DONALD TRUMP. And Bevin is of course trying to contest the results, likely by expecting the still-Republican held legislature to back him up, except that a lot of those Republicans are publicly trying to cool down such talk. And that might because while Bevin only trails Beshear by a little over 5,000 votes, Libertarian gubernatorial candidate John Hicks got 28,425 votes.

In response to the event, the official Facebook page of the Libertarian Party did this piece, most likely written by Nicholas Sarwark: https://www.facebook.com/LPKentucky/posts/10157252121401936

“In an ideal world, we elect Libertarian candidates and advance liberty. Failing that, we push mainstream candidates towards liberty to advance the cause.

But if we can’t do those things, we are always happy to split the vote in a way that causes delicious tears. Tonight there are plenty of delicious tears from Bevin supporters.

Had Matt Bevin not ditched his liberty Lt Governor for a Mitch McConnell picked anti liberty, corrupt running mate who has tried to eliminate Kentuckians jury trial rights, had Matt Bevin not presided over a huge sales tax increase, had Matt Bevin supported any of our key issues on criminal justice reform, marijuana legalization, expanded gaming, cutting taxes, or acted with the least bit of civility, we probably would not have run a candidate. Of course, he did the opposite. And here we are.

We split the vote. And we could not be more thrilled. If our friends in the major parties do not want this to happen again, they should think about passing ranked choice voting. And supporting our issues.

In the meantime, thank you to John Hicks, Ann Cormican, Kyle Hugenberg, Josh Gilpin and Kyle Sweeney for running. Your effort was appreciated.

For the Bevin supporters, your tears are delicious.”

And the comments on said Facebook page were amusing to say the least. One guy said: “What a joke. Truly embarrassed to call myself a Libertarian. Way to push people back to the two party.” Response: “Libertarian Party of Kentucky Triston Myers we looked up your voter registration. Please do not claim to be a libertarian when you are a registered Republican. Thanks for playing.”

Which pretty much sums up the “conservative” pushback in that thread.

Let’s go over this. One of the other alleged sympathizers in the thread posted, “Making the statement that you find the tears of hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians delicious shows that not only will your party never actually win an election, but that you the writer of the post are a poor excuse for a human! To relish in anyone’s pain is closer to fascism than democracy!” My response: “Yeah, I’m sure all those kids in the detention facilities will be glad to hear that conservatives don’t relish in anyone’s pain.” And another person posted: “Pain? It’s politics. If it means that much, maybe government and politics is too large.”

“Well, I’m never supporting the libertarian movement again.” Bitch, when did you EVER?
Did you vote for a Libertarian candidate? No? Are you a member of the Libertarian Party? NO? Then who cares what you think about the Libertarian Party? You have just as much right to call yourself a libertarian as Bernie Sanders. Get out of the city!

There’s a difference between a socialist who says “I vote Democratic because that’s the most practical option I have in the system” and a libertarian who says, “I vote Republican because that’s the most practical option I have in the system.” The socialists are actually moving the Democrats to socialism. The Republican Party is far less libertarian than it was even four years ago. And we know this because Rand Paul is far less libertarian than he was four years ago.

Oh by the way, fuck you, Rand Paul.

And fuck all y’all who think that the Republicans are libertarian or even the “lesser evil.” You’re the people who are making MY job harder.

You’re the people telling America, and the rest of the world, that a “small government” just means a government small enough to fit in your uterus. You don’t like abortion? Don’t get one. And by the same token, you don’t like gun control? Here’s a great way to discourage gun control AND prove you’re pro-life: Stop shooting so many people. Cause with the conspicuous exception of James Hodgkinson, most of the people who shoot up public places, mosques and synagogues aren’t fans of open borders and AOC.

You’re the people who make a fetish of tax cuts but let the Republicans pass a tax bill that primarily benefited their donors and cut state tax deductions in a lot of states. Like the man said, Governor Bevin refused to cut taxes in Virginia and passed a huge sales tax increase. And you’re accusing us of letting the pro-tax party win? I assume that you’re the anti-tax party? Prove it.

You’re the people who want us to get out of foreign entanglements but cheer while Trump betrays the Kurds one week then next week resettles our troops in north Iraq and Saudi Arabia to get everybody’s oil.

The libertarian Republican has a fat Venn overlap with the Good Christian(TM)Republican: they both profess to a philosophy that holds a higher value than the state but give greater power and authority to the state over the individual every chance they get, and never more so than under this Republican president. For example, Rand Paul.

On a related subject, fuck you, Rand Paul.

When you say, “I’m a libertarian, and I love Trump”, it’s like saying “I’m an Orthodox Jew, and I love bacon cheeseburgers.” Clearly, one priority outweighs the other.

And if you’re going to badmouth libertarians because we don’t worship Trump and don’t agree with you on abortion, or your endorsement of Republican policies that lead to less liberty and civil rights, don’t tell us that we’re letting the bad guys win. Our priorities are not yours, and when you tell the rest of the world they are, you do more to undermine the Right and give the Left a victory that they could not have achieved with their own limited imaginations and strategy.

Why, it’s ALMOST AS IF the Republican Party had been taken over as a long-term project from an ex-KGB chief to undermine the primary opponent to Russian hegemony and make the left spectrum of politics look more attractive in comparison.

And don’t whine at us cause we took votes you didn’t deserve. Cause I distinctly remember one Trumpnik friend whining after the election even though his team won.

“Nevada would have went to Trump if he had received the votes that Gary Johnson received. Colorado would have went to Trump if he had received the votes that Gary Johnson received. New Mexico ditto. Minnesota ditto. Maine ditto. Popular vote total ditto.” And then he went, “I am glad that your (Libertarian) votes didn’t allow Hillary to win, but that last entry would at least have kept some of her supporters from being so disruptive.”

And I wrote: “Thank you so SO much. I am going to bring up this point EVERY SINGLE TIME some liberal wants to read me the riot act cause I voted for Gary Johnson. Because we all know that if Hillary had won the Electoral College, your side would be calling me an Antichrist and their side would be buying me a beer.”

Fuck You, CNN

You know how I could say that? Because years before Trump, there were close state elections in Nevada where the Democrat won by less points than the Libertarian vote, and I heard Republicans howl like scalded cats for losing votes that they wrongly took for granted, just as the Democrats whined in 2016. And I knew that if the tables were turned and Republicans again lost a race by the third-party margin, Republicans would howl just as loud as the Clintonistas did in 2016. And wow, wouldn’t ya know, I was right.

I know that libertarians aren’t good at appealing to the center and quite a few of us take a delight in scaring the straights. Starchild. That guy who took colloidal silver and turned his skin blue. And of course, Nicholas Sarwark. But none of those guys want to separate migrant families and put them in cages. And contrary to liberal belief, the government hasn’t been run by Milton Friedman nerds for the past three years. Because the first thing those people would have told Trump is, tariff wars never work.

Now I know that liberals and conservatives might think that people like me and Nicholas Sarwark are flippant and “glibertarian,” but really, we’re just trying to make you grow the fuck up. Both “real” parties assume that the worst thing in the world would be the other party taking charge. And face it: you both have good reason to think so. In 2016, Donald Trump won Wisconsin and other states by less than the margin of Gary Johnson’s votes, and liberals wailed that the theo-fascists would take over Washington. And so they did. And this week, the “conservatives” are wailing that because of John Hicks, the socialists and gun-grabbers and baby-killers will take over in Kentucky. And they will.

Here’s the joke, neither one of your parties deserves to win, but as long as you insist that we can only vote for the two of you, one of you WILL win any given election. So the punch line is that one of you was going to win this election, and one of you was going to lose. And if Libertarians ARE an unpopular outlier, if Matt Bevin did win the last time, and he didn’t win this time, that means at least one of three things: Libertarians got more votes than last time, Democrats got more votes than last time, or fewer people voted Republican than last time. Quite likely all of the above.

Which is exactly what happened to Republicans in 2012 when Mitt Romney ran against President Obama and what happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016. It would have happened whether Libertarians and Greens were in the race at all. So I’m not exactly shaking in my boots at all you whiners who say you’re leaving the libertarian movement because we’re not “conservative” enough for you. The reason Bevin lost is because a lot more people who used to vote Republican are leaving YOUR party, and you will continue to lose elections this way until you run out of elections to lose.

Apropos of nothing, fuck you, Rand Paul.

The fact is, Libertarians ARE the common-sense middle. Republicans think that Democrats want to turn America into a socialist nanny state. Democrats think that Republicans want to turn America into a corporatist banana republic. Libertarians think they’re both right.

At some point, the “greater evil” is going to win an election, unless one party succeeds at turning America into a one-party banana republic. And if it seems like me, and a lot of the Libertarians on Tuesday night, seem to be sliding towards the Democrats, it’s only because the Republicans are far more likely to desire that outcome. To paraphrase David Frum: If democracy interferes with the conservatives’ agenda, they will not modify conservatism, they will abandon democracy. But in the meantime, Democrats are going to win elections, just as Republicans were killing Democrats (figuratively) until everybody saw how incompetent they were. Is this the end of the world? Cause it’s happened a lot. I think back to that guy in the forum who said: “Pain? It’s politics. If it means that much, maybe government and politics is too large.”

Because after all, we are Libertarians. We have survived the end of the world more times than you can count. So in between these races, we have to live our lives as though the world didn’t end.

In fact, I would say that’s one implicit point of the libertarian movement: the idea that politics, conquest and domination are not the be-all and end-all of existence.

Because as we have seen, there are worse things in the world than losing. You could proverbially win the whole world by selling your soul. You could seize power by hook or by crook (emphasis on the crook) and once in charge become such insufferable, cretinous goons that the rest of the country got over how much they hated Those Other Guys and voted for them to flush you out because they hate you that much more. And so the “worst thing in the world happens” because you practically begged for it.

And that’s what happens when you confuse libertarianism, small government and small-r republicanism with the anti-liberty, Big Government and anti-republican agenda of the personality cult that is currently animating the shell of the Republican Party like a pack of rats inside a week-old corpse.

In conclusion, if you the reader remember only four words from this essay, I want them to be these:

Fuck You, Rand Paul.

So…

Mitch?

Mitch McConnell?

I got a question for you…

…

…

…

You sick of winning yet?

(credit for title to Virginia Bauman on Twitter)

Just a little over two weeks ago, September 21, I went on Facebook and posted a little tweet by Libertarian Party Chairman Nicholas Sarwark: “Nancy Pelosi is one of the most experienced House speakers of the last century. She’s only 70 votes short of an impeachment inquiry. She knows how to whip a vote. She doesn’t want impeachment. She wants a Democratic President to able to abuse the office like this one.”

And it got flak from some of my mainstream liberal Facebook friends, the kind of people who think that Nancy Pelosi actually knows what she’s doing. I was told “she also seems worried that an impeachment battle in DC will boost (Trump’s) approval ratings and help get him reelected. I really loathe to say it, but she might be right about that.” I said “the only reason she’s even Speaker is because voters wanted to put a check on this Administration.” I was told, “and what mechanism would stop him without awakening the beast and getting him elected again? The only thing that will work is get him out of office and try him for his crimes.”

You know, the same old scaredy-cat posture of learned helplessness, where Democrats assume that it’s better to do nothing than antagonize an enemy who’s already out to get them.

But what a difference a week makes, huh?

The Democrats are all, “What gives? The poll support for impeachment has closed the gap! It’s actually popular! We would have done this earlier if we’d known there was more support! What changed?”

And my answer is, “your party finally grew some balls.”

The flak I got was on the basis that there are certain rules that necessarily apply and can be predicted. The whole premise of Democratic passivity – which differs from but does not contradict Sarwark’s suspicion that Pelosi just wants the next Democrat to have Trump’s level of unchallenged power – is the naive assumption that Trump is just a mutation that will be resolved in the next cycle, and it would be better to just wait out the next election rather than antagonize the other party, which as we know, is going to be antagonized whether one does anything or not. This is of course based on the belief that there is going to be a free and fair election. In the fact of Donald Trump’s pressuring a foreign head of government for opposition research, it should be clear – even to Democratic leadership – that Trump has no intention of having a free and fair election, and neither does his Party. Thus, whether Pelosi wanted to or not, she had to act. And pretty typically, the Democrats only got off their asses once their own power and privileges were threatened.

And even more typically, Republicans use the same language that Democrats used during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, like what he did “doesn’t rise to the level” of impeachment and removal from office. Well, if perjury over sex rises to that level (so to speak) why does withholding military aid from a country under subversion from its neighbor – a neighbor that Trump just happens to have begged for opposition research in the past, and that he just happens to have handed intelligence from our allies while president – on the condition of a “favor” to research Ukrainian connections to a cyber-research firm that exposed Russian hacking of the Democratic Party and to research Hunter Biden’s connection to Ukrainian business NOT rise to the level of an impeachable offense? As far as the Party of Trump is concerned, the real scandal is that Burisma paid Hunter Biden 50,000 dollars. Sure. Eric and Donald Jr. are running a business that is clearly not a blind trust. Ivanka is attending meetings of NATO countries with her father. And her husband is running diplomacy with Saudi Arabia, when nobody in the Republican Party can tell us what Jared Kushner’s JOB is or what he is actually tasked to do. But sure, let’s get our undies in a wad over Hunter Biden and his FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS.

Cause that’s the way you’re supposed to say it now. At least if you’re a Republican on TV. Loudly and righteously. As in, “I’m sorry your husband got shot, Mrs. Lincoln, but can we focus on the fact that Burisma paid Hunter Biden FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS??”

Thing is, as much as Democrats have cause to regret their bargain with Bill Clinton now (in this politically correct age when a grown man can’t manipulate a girl into sex in the privacy of his own Oval Office), they did at least get something out of it. He was popular. The economy was actually good. They got a lot of legislation done, and some people other than rich donors liked it. What exactly are Republicans getting by fighting so hard for Trump? Why is this fatty orange hill the one they want to die on?

On September 27, Trump twitted:

“To show you how dishonest the LameStream Media is, I used the word Liddle’, not Liddle, in discribing Corrupt Congressman Liddle’ Adam Schiff. Low ratings CNN purposely took the hyphen out and said I spelled the word little wrong. A small but never ending situation with CNN! “

Or, “I’m going to nitpick your misspelling of a word I made up, and I’m going to do so by exposing the fact that I can’t tell an apostrophe from an accent mark from a hyphen.”

See, this is why, even now, I find it hard to call Trump a Nazi. Not that he isn’t just that evil and racist. Not that he doesn’t intend to turn America into a one party thug regime. It’s just that he’s so fucking BAD at it. I mean, look at this, he can’t even do Grammar Nazi right.

And yet, this is the level of mastermind that Republicans think is presidential. And it always causes one to ponder the question, why is it that people who are NOT dumber than wet camel shit continue to worship someone who is? Well, I may have finally found the answer.

I have said, more than once and in more than one place, that the secret to Donald Trump’s political success is that Donald Trump is what the average Donald Trump voter would be if they had money. Well, it turns out there is a new study out that makes much the same assertion, only with academic credentials.

It’s detailed in a recent article for The Atlantic, appropriately titled “The Most Dangerous Way to Lose Yourself.” Essentially, people will do certain things to preserve their sense of identity, even counterproductive things, if their sense of self is essentially negative. They may also display a certain amount of “team spirit,” like if you grew up as a Dallas Cowboys fan way back in the day and then Jerry Jones took over and the first thing he did was fire Tom Landry and every dumbass thing that happened to the team since proceeded from there, yet you still go along with what Jerry Jones wants because you’re a Cowboys fan, and what are you going to do, quit being a Cowboys fan?

But the article takes this sense of identification and goes deeper.

“Over the past decade, a new conceptualization has gained attention. It began with the seeds of an idea after the attacks on 9/11, (William) Swann says, in that the terrorists’ actions seemed to him to be driven by unusually powerful group identities. A willingness to die—and to kill thousands of others in the process—goes beyond simple allegiance. He reasoned that these people had essentially taken on the group identity as their own.

“Swann gradually developed the concept and deemed it “identity fusion.” Along with a collaborator named Angel Gómez, he defined it in 2009 as when someone’s “personal and social identities become functionally equivalent.”

“When people are fused, your personal identity is now subsumed under something larger,” says Jack Dovidio, a psychology professor at Yale. One way researchers test for fusion is to ask people to draw a circle that represents themselves, and a circle that represents another person (or group). Usually people draw overlapping circles, Dovidio explains. In fusion, people draw themselves entirely inside the other circle.

“…By a similar token, pundits often chalk “radical” behavior up to pathology, or simply to a vague “mental illness” or religious or political extremism. But fusion offers a framework that involves an ordered thought process. It is thought of as distinct from blind obedience (often assumed to be the case in cults and military violence), in which a person might follow orders and torture a prisoner, either unquestioningly or out of fear for personal safety. In fusion, people become “engaged followers.” These people will torture because they have adopted the value system that views the torture as justifiable. Engaged followers do so of their own volition, with enthusiasm.

“…The fusion might explain some apparent contradictions in ideology, Dovidio says. Even people who typically identify as advocates of small or no government might endorse acts of extreme authoritarianism if they have fused with Trump. In fusion, those inconsistencies simply don’t exist, according to Dovidio: Value systems are only contradictory if they’re both activated, and “once you step into the fusion mind-set, there is no contradiction.”

“…Fundamentally, fusion is an opportunity to realign the sense of self. It creates new systems by which people can value themselves. A life that consists of living up to negative ideas about yourself does not end well. Nor does a life marked by failing to live up to a positive self-vision. But adopting the values of someone who is doing well is an escape. If Donald Trump is doing well, you are doing well. Alleged collusion with a foreign power might be bad for democracy, but good for an individual leader, and therefore good for you. “Fusion satisfies a lot of need for people,” Dovidio says. “When you fuse with a powerful leader, you feel more in control. If that person is valued, you feel valued.”

Even if the identity fusion theory did not exist to describe the current phenomenon, we are clearly looking at a situation where Trump is where he is because a critical percentage of the country wants him there, and they want him there because they identify with him to a truly bizarre level. They think he “fights” for them, even when that just means he’s telling them what they want to hear. (When ARE we going to lock Hillary up, anyway?) They think he’s one of them because even though he isn’t, in broad measure he is – an aristocrat whose crassness means he has never been fully accepted as such, someone who despite his background shares many of the beliefs of “flyover country.” A man whose persecution complex and inflated sense of victimhood almost approaches that of his fan club. And to the extent that he doesn’t share their beliefs, he knows that his survival depends on telling them what they want to hear, even when they themselves know he’s lying.

This is why people who are by no means stupid end up becoming Trumpniks. In a certain sense, they’re self-programmed. And now, these people believe in Trump under the impression that he’s invincible, not realizing that the reason he’s been untouchable is because his “base” has made it politically unprofitable to confront him. What they also don’t realize – or don’t care about – is that growing numbers of Republicans in the Congress are retiring, because some of them are not victims of identity fusion, they just know which way the wind is blowing. And without a party in Congress, it is that much less likely that the Republican Party will get anything done. What exactly are “conservatives” fighting for, if all they’ve got to fight for is Trump? If a Party consists only of Trump and his ever-changing moods, is it even a political party?

It’s like a dog that chews a bone and tastes the marrow. He chews even harder and breaks the bone, splintering it. The marrow comes out and he chews even harder. The splinters break his gums. He fixates on the taste and digs in deeper, not realizing he’s tasting his own blood.

It really is a sort of faith. There is a critical difference between “conservatives” (read: Trumpniks) and Christians, however.

At the Last Supper, Jesus predicted that even Peter would betray him three times before the cock crowed in the morning. After the Romans arrested Jesus, Peter was recognized by a servant girl, but he denied knowing Jesus. She asserted “he is one of them (the followers of Jesus) but again Peter denied it. At one point, Peter was spotted by one of the High Priest’s men, and again he denied knowing Jesus. And at that point the rooster crowed.

Whereas over the past three years, Republicans have learned more and more about how ungodly their Leader is, and how much his position as leader makes a mockery of their claims to piety. And still, none of the party “leadership” will speak out against him, and the redcaps in social media are if anything more defiantly supportive than ever.

So congratulations, conservatives. You’ve proven that you’re more loyal to Trump than you are to Jesus.

Somehow I don’t think this cult will last as long, though.

To the extent that there is a real difference between Donald Trump’s fan club and the pre-Trump Republican Party, Trumpniks tend to share leftists’ and libertarians’ disdain for America’s perpetual military commitments overseas. So a lot of otherwise anti-Trump people saw the new president’s disdain for war and neo-conservatism as a silver lining in his election. And then he hired John Bolton to succeed National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, when Bolton was one of the architects of the Bush Administration’s Iraq invasion, the exact sort of neocon adventure that Trumpublicans are supposed to be against.

During his tenure (starting April 2018) Bolton did indeed clash with Trump on a lot of foreign policy issues, even if he reinforced the Trump team’s hawkish stand against Iran. As it turned out though, Bolton had the right take on Trump’s dovish relations with North Korea, pointing out that the North Korean regime was testing new strategic missiles, countering Trump’s statements to the contrary.

But, according to the usual Beltway gossip, what actually killed this marriage made in White Trash Hell was Bolton’s objections to Trump’s secret negotiations with the Taliban on the month of the 9-11 anniversary. Said conflicts may have prompted Trump to announce that the hitherto unrevealed negotiations were being cancelled, allegedly on the grounds that the Taliban had killed one of our soldiers, as opposed to all the other days when they aren’t trying to do so. And while Trump apparently wanted to spring this as a stunt to convey the message that he was standing up for our troops, the rest of Washington got the opposite message from the fact that the Taliban were even invited to Camp David. The former US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, told The New Yorker: “We basically turned on the government, (we’ve) said, ‘It’s your fucking fault that we’re losing.’ ” He said that the optics of shaking hands with people still killing every American soldier they can are “mind-boggling” for the U.S. military, too. “The Pentagon would be in a fury: you kill our soldiers and get invited to Camp David.”

I mean, yes, we basically have to cut bait in Afghanistan, but the Trump Administration position seems to be just as optimistic as it is with North Korea: we withdraw all our forces and trust that the Taliban will peacefully co-exist within the elected Afghan government. And if you believe that, Henry Kissinger has a Nobel Peace Prize he’d like to sell you.

My friend Don looked at this week’s news and told me, “the White House has a turnover rate worse than a McDonald’s.” I said, “Donald Trump is like the guy who goes to the counter at McDonald’s and says, ‘I want to speak to your manager.’ And the counter boy says, ‘Sir, you ARE my manager.'”

But in the wake of all this, our accidental president has told us that he’s going to have a new National Security Advisor next week. Clearly the challenge (as seen with both Bolton and McMaster) is to have somebody who can get along with Donald Trump and still present himself as a persuasive figure on the world stage. And if I may presume, I think I have the perfect candidate for the job.

Gary Busey.

As we know, Gary Busey and Trump go way back, with Busey appearing on two seasons of Celebrity Apprentice in the last decade, before Trump left the “reality TV” business to develop a more lucrative career by screwing the country as a politician. The two men are also fairly similar politically; indeed, Busey actually preceded Trump in showing that you could still have a career after proving to be mentally unhinged.

And actually, as a government official, there would be quite a few points in Busey’s favor.

I’m pretty sure that Gary Busey is at least as qualified for diplomatic work as John Bolton.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un seems to have a real affinity for eccentric extroverts.

The post of National Security Advisor does not require Senate approval. Which is good, because even Mitch “the Bitch” McConnell might gag if he had to bring Gary Busey on the floor.

And Gary Busey always has an ambitious, positive approach to the world, which would be a contrast to Donnie and his Resting Trump Face.

But you might say, “wait.” You might say, “James. Isn’t Gary Busey, like, actually brain damaged?” And I say, So? Was anybody who voted for Trump afraid of a little brain damage? Would brain damage be a problem for working in this Administration? I would argue that it’s a plus. At this stage, what person in their right mind would work for this Administration? The last two National Security Advisors were dignified, rational men. And Donald Trump has shown us that he does not care for rationality or dignity. Fortunately, Gary Busey has left rationality and dignity far behind. He already has a rapport with Trump, and besides, anybody who voted for Trump clearly wanted a government that “works” like Celebrity Apprentice, so you might as well just admit it.

What is that remaining hesitation you have? You know what that is? That is FEAR. And do you know what FEAR is? FEAR is False Evidence Appearing Real. You know who said that? Gary Busey. And if you can’t trust Gary Busey, you can’t trust ANYBODY.

The Conservative government of Great Britain, prior to the resignation of Prime Minister Theresa May, had declared that, deal or no deal, they are going to leave the European Union on October 31. This position was arrived at by party insiders and “hard Brexit” advocates including Boris Johnson, who has since become Prime Minister (in an internal Conservative Party vote). Having gamed the opportunity for the power to enforce his policy, Johnson as Prime Minister has since rapidly cemented his reputation as a Donald Trump who can actually speak English.

In an implicit acknowledgement that the whole Brexit is no longer very popular, Johnson first decided to “prorogue” Parliament for five weeks to forestall debate on the terms of departure, which is legal by parliamentary rules but alienated members from all parties, including some Conservatives. Perhaps as a result, Johnson lost not one, not two, but three votes before the suspension of Parliament, with the House of Commons first voting to pass a bill requiring approval for a no-deal Brexit. A vote to pass the bill on second reading succeeded the next day, and Johnson’s request for a general election failed to pass a vote. Several Conservatives voted against their own party on these measures. Johnson attempted to enforce party discipline by threatening dissident Conservatives with expulsion, only to have many members call his bluff, resulting in the ouster of several, including not only Mr. Soames (Winston Churchill’s grandson) but Johnson’s own brother. Even before that, his parliamentary majority consisted of only one vote, and with the purges, that majority is now gone.

And yet, because of that parliamentary setup (which makes the chicanery of American politics seem simple and easy to follow), there is still a chance for Boris to come out on top. This is the thesis of Andrew Sullivan’s latest weekly column in New York magazine. Sullivan is an old-school (C)onservative who knew Johnson back in the day, and he believes that a general election will be called in response to Johnson’s gambit (although not necessarily on his terms) and that this will in effect be a second Brexit referendum. “This time, the choice will be starker than in 2016: a no-deal Brexit or staying in the E.U. And this week, by firing the dissenters, Johnson has succeeded in making the Tories the uncomplicated “Leave Now” party. By clearing up any confusion, Johnson will thereby stymie the threat to Tory seats by the Brexit Party, which stormed to victory in the recent European elections. … And that is a Tory strength, as it stands. Just before Johnson won the leadership, Labour and the Tories were roughly even: around 26 percent each. Right now, the Tories have recovered under Johnson, as Brexit Party voters have come home, and have a clear ten point lead over Labour: 34/24 percent. The Brexit party still has 13 percent. Now that the Tory position on Brexit is the same as the Brexit Party’s, they form a no-deal bloc of 48 percent of the vote. The unabashedly pro-Remain party, the Liberal Democrats, have 18 percent, the Greens 5 percent, which added to the Labour total, gives the anti-no-deal bloc a total of 46 percent. It’s still close however you look at it.” Sullivan sums up: “Johnson has a clear case: that he stands for respecting a democratic vote to leave the E.U., that his opponents are elitists trying to defeat the will of the people in favor of a foreign entity, the E.U., and that Jeremy Corbyn cannot be allowed into Number 10.”

Yeah, I’m not so sure. It is quite true that Labour leader Corbyn, simply by being Corbyn, has miraculously squandered the immense advantage he has in the unpopularity and fecklessness of the Conservatives, since in this environment, he could have been the Prime Minister now. It is also true, as Sullivan says, that Labour itself is feckless, largely because it has never been as strong in support of “Remain” as the Conservatives are in support of “Leave.”

Way back at the time, I had said that the results of the Brexit referendum (in which 37% of Labour voters backed Brexit) indicated that there is a substantial group of people that rejects the closed-off, neo-liberal, “globalist” establishment, and that in the case of the Labour statistic, this group isn’t limited to right-wingers. I had also said that the Brexit vote (in the summer of 2016) could be a warning to those who think they know what “the people” want and what’s best for them. And this turned out to be the case. Trump got elected president, and we have had alt-right parties gain success in Germany and elsewhere. And the fact that the anti-establishment sentiment is actually a common cause of both the nationalist Right and the socialist Left means that an anti-globalist policy isn’t necessarily a reactionary and racist position. Nobody thinks that Jeremy Corbyn is a racist. Unless you’re Andrew Sullivan.

The problem, especially in the cases of the US and the UK, is that discontent with mainstream liberalism doesn’t mean that the conservative wing of the country knows what it’s doing, and since they don’t, people have to live with a government that is both malicious and incompetent. Which means that the conservatives currently in charge have to present themselves as the last defense against Evil Socialism, when all they have to recommend them is malice and incompetence. Now, we’ve seen that this is actually the selling point for the Trump Administration, but in the case of Brexit, it may not be enough, especially because of that unacknowledged Labour influence on the Leave vote.

Sullivan’s bet is that people are more sick of Corbyn and the Left than they are of the Conservatives, but the history of Brexit itself undermines the case. The referendum was first proposed by then Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, because he was actually in favor of remaining in the European Union under re-negotiated conditions, but was pressured by hardline Conservatives and the UK Independence Party (UKIP). The Brexit referendum was intended as a defense of the moderate, negotiated position, and when the Leave vote won, Cameron resigned his seat. This is how Theresa May became Prime Minister. She herself had supported Remain, but felt obliged to uphold the Conservative position that a Leave vote meant that the government should enact a plan to leave the EU. After almost a year in office, having previously said there would be no general election, May made a “surprise statement” announcing a snap election to seek support for the Conservative position. As a result of the 2017 election, the Conservatives actually lost seats, and while Labour failed to capitalize, the Conservatives needed to form a coalition with the hard-right Unionist Party of Ulster to keep their majority. The main reason May’s government held up as long as it did is that it took this long to build up a consensus for a successor.

The pattern thus far has been that Conservatives want to promote a policy which is both controversial and has a real level of support. In order to bolster support, they use the election system in the hopes of increasing their majority and reinforcing a mandate for the policy. And the end result causes them to lose seats and by implication, support for the policy. This was the case with Cameron’s referendum, it was the case with May’s snap election, it has been the case with Johnson’s parliamentary votes, and there is no reason to believe that that will not be the case with another snap election.

Why? It might have been a lot easier if the people who are always going on about enforcing the choice of the Leave voters actually had any sort of plan to do so. If they’d had any sort of time table to work within a deadline, as opposed to setting a deadline and hoping somehow a time table would come to them before then. If they’d considered that they still had to work with European Union negotiators who now have that much less reason to deal with the Conservatives. If they’d considered the other practical consequences of their policy, namely the fact that the United Kingdom still has a land border because of Ulster, which means that a “hard” Brexit could restore a hard border with Ireland since the two nations will no longer be in the same economic community, and the economic and social consequences of that could lead to the result that British foreign policy has been trying to prevent ever since the Irish state was founded – the loss of Ulster and the reunification of Ireland.

This leads to another point. It has been said that a crucial advantage of the Right in politics is the idea that they don’t want more government. They have an advantage over the Left in that the Left does want more government, so gridlock is usually to the advantage of the Right. This also applies in political terms, because the average voter who isn’t concerned with political affairs or “social justice” takes the current situation as the given and is often suspicious of anything that would change that, even an ostensibly good reform proposal. But in this situation, it’s the Conservatives who are the radicals. In his column, Sullivan quoted a pro-Brexit blog using the phrase “By Any Means Necessary” with a picture of Malcolm X. “When a Conservative Party cites Malcolm X as a role model, it seems safe to say it is no longer conservative in any serious meaning of the word.” Which again would not be a bad thing if the proposed reform were actually good and it were not in fact destructive to the current order, with no real benefits. I return once again to the example of our “conservative” party in America, which wailed and moaned about the “radical” agenda of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (which had its antecedents in the pro-market Romneycare of Massachusetts and a Ron Bailey article in Reason magazine) and when the ACA was the new idea being forced into the system, it was easier to make a case against it. But by the time the Republicans actually got a Republican president who would sign one of their numerous repeals of the ACA, it was clear that they didn’t have anything to replace the ACA with. Which was bad enough. But in the interim, enough people had gotten real benefit from Obamacare that we had to consider the consequences of going back to the status quo ante, which would have cut a lot of people off from medical coverage. In the current situation, the radical and destructive position is to remove the “socialist” (actually business-oriented) reform of the ACA, and if people had actually wanted to go back to the prior standard, it would not have been changed in the first place. Republicans have not succeeded in repealing the ACA, despite valid criticisms of the program, because they don’t have a better idea, and everyone knows it.

Likewise, despite real support for the idea of leaving the EU, Conservatives have not been able to capitalize on that, because they don’t have a real plan other than “crash out” by default, which has consequences that no one really wants. Sullivan’s thesis is that Labour is sufficiently unpopular (and disorganized in its own priorities) that Johnson’s government will prevail anyway, which discounts the point that the Conservatives are the ones endorsing the radical and destructive policy. It discounts the point that in this context, all that the Labour-led opposition needs to do is to endorse the default status quo. To endorse the policy of not changing. You know- the conservative position. There’s also one factor here that doesn’t exist in America, which is that the flexibility of parliamentary politics means there actually IS a viable third party in the UK, called the Liberal Democrats. They have some things in common with Conservatives on economics, but are basically like the old Liberal Party that existed before the Fabian Socialists of Labour took over the opposition to the Conservatives. The LibDems might not be socially conservative enough for some Tories, but they provide a real choice to those who want an alternative to Conservative whackery and the socialist whackery of Labour. Which again provided an escape valve for Johnson’s internal opposition and allowed them to call his bluff. Even Sullivan says, “if Labour were to win, or go into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, they could keep the U.K. in the E.U. without appearing to be acting directly against the wishes of the people. Or they could hold a second referendum. Either way, some kind of resolution would happen — and through a democratic process like a general election.”

In any event, the parallels continue: if the original Brexit vote was a sign that the liberal establishment was not invincible, the three years afterward have demonstrated that for the Right to actually take advantage of that and create positive change, they have to have a plan to do so. The problem has been that they don’t have a plan to do so, because at heart, they don’t believe in positive change. This has already had bad results for the “conservative” movement, despite the weakness of the Left, and that lack of foresight will continue to undermine them in the future.

It was announced on Friday August 23 that David Koch, former Vice President of Koch Industries, had died. It is unknown which physical ailment ended up killing him, but apparently he had more than one. But David and his brother Charles were best known for applying their vast wealth, and influence with other wealthy people, towards the libertarian movement, which has had a broad degree of influence on right-wing politics without actually taking over the Republican wing of America’s duopoly. In particular, the Kochs fund Reason Magazine, which I’ve always considered to be a fair and useful information source, even if it is sometimes “glibertarian.”

He had donated hundreds of millions of dollars to public television, museums, and cancer research, especially after his own cancer diagnosis. Even Mother Jones had enough regard to mention this side of his public life.

The Reason obituary has an interesting little remark where Brian Doherty implies that Koch’s reason for his limited engagement with third-party politics was mostly practical: “In the 1980 presidential campaign, when recently imposed campaign finance restrictions hobbled third parties’ abilities to fundraise by severely limiting how much any single donor could give, David Koch took advantage of the fact that the rules allowed candidates themselves to self-finance as they wished: He became the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential nominee. He and running mate Ed Clark got more than 1 percent of the vote, a party record that would go unbroken until 2016. ”

In a certain respect, Koch was ahead of his time, preceding billionaire Ross Perot’s self-funded celebrity campaign for president 12 years later. Of course neither Koch nor Perot gamed the system as well as Donald Trump, who did the same thing with politics that he did with his private career: run up huge tabs and expect the creditors to pay for them.

Doherty had previously quoted Koch in his book Radicals for Capitalism, where he said that after the 1980 campaign, he saw politicians as “actors playing out of a script.” From that point, the Kochs took the conventional route for wealthy men in politics: hiring the actors to play out their scripts.

Not only had the Koch Brothers supported numerous rising conservative lights like Scott Walker and Ted Cruz, they had disavowed the rising populist Tea Party movement. David Koch had repeatedly said that while he had sympathy to the Tea Party movement, he’d never been approached by their people and had no involvement with it.

As Ron Howard might say, this is not entirely true. One of the more developed exposes of the Koch political network was Jane Mayer’s 2010 article for The New Yorker, and it pointed out, for one thing, that one of the organizations within Americans for Prosperity (a group founded by David Koch) had hosted an anti-Obama event in July 2010. Peggy Venable, an organizer for the July summit, was at the time an employee of Americans for Prosperity and had also been part of other Koch-funded groups. “And she noted that Americans for Prosperity had provided Tea Party activists with lists of elected officials to target. She said of the Kochs, “They’re certainly our people. David’s the chairman of our board. I’ve certainly met with them, and I’m very appreciative of what they do.” Mayer also quotes former Reaganite Bruce Bartlett as saying ““The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.” With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.”

This premise of control is a consistent theme with the Kochs. I’d already pointed out that as part of their need to preserve their fossil-fuel based industrial empire, the Kochs are among the primary deniers of anthropogenic climate change, to the extent of fighting both state and private initiatives for green energy. Their secrecy in regard to their activities includes their denial of interviews to most journalists, including Mayer. In the case of Doherty, Mayer quotes David Koch’s comment to him: ““If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent,” he told Doherty. “And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding.”

Anybody who actually read Atlas Shrugged knows that in that book, the government was not so much the main enemy as the enforcer for people like James Taggart who used their influence with government to preserve their privileges by force. In a certain respect, both libertarians and socialists are right: Big Government AND Big Business are the enemy, because Big Government usually acts at the behest of Big Business. Which is why I would count the Kochs as libertarian-sympathetic but not entirely a good for libertarianism: The premise of libertarianism is the release of controls on the individual – from public OR private authorities – and the mindset of the Kochs is the mindset of control freaks.

It is this need for control that undermines not only libertarianism in theory but libertarianism in practice and perception, as for all the genuine charity and socially progressive policies of the Kochs as individuals and as company representatives, they are far more exercised in harnessing government than restricting it, and their influence has been far more concentrated in removing restrictions on their business (regulations and ‘progressive’ taxes) than on individuals (with, say, the fact that one of our country’s main businesses is the prison industry). In their case at least, “liberty” primarily means the right of a corporation to do whatever it wants without consequences or concern for the environment (either the literal environment or the culture). And there is a reason why liberals always use the Koch Brothers as their go-to, Captain Planet-villain-caricature of what all libertarians really are, because the Koch Brothers are really like this.

It’s akin to the “Faustian bargain” that the Good Christians (TM) of the conservative movement made with Trump (and secular Republicans before him), except that they’re actually getting something out of it. They’ve got Mike Pence as Trump’s backup, they’ve got a whole new class of religious conservative judges on the bench, and they’re aligned with Trump’s policy to criminalize migration into this country, which most libertarians (including the Kochs) oppose. And while Paul Ryan did give the donor class that big tax cut, the benefits of that are being eaten by Trump’s trade war. This may be why Charles (whom I’d always regarded as the more sensible brother) started pulling his lobby away from active endorsement of the Administration.

In that regard, I posted this bit on my Facebook page from a Facebook site called Progressive Libertarianism –

which captioned it, “President Donald Trump, the central planning socialist.” And this got a slight amount of blowback from “progressive” friends who gave me the standard defense that socialism is something other than the authoritarian system that was implemented by every country that actually calls itself socialist or a “People’s” government. Which is ironic for two reasons: one, the Facebook page was quoting Judd Legum, a liberal journalist formerly at Think Progress. Which leads to the second point. Liberals, the issue is not whether you agree with the assertion that socialism equals authoritarianism. The post is challenging the assertion and acting on it. If you are a libertarian or conservative and you actually believe that authoritarianism, especially command of the private sector, is a characteristic of socialism, and you support Trump as the counter to socialism, you need to wake the fuck UP.

Just as the point of challenging libertarians is not whether I believe in the leftist assertion that libertarianism is just another wing of conservatism that seeks to ban abortions so that we can fill the maternity wards and the Koch Brothers can eat the babies. The point is whether libertarians should present a position that justifies that impression among people who aren’t on the Left.

There are at least two ironies in the Koch political trajectory: One, as Jane Mayer pointed out, the Kochs’ philanthropic and political roles created certain conflicts. “For example, at the same time that David Koch has been casting himself as a champion in the fight against cancer, Koch Industries has been lobbying to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde, which the company produces in great quantities, as a “known carcinogen” in humans.” In the same respect, the Kochs’ alleged respect for libertarianism not only discredited the movement politically, it actually worked at cross-purposes. The best way to create a libertarian movement would have been to divorce it from the patronage of either political party. The path the Kochs took, to entwine themselves that much more deeply with the rest of the Right, actually worked against liberty, especially in their support of a populist movement that led to the likes of Sarah Palin, and then Trump. If, as Bruce Bartlett says, libertarianism was never that popular anyway, how popular was racism before the astroturf grass-roots movement? Which movement is an actual danger to democracy and which is ascendant in the “conservative” party today?

The real punch line is that the closest thing you’ve got to a grass-roots concept in American politics nowadays started with Bernie Sanders’ small-donation network, creating a path for politicians to be less dependent on the donor class, and making it more likely that real change will occur through the leftist movements that the Kochs regarded as anathema.

The example of David Koch – and why he deserves neither unqualified hatred nor praise – is an example of someone who knew better. He and Charles Koch were part of the foundation of libertarianism as an organized political movement, and they had the choice to present an alternative to the two-party system. They chose to join it, and support it. We are living with the consequence of that choice today.