Tag: coronavirus

March 30, 2023.

A day which will live in Schadenfreude.

On that day, a New York grand jury, after hearing weeks of evidence, voted to indict former president Donald Trump, on charges to be specified at the hearing. And Trump’s response on Truf Censhal was with the usual flair:

“These Thugs and Radical Left Monsters have just INDICATED the 45^th President of the United States of America, and the leading Republican candidate, by far, for the 2024 nomination for President. THIS IS AN ATTACK ON OUR COUNTRY THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE. IT IS LIKEWISE A CONTINUING ATTACK ON OUR ONCE FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS. THE USA IS NOW A THIRD WORLD NATION, A NATION IN SERIOUS DECLINE. SO SAD!”

(Posted in ALL CAPS, because as we know, the three loudest things in the universe are the original Big Bang explosion, Disaster Area, and Donald Trump social media posts.)

Well, at least he spelled “INDICATED” correctly.

Again, the public has not been made aware of the specific charges, but based on the investigations that were known up to this point, charges seem to stem from money paid out to porn actress Stormy Daniels so that she would not confess to an affair with Trump in 2006. This payment was arranged in October 2016, just before the presidential election that Trump ended up winning. While some would describe this as a financial arrangement between consenting adults, we know this qualifies as a crime because Trump’s lawyer and “fixer”, Michael Cohen, who actually made the payments, was convicted for doing so. At the time, Cohen insisted that he did not make the payments in collusion with Trump, but later turned against his boss and admitted that the money was transferred to his accounts. On May 2, 2018, Trump’s new lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, admitted that Trump had reimbursed Cohen. So… if it was a crime for Cohen, why is it NOT a crime for the “Individual One” who was listed as a “co-conspirator” in his case?

Trump’s logorrhea in this case is yet another example that every one of his accusations is either a projection or a confession. He is in no position to talk about free and fair elections when he whined about losing the popular vote in the 2016 election that he won with the Electoral College, and when we actually had a free and fair election in 2020 and he lost the popular vote AND the EC, he attacked that free and fair election by sending a lynch mob after the Congress that met to certify it. And if we are subjecting a former head of government to prosecution for criminal acts – as France has done at least once, and as Israel is doing with Benjamin Netanyahu – we are becoming less like a Third World nation, not more.

Which all leads to the question of how things will proceed. Supposedly Trump has agreed to fly to New York on Monday in order to appear in court Tuesday, when the charges will be unsealed. He will most likely have to be fingerprinted and recorded like any other suspect, although most sources agree he will not have to do a “perp walk” in handcuffs. After all, Trump is already under Secret Service escort at all times. What’s he going to do, flee to Russia as soon as it looks like he’s going to be arrested?

We are being told by the media that in order to preserve “the rule of law” that all proper legal procedures must be in place to protect the rights of a defendant, which is true, but elides the point that throughout his life, Donald Trump has had far more than the presumption of innocence, but has always acted on a presumption of immunity – as the formerly most criminal president in history, Richard Nixon, put it, “if the president does it, that means it’s NOT illegal.”

Of course Trump was not actually president at the time these transactions occurred, but that just gets to the larger point, that he has always acted as though he could do anything he wants because someone is always going to protect him. Because up until now, he has always had reason to believe that.

The liberal media keeps referring to Trump and this case by saying “no one is above the law.” But the fact that Trump has gotten away with as much as he has, as long as he has, proves that’s not the case, and it never really has been. But that’s okay. After all, we also keep saying “all men are created equal”, when in the legal system all men have never been equal to each other, let alone to women.

When we say “no man is above the law” or “all men are created equal”, these are not realities. These are aspirations. These are goals. And as long as we see that they are national aspirations and not the reality, we can make progress. This country has become more equitable insofar as we are capable of recognizing the contradiction between our ideal and our reality. Unlike some ideals, it is quite possible to make the legal system more fair, if not abstractly perfect. We can at least make it better than it was. People like Trump coast on the unfair reality of the world as it is, and that is what they seek to preserve. Far from a fair system, they want a sugar daddy government for themselves and a Road Warrior barbarism for the rest of us. When they whine that being equal under the law makes this country MORE of a Third World regime, they are not asking for a free country with fair elections. They want to indulge their desire to look up to a king.

Bad enough that that is the case, but Trump and the fan club that used to be a political party are willing to resort to intimidation. When Trump first heard he was going to be indicted, he first told his gang to protest at the court (when he should have known from local experience that NYPD aren’t nearly as restrained as Capitol Police) and then made a post on Truf Censhal showing a picture of him with a baseball bat next to a picture of New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, raising his hand. When the actual indictment came, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis spoke up for the resident of his state, saying “The Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney has consistently bent the law to downgrade felonies and to excuse criminal misconduct. Yet, now he is stretching the law to target a political opponent”. So the guy who is setting himself up to be the alternative to Trump in 2024 is going along with all the George Soros dog-whistling and antagonism to big cities, just like Daddy Trump does. Raising the question, is DeSantis really running for President, or Trump’s Vice President?

All of which sort of blows away the tut-tutting on MSDNC and other networks prior to the actual indictment about whether charges over an affair are worth a criminal case against Trump, when there’s so many more serious charges we should be pursuing. But as Cohen himself told the press, Al Capone was only convicted on tax evasion. And let’s review what we’re really dealing with: A populist who bragged about his support from the “poorly educated”, who said he would pay the legal costs for any fans who beat up protestors at his rallies, who openly begged Russia to release hacked intel on the Hillary Clinton campaign (which they DID), who as President fired people specifically because they investigated him, who hired an Attorney General (Bill Barr) largely to undermine investigations against him, who refused to admit the extent of coronavirus in 2020 because it would undermine his deals with Communist China, who told state governments to not allow special measures to vote by mail during the pandemic, because it helped his chances of re-election if people were less likely to vote, who still lost that second election anyway and refused to admit it, and who encouraged social media campaigns to organize violence against the certification, threatening the lives of Republican congressmen, not to mention his own Vice President.

This has gone far beyond having a difference of opinion. When you try to stop an election result from proceeding, you lose all right to talk about “FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS” or rights when you certainly wouldn’t have given any rights to the people on the other side. Trump isn’t just some mean old conservative that woke liberals hate, he’s an active threat to national security. He has exhausted any benefit of the doubt, and any right to sympathy. And that goes double for anybody who looks at where he’s taken this country and thinks, “we need some MORE of that.” Bluntly, who gives a fuck which charge they get Trump on, as long as they GET him?

And if this doesn’t pan out – remember, it is a jury trial – there are all those other cases that the Feds and other states (namely Georgia) have waiting in the wings. If it was just one case of criminality, you could take your chances with the legal system. But Donald Trump is in a unique situation because of all our public personalities, only Trump lies, swindles and commits crimes like other people breathe. As in, he does so on reflex, and if he ever stops, he might die.

On the bright side, history also shows that while Al Capone got an 11-year prison sentence, he was released after only 7 1/2 years, after doctors diagnosed a case of syphilis that was slowly destroying his brain and his ability to function normally. But then we have no cause to believe that Donald Trump is suffering from an illness that is destroying his brain, much less an illness contracted from sexual incontinence.

Early voting in Nevada ends Friday. The news leading up to the election is certainly stressful and intense. It shouldn’t be. Simply because Democrats could lose an election when Conventional Wisdom dictates the President’s party is going to lose in the midterms doesn’t mean it’s the figurative end of the world or the end of the republic.

Except, it probably could be.

Remember, the Party of Trump is engaged in an organized effort to install state officials who parrot the dogma that the election was stolen and Trump is the real president, and this effort is strongest in states like Arizona and Nevada where Trump barely (but clearly) lost. Lest one think this is not an organized campaign and that the good little Trumpniks all came to the same conclusion independently, Arizona US Senate candidate Blake Masters actually released a video of him campaigning door-to-door, and while he was out he took a call from Trump who told him, “Look at Kari. [Kari Lake, the Trump candidate for Governor] Kari’s winning with very little money, and if they say, ‘how’s your family?’ she says, ‘the election was rigged and stolen.'” All the proof we need that this really is the catechism of the Church of Trump. Just what you’d expect from a movement that is half fundamentalist cult and half snake-oil racket. Always Be Closing. At least Trump knows that much.

As addled as the Trumpniks may be in, for example, running a country, they have a capacity for long-term strategy and a capacity to change the terms of debate in a way that Democrats have so far been lacking. If they win it will make it that much easier for them to game the system and get their dominus et deus back in the White House, and then it won’t matter if Democrats bounce back in the presidential race after they didn’t feel like voting in the midterms because they weren’t enthused about the party in power. If enough Republicans get enough power in enough states next week, Democrats might never get back in power again.

These are my impressions on how this election is shaping up and how we got here.

The press is engaging in malpractice.

This week Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight made a hypothetical case for how Republicans could actually have a red wave this year, titled “The Case For A Republican Sweep On Election Night.” And I thought to myself, ‘that’s got to be the best news Democrats have had all year.‘

Silver, you might recall, was pretty optimistic about Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the White House in 2016, even if he also gave Trump a bigger chance than anyone else. And FiveThirtyEight, like most pollsters, was a lot more optimistic about the Democrats’ downballot chances in 2020 than the actual results warranted. After the fact, Politico came up with at least one analysis. “The most likely — if far from certain — culprit for off-kilter polling results is that key groups of people don’t answer polls in the first place. …Decreasing response rates have been a major source of concern for pollsters for more than a decade. But the politicization of polling during the Trump era — including the feedback loop from the former president, who has falsely decried poll results he doesn’t like as “fake” or deliberately aimed at suppressing enthusiasm for answering polls among GOP voters — appears to be skewing the results, with some segment of Republicans refusing to participate in surveys. …The most plausible — yet still unproven — theory is that the voters the polls are reaching are fundamentally different from those they are not. And Trump’s rantings about the polls being “fake” or rigged only exacerbate that problem.”

Politico also noted this year : “For the past week or so, polling averages like RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight have seen a steady stream of surveys from Republican (or Republican-leaning firms). That’s led to a social-media debate over whether the GOP’s uptick in the polls is real — or whether it’s an artifact of which polls are comprising these averages.

“How much of an influence are the Republican polls having? In New Hampshire, four of the last seven polls in the FiveThirtyEight average are from Republican firms. In Pennsylvania, it’s the three most recent polls, and six of the last nine. In Georgia, five of the last seven.” The article also noted that polls achieve substantively different results based on methodology: “(Nevada) Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican Adam Laxalt were tied in the New York Times/Siena College poll, 47 percent to 47 percent. Another new poll out Monday, an OH Predictive Insights poll conducted for the nonprofit Nevada Independent, showed Cortez Masto barely ahead of Laxalt, 43 percent to 41 percent.

“Again, though both polls point to a close race, the differences in vote share can be explained by different methodological choices. The Independent’s poll included all three third-party candidates, plus Nevada’s unique “none of these candidates” ballot option.

“But the Times poll required respondents to volunteer the names of the third-party candidates, and “none of these candidates,” likely leading to higher vote shares for both major-party hopefuls.”

It recalls the physics problem of how the act of observing a phenomenon changes the nature of what is being observed.

There’s also the fact that, as with the Clinton-Trump race in 2016, you have may one candidate who is unpopular but qualified, or in some races a candidate who is qualified AND popular, against another candidate who is objectively inferior, and the press basically stages things to make the race a lot more suspenseful than it arguably ought to be.

Katie Hobbs is the Democratic candidate for the open Governor seat in Arizona against Kari Lake. Some have compared the race to an NPR public-affairs host going up against a Fox News anchor. Hobbs clearly has no charisma, and apparently no faith in herself. Because she went through all kinds of maneuvers to avoid getting into a debate with Lake, and in such a way that it ended up causing more problems. Supposedly this was because Lake “only wants a scenario where she can control the dialogue ” and is “only interested in creating a spectacle”. Which is true enough. Of course the spectacle was where Hobbs torpedoed the debate and made herself look like a chicken. On the other side of the country, Democrat John Fetterman is running as the Democrat for Pennsylvania’s open US Senate seat against Mehmet “Dr.” Oz. Fetterman had a stroke just as he was getting confirmed as his party’s nominee, and had been doing pretty well in the polls even though he refused to do direct interviews or public appearances, citing his need to recover. But then he had to do the late-campaign debate with Oz, and predictably did very badly. (It was noted at the event that Fetterman had to watch closed captioning panels because he still has problems processing what he hears, which made it that much harder to respond in conversational real time.) Now, it may be true that Fetterman will end up recovering fully while Oz will always be an entitled jerk, but his performance still might have had a negative impact on people who hadn’t already made up their minds. Why did Fetterman keep to his schedule when he would have had an excuse not to? Because if he’d refused to debate, he would’ve looked like a chicken. As it is, he looks unfit. And thus two races that had been going pretty good for Democrats are in real danger of going the other way, because the candidates could not or would not perform to the dictates of the press.

Why? Because getting a bunch of career politicians and functionaries to keep running the government the establishment way is boring and bad for ratings. Stuffing a bunch of baboons into business suits and telling them to rewrite the Constitution is funny and great for ratings.

But that would be if the Democrats lose, as if they need any help. The real punch line would be if the Republicans aren’t as popular as they appear and don’t perform as well as the press expects (see below) and the Trumpniks, as they did in 2020, play on this to say everybody expected them to win and therefore an inconvenient result means the whole thing was “rigged” and “stolen.” And who else do you think they’re going to blame?

You would think that these guys learned their lesson by foisting a “reality” TV celebrity who then turned around and sued the press for telling the truth about him, but apparently not.

Nobody likes either of these parties.

But this election, based on all the information I can trust, really is close.

I went to a Walmart the other day and the friggin’ mens’ underwear was locked in a glass cabinet so you had to flag down an employee to get it. I went to their cereal aisle and the prices were almost a dollar higher than they were the last time I was there. Republicans’ anti-Democrat commercials keep hammering inflation and crime, and what am I dealing with when I want to shop in my neighborhood? Inflation and crime.

None of which means that Republicans have any better idea how to deal with these things, but all they have to do is keep hammering on the side that’s in charge and hope voters don’t have a memory span longer than two years.

And it goes to display our civic illiteracy and lack of long-term analysis that nobody considers that when you lose representative government, the economy gets worse in the long run because there is no way to correct a bad government’s bad decisions. Just look at Vladimir “Let’s Have A War” Putin. Or China under Xi Jinping, whose economy is becoming more brittle even as The Leader consolidates more power.

But the apparent weakness of the Democrats in the stretch belies the point that again, in midterm elections with an unpopular president, that president’s party usually does that much worse. And if Republicans are that popular and Democrats are that bad, you would think that their lead in “tight” states would be that much more clear. If Republicans really are a party of brain-dead theocrats, why aren’t Democrats running away with this? And if Democrats are a bunch of woke Commies and everybody hates the economy, why aren’t Republicans running away with this?

Because the Republicans actually ARE a brain-dead theocracy. And while the Democrats aren’t really a Communist regime, they haven’t been doing such a great job.

MAYBE, it could be, Americans don’t like either one of these gangs. But one has to win.

And if Democrats are that unpopular and that incompetent, and Democrat early voting turnout is as lackadaisical as it often is (remember, blowing a big lead on paper is what Democrats DO), the main thing that gives me hope is that in the Kansas abortion referendum this summer – where a “Yes” vote technically would have only meant that the state had the option to write greater restrictions on abortion in the future – the main poll prior to the vote had “Yes” leading by 4 points with a 2.8 percent margin of error and the “No” vote ended up winning by almost 60-40.

Because as much cause as voters might have to hate Democrats, I think some of them realize that they can’t take a chance with the Republicans. “What the hell have ya got to lose?” Well, over a million COVID deaths between January 2020 and November 2022, over a third of which were under Trump in one year.

The Future

So given all that, I’ve got no right to make a prediction for what happens in these various elections other than what we already know: If Republicans win their contests they will do all they can to skew state governments to make sure they can throw out any 2024 election results they don’t like. And if they don’t get the results they want they will scream and cry and throw things, try to pull what legal skullduggery they can and ultimately resort to violence, because that’s just what they did after 2020.

Democrats keep wailing that this approach is a threat to “democracy”, but I’m not sure they understand that in an environment where everything is branding, association of democracy with the Democratic Party might not be such a great idea. Think of our system more as “representative government.” Or even “republicanism.” And right now the ostensible Republicans are against that. A republic means you elect the political class, and if your approach is “either we win or there will be blood”, then there’s really not an election now, is there? I know the Right is, or used to be, the side that said, “it’s a republic, not a democracy,” but as I’ve said, these are functionally the same thing. And if there are no independent elections, it’s not even a republic anymore. It’s more like what you have in Communist countries where you have an “election” to give undeserved legitimacy to the regime, but the outcome is never in doubt. I mean back in the days of Reagan or even McCain, Republicans used to be critical of old Communist politicians but apparently not anymore.

Regardless of who ends up winning in your state, this is my advice to any liberals after the election:

Buy guns. Train with guns. And buy lots of ammo.

Because it is very clear now that the Republican state governments and the Alito Supreme Court don’t think we have any human rights other than the right to have guns, and don’t acknowledge any part of the Bill of Rights besides the Second Amendment. And you need to take advantage of that before they get rid of that too. I mean, if they see enough black, female and gay customers come into the gun shops all at once, they might get wise. Although if you have pastel colored hair and a cannabis T-Shirt, you might be able to pass as a Libertarian.

You might think, “oh no, we shouldn’t escalate”, but kids, the Party of Trump has been escalating for the past six years whether you acknowledge it or not, and this is where we are. These people only acknowledge power and force, and you need to get some of your own. Or, you can just keep playing Eloi to their Morlocks until they’ve gobbled the last one of you.

And if you really think the solution to this country’s political violence is more gun control – meaning, more control of the individual by a government that you are rapidly losing control over – first acknowledge that you’re not going to get more federal gun control as long as the entire Republican Party and several senior Democrats are against it. But you know what will change their minds?

All you need to do is have one hundred big Black men in BLM T-Shirts, flanked by an honor guard of twenty drag queens, marching down the streets of Washington DC all strapped with AK-47s and AR-15s. When they see that on Fox News, the Republicans will all change their minds on gun control right quick. They will change their minds like Saul on the road to Damascus, PRAISE Jesus.

And everyone here hates everyone here for doin’ just like they do

And it’s best that we all keep it quiet instead

-Matchbox 20, “Back To Good”

“New Rule: …if you believe that the world is going to end, then you don’t get to vote on next year’s budget, BECAUSE IT DOESN’T CONCERN YOU.”

-Bill Maher, Oct. 11, 2013

The early mail-in ballots for Nevada elections came in this week. And if Republicans take over at least one house of Congress, as seems likely, they’re going to do that much more to wreck this lousy economy than they already have, in order to blame a Demonrat Party that is still nominally in charge as long as Biden and Harris are still in the White House. And if they win certain state governments, they will have charge of who certifies elections. And that will make it that much more likely that they will be able to reinstall their boss, Donald Trump, meaning, Vladimir Putin, in order to turn the United States back into Russian North America, and make it that much harder for Ukraine, and thus Europe, to resist Putin’s expansion.

I was trying to find this article I read in Politico or some place, where somebody mentioned the experience of trying to talk to their Trumpnik relative and being told “I don’t care” about all the stuff one could say for the Democrats or against Trump.

Trumpniks, what you all haven’t figured out is that I don’t care if you don’t care. If nothing will persuade you, I’m not going to try. I’ve written you off.

Don’t try to tell me I don’t know where you’re coming from. I mean, I AM you. I am a cis het white guy. I actually do ask myself, “When did Motley Crue become classic rock?” I have no idea why everybody became transgender and vegan all of a sudden. And while I wasn’t old enough to vote for Reagan, I was old enough to remember when the Republicans really seemed to know what was going on and how to run the country, while Democrats were completely clueless. And I’ve said, in my posts about the Trump Organization, that as long as Trump superficially held to the fiscal conservative policies of earlier Republicans, the economy was good, at least for certain people, and I can certainly understand how those people could support Trump as long as their ox wasn’t gored.

But then coronavirus happened, and Trump and his Republican governors wanted to pretend it didn’t happen. And as a result almost a quarter million Americans died by the time Trump lost his election (News Flash: Trump lost the 2020 election) and over a million have died in total. But don’t worry, it will all work out well, thanks to President Xi.

Needless to say, quite a few Republicans got more than their ox gored, including Herman Cain. Not only that, the low-wage, low-demand economy that the conservative business class had been leaning on was at least temporarily wrecked because the virus threatened those service industries whose employees couldn’t just sign in at a workstation from home. You want to know why all those jobs now have to pay more than (oh no) ten dollars an hour, that’s why. Because the Law of Supply and Demand actually works for labor, too.

If you want to know why I, as a member of my demographic, became a race traitor and commit daily blasphemy against Our Lord and Savior, it’s for more reasons than I can really count, but what’s relevant here is however bad you think the economy is now, we aren’t nearly at the point of catastrophe that we were under Trump and his Party of enablers.

Under Trump, Republicans lost the House, then the White House, and eventually the Senate. And a lot of them lost their lives. And the economy, the main thing people give Republicans credit on, was lost too, and there is little objective reason to believe they will do a better job if we let them back in charge. There is in fact every reason to think that in the short term they will make it worse. And whatever you think you’re getting from Trump, you’re really not getting it, unless what you want to get from him is more rage and hatred and justification for those emotions, because those are the only things he really delivers on. In which case, that is the only thing that justifies your loyalty.

Because you are that much more loyal to Trump, who has lost you everything, than you were to prior Republicans under whom you had a good economy and renewed national standing.

Like I said, if the Republican Party was still more benefit than drawback I could understand your rationalization. But this is not the Party of Reagan. This is not like Chik-fil-A, where liberals can go, “Yes, the company is run by a family of homophobic fundamentalists, but I REALLY LOVE THE SANDWICHES!” Your boy is serving chicken vomit sandwiches and shit nuggets, but you’re still lining up around the block.

The other huge reason I oppose the Church of Trump is because I’ve seen this happen before. Bill Clinton, already known to be a pathological liar, ended up committing perjury over Monica Lewinsky. (Liberals would say Ken Starr set up a ‘perjury trap’, I think Bill was just that much more scared of Hillary than everybody else.) So he ended up getting impeached. And the liberal Democrats all went “it’s nothing”, “it doesn’t rise to the level of impeachment”, “it’s a political attempt to thwart the will of the voters”… y’know, all the stuff that the Church is saying to defend their Lord and Savior from crucifixion. Where do you think they learned it? The difference being that Clinton’s perjury, while still perjury, was perjury over an affair, whereas Trump committed obstruction over an attempt to strongarm a head of state who was himself pressured by another head of state (Putin) in order to get dirt on his potential election opponent Joe Biden. The other difference being that however much I hate them, Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were somewhat competent.

So if I hated the Clintons that much, and you want to act like the Clinton Party on steroids, you better believe I’m going to be hating you like I hated them, on steroids.

And when I say I hate you, I don’t mean Trump, I mean you. If you weren’t defending him, Trump would be just another bum at the gas station hollering conspiracy theories at strangers while begging them for change. At least he would have an excuse for that haircut.

The only reason that we haven’t thrown Trump in a cell and thrown the cell away is because the contingent claiming to represent “real America” says he’s their hero. Not Reagan. Not Goldwater. Not even Ted Cruz. Trump.

I’m sure you know that line in social media that Trump has repeated himself: “They’re not after me. They’re after YOU. I’m just in the way.” By the same token, YOU wouldn’t be the issue if you weren’t supporting someone who is so uniquely malignant, and by treating him seriously, giving him power completely out of scale to his merit. Kamala Harris is not going to send the Food Police after you to make sure all your food is vegan and gluten-free. The government does not have the absolute power that you want it to have under Republicans and fear under Democrats, otherwise both Trump and Biden would be able to get away with a lot more than they have. If anyone is after YOU, it is because you’re the only thing keeping this colon cancer of a politician viable. He’s not “in the way”, YOU are. That’s how he likes it, because that is what sniveling cowards do: Shove their flunkies in the way so they take the hits instead.

Look, nobody HAS to do anything. In life, the only thing one HAS to do is die. You don’t serve Trump because you have to, you do it because you WANT to. Because he’s what you wish you could be but can’t. After all, you’re Good Christians. (TM)

And that seems to be what it comes down to. Because no way can you justify this anti-sense unless you believe that the world of cause and effect is secondary to a world that we can’t prove but we’re supposed to take on faith.

For example, the Georgia US Senate election, which pits Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock, an actual black Christian minister, against Herschel Walker, whom the Republicans nominated mainly because he is black. And an acolyte of Trump. And being an acolyte of Trump, it is probably not a surprise that at a critical moment in the campaign, Walker got accused of paying for a girlfriend’s abortion even as he now opposes abortion in most or all circumstances. And yet the Church embraces him that much more strongly as if his martyr status made him that much more a Christian than the incumbent Senator who is an actual Reverend.

It’s of a piece with their attitude towards the Clintons and Hunter Biden, whom they abominate even as their Leader does all the nasty shit they did and worse. If you’re going to ban abortion, yet your lawmakers have abortions, and you’re going to demand consequences for corruption, yet the people demanding prosecution are even more corrupt than the people they’re accusing, clearly you’re not focused on the sin, but the sinner. You don’t care that the people you’re replacing are even more evil than the ones they replace. You just want your team in charge.

I had seen some talking head recently say that Walker’s position on abortion might actually help him with some voters, because a large plurality of Republicans are actually pro-choice personally. They see this as much the same thing as their own position, endorsing a “pro-life” stand in public while doing what you want in private.

But then anybody with enough fame, money and influence has always been able to get past the law. Trump certainly teaches that, and so do people like Herschel Walker. And if a Republican politician is a hypocrite on moral issues, that is hardly a shock anymore. It may actually be a membership requirement. What is relevant is the practical consequence of electing such people. Herschel Walker is expecting, as a man and as a Christian, to be forgiven for something that was not illegal at the time he did it, but he is asking voters to elect him to a position where he will support laws that will criminalize women for doing the same thing he did, and in that scheme Christian forgiveness will be irrelevant. The fact that he doesn’t believe in saving poor, innocent unborn life any more than Trump does is irrelevant, because those women do not have the fame, money and influence that he does to get away with what he did. In any case the cult is sending a message to the entire rest of the country who are not in the Church of Trump: “Rules are written to control you other people. Rules never apply to US.”

There is no better word for that position than injustice.

I’ve often talked about Rod Dreher, the columnist and author who is nominally a Christian apologist but often seems more motivated to deliver apologia for this “post-liberal” “traditional conservative” mindset. He is probably most famous for writing a book called The Benedict Option, inspired by Benedict of Nursia, the monk who first developed the Benedictine Rule. Dreher’s thesis was that the world of secularism is now sufficiently omnipresent that the Christian community will not be able to prevail in what liberalism calls the marketplace of ideas, so the solution, at least until the worldly culture burns itself out, is not to compete with it but to withdraw and find or create committed spiritual communities. Historically, Benedict was born just after the end of the Roman Empire in the West; by that time Western Europe had been Christian for at least a century but the temporal authority behind the Church was gone.

But then Benedict was experiencing the end of a world, not necessarily THE world. Christians have gone through “the end of the world” several times, and yet, it never actually ends. And believe it or not, Christianity hasn’t ended either. It changes like the rest of the culture, but there have been two main apostolic church organizations since at least the Middle Ages, there have been numerous Protestant churches since the Middle Ages, and yet Catholicism and Orthodoxy still exist.

In the Wikipedia entry on The Benedict Option, the book’s title is an allusion to a quote by philosopher Alasdair McIntyre: “If the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without hope … We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” But McIntyre later spoke out regarding the book saying that Dreher had misinterpreted his meaning as advocacy for traditional conservatism while his own “virtue ethics” are neither liberal nor conservative. “This is not a withdrawal from society into isolation of a certain sort; this is actually the creation of a new set of social institutions that then proceed to evolve…So, when I said we need a new St. Benedict, I was suggesting we need a new kind of engagement with the social order, not any kind of withdrawal from it.” In practice, Dreher would seem to agree, as more recently he had been given a paid fellowship in Hungary by the government of strongman Viktor Orban. “Orbán was so unafraid, so unapologetic about using his political power to push back on the liberal élites in business and media and culture,” Dreher told The New Yorker‘s Andrew Marantz in 2022. “It was so inspiring: this is what a vigorous conservative government can do if it’s serious about stemming this horrible global tide of wokeness.” Dreher also argued that the U.S. Republican Party needs “a leader with Orbán’s vision—someone who can build on what Trumpism accomplished, without the egomania and inattention to policy, and who is not afraid to step on the liberals’ toes.” And while professing to be appalled by Trump, he was so much more appalled by the Left’s response to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court that he sided with Kavanaugh: “I do not understand why the loutish drunken behavior of a 17 year old high school boy has anything to tell us about the character of a 53 year old judge.” (Because, as the experience of Trump should educate us, it doesn’t matter what calendar age a man is if he continues to act like a 17 year old lout.)

If Dreher were serious about his thesis, he wouldn’t have counseled a Benedict Option, he would have counseled a John of the Apocalypse option. John, of course, was the mysterious writer of the Book of Revelations who is also thought to be the author of the fourth Gospel. Revelations, cutting out all the mystical allegory, is really about the message that we don’t know when the Day of Judgment will be and we have to act as though it’s today, because some day, it will be.

The cult doesn’t believe in the Kingdom of God. They believe in what Christ called “the world.”
And why shouldn’t they? In Matthew 6, Christ also says ““Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. “

Have you ever tried to get your daily bread by just praying for it and hoping God would provide? I do NOT recommend it.

All the real accomplishments of Christianity – the Byzantine Empire, the monasteries and universities, the Puritan settlements, global evangelism – were because Christians rolled up their sleeves and did the hard work to make things happen in this world before they could focus on the next one.

But then I follow another book of Scripture: Atlas Shrugged. And in the later acts of that novel, Ayn Rand has John Galt use his weird science to commandeer the national airwaves to give a marathon speech explaining Objectivist philosophy, and at one point he tells the audience:

“Do not remind me that (my position) pertains only to this life on earth. I am concerned with no other. Neither are you. “

I mean, if your religion tells you to focus on the world to come, why are you so obsessed with controlling this one? If the afterlife is better, why do you cling to this one so desperately? Because, frankly, y’all don’t believe in this stuff any more than I do. You can’t be surprised that I, and increasing numbers of other Americans, don’t believe in religion when clearly you don’t.

Religion might teach some positive virtues, like forgiveness, charity, and dis-attachment from a temporal universe that we are going to leave quickly enough anyway, but taking it literally is potentially deadly. And I am starting to think that anybody who still has a working brain but does take religion literally is just trying to sell something to people more gullible than they are.

As I’ve said, the irony of the Electoral College in practice is that it was intended to act as a screening mechanism against an angry mob being gulled by a demagogue and “creature of foreign powers”, yet the only reason that result actually occurred is because we had certain states swing the EC for Trump. And of course the priests of Trump in the US Congress who wailed that impeaching him would be “thwarting the will of the people” had to eat their words when Trump lost even with the Electoral College, and to defy it, he resorted to a gullible angry mob.

This is why the Church is so (ahem) hellbent about controlling those state governments and election systems, in order to control the Electoral College, and why they are so fanatic about the shahada that “Trump didn’t lose, and Biden isn’t the real President.” This despite the fact that most of them are willing to say their OWN elections were perfectly lawful, because the Electoral College had nothing to do with them. And if they still lose an election, all they have to do is say they won! “I’ll accept the results, cause I’m gonna win.” “What if you lose?” “I’M GONNA WIN!!!” Well, that’s a great way to solve all your problems. I mean, I’m a Las Vegas Raiders fan, that would make things so much easier! We’re going to the Super Bowl!!! What do you mean we’re not 15-1? What do you mean Tom Brady is still the winning quarterback! Fake news! I roll to disbelieve! Save versus illusion!!

It’s amazing how much stuff in life we do not assume we can resolve with fantasy and wishes, yet something trivial like who’s going to run the country is a case of “you create your own reality.” This despite the fact that politics is the exact opposite of living in your own subjective world. This is why we need laws. But laws are what the Church of Trump want to destroy.

The problem with throwing out the rule of law is that you have to resort to having the biggest gang, and the whole reason Trumpniks are so existentially afraid is the fact that they are not the biggest gang. Even when their Messiah was in the White House, he had done so much to alienate the military brass that they were starting to pull back from being involved in his various political stunts.

Which means that while the cult doesn’t want the rule of law, it really doesn’t want rule by brute force either, cause they ultimately don’t have it. What do they want, then? What they really want is a “civilized” population that can be bullied and cowed into doing what they say, because then you have all the advantages of arbitrary brute force without the danger of confronting a larger enemy.

I again refer to the great quote by Robert E. Howard: “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”

The villain is actually better protected under the rule of law than under chaos, because he has a right to an unpopular opinion. If you want to throw out the rule of law and rule by the Law of the Jungle, you better be able to back it up.

Again, the Ukraine situation is a good analogy here. Czar Vladimir I clearly does not believe that Ukraine deserves to exist as an independent nation and probably doesn’t think Ukrainians deserve to exist as a people. And he was proving it by biting off little bits of the country, one by one. And because Russia was (perceived as being) such a large and powerful country, Ukraine, and the West, had no choice but to accede. But then for whatever reason escapes me, Vlad decided that wasn’t enough, and decided to “de-Nazify” Ukraine by sending his army to conquer the nation so his secret police could liquidate the Jewish head of state. And at that point, Ukraine started fighting back because Putin was clearly aiming to destroy Ukraine as a country. And when they did, the big, bad Russian military was revealed as being not up to snuff. And the result of that is that Putin Russia has become the junior partner to China in the We Hate America coalition, and even Russia’s satraps in far-off places like Azerbaijan are losing stability, because their patron is no longer able to back them up.

And again: All it took was fighting back. But when did Ukraine start fighting back? When it became clear that any further concessions would only be annihilation. When there was nothing to save by NOT fighting back.

While you pay your worship to Donald Trump, your true spiritual model is Vladimir Putin. And like Putin, you keep pushing and pushing and pushing, but it was Putin who ended up getting backed into a corner. Now the civilized world is trying to find some way to return to peace and normalcy while at the same time knowing that Putin has given up on being a civilized human being who can be trusted to co-exist with others.

The same situation is going to happen with you people in America, because you will not peacefully co-exist with others, and while the political system will help you win elections, it will not give you a mandate, much less a majority. And as with Ukraine, we can only hope the denouement does not involve nukes.

And it’s over now

And I don’t know how

Guess it’s over now

There’s no gettin’ back to good

“if you have either no fellow-feeling for the misfortunes I have met with, or none that bears any proportion to the grief which distracts me; or if you have either no indignation at the injuries I have suffered, or none that bears any proportion to the resentment which transports me, we can no longer converse upon these subjects. We become intolerable to one another. I can neither support your company, nor you mine. You are confounded at my violence and passion, and I am enraged at your cold insensibility and want of feeling”

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

In my last post, I had just summed up the dilemma of America’s downward-spiral political system thus: “We’re screwed either way. If you hate woke socialism and political correctness, your only choice is the Republican Party, which means submitting to the even more smothering political correctness of their made-up theocracy and Trump worship. If you don’t want to be ruled by Trump and his wannabe fascists, your only choice is the Democratic Party, which on one hand advocates for woke socialism and political correctness and on the other hand does a piss-poor job of implementing them.”

For years, I had advocated alternatives to this political trap, specifically advocating the Libertarian Party as a party of free minds and free markets.

Yeah, that was fun while it lasted.

The Libertarian National Convention for the 2022 midterms was held on Memorial Day weekend in Reno, Nevada, which should have been a bad omen right there. It was notable in that the “real” libertarians who call themselves the Von Mises Caucus decisively took over control of the Libertarian Party and immediately started changing the platform to their liking.

I didn’t say much about this at the time cause frankly, it wasn’t worth the effort. Much like this Party is now.

On Wikipedia, the Von Mises Caucus is described as promoting paleolibertarianism and positions itself in opposition to the more moderate positions of 2016 presidential candidate Gary Johnson and former chairman Nicholas Sarwark, apparently because Sarwark wasn’t confrontational enough. (Note for the uninitiated: That was sarcasm) Prominent members include comedian Dave Smith and podcast hosts Tom Woods and Scott Horton. The kind of performers who appeal to the guys who like Joe Rogan, but think he’s too curious and open-minded. In 2021 Mises board member Andrea McArdle announced her intention to run for Party chair at the LP’s midterm convention and got over 69 percent of the vote in May, cementing the Caucus’ takeover.

The keynote speaker for the Convention on Friday May 27 was Justin Amash, a former US Congressman from Michigan who spent most of his career as a Republican before publicly quitting in 2020 once that institution clearly became the Party of Trump. He made a big show of joining the Libertarian Party and serving as their first federal officeholder for the remainder of his term. He is so far their only office holder, because he refused to run for re-election after his term expired in 2020. Nevertheless, he was thought of as a potential candidate for president, which is probably less likely after his speech to the new Libertarian caucus.

Congressman Amash started his thesis by saying “I’m here because I want libertarian ideas to win in my lifetime.” He established his contrarian credentials by saying he had served with Ron Paul and that while he was in Congress during 10 years he was the lone “No” vote on bills 56 times, with all other Congressmen combined having 76 No votes during that period. And he said that the libertarian philosophy, the philosophy that is popular in America and that the Party can win with, is at its core “liberalism.” And he held up a book by that title- by Ludwig von Mises. Amash said, “liberalism, as Mises talks about, is the philosophy of human cooperation. It’s human cooperation that brings progress and happiness. And I think too often as libertarians, we don’t focus enough on that.” Then he reiterated from his first point: “What is the point of a political party? The point of a political party is to win elections.” Then he said: “That brings up the question- who’s a real libertarian? I’m going to quote from some famous libertarians, and I’ll let you decide.”

“…a small number of anti-social individuals, i.e., persons who are not willing or able to make the temporary sacrifices that society demands of them could make all society impossible. Without the application of compulsion and coercion against the enemies of society, there could not be any life in society.” Silence. “Here’s another quote: ‘Anarchism misunderstands the real nature of man. It would be practical only in a world of angels and saints. …Libertarianism is NOT anarchism, nor has it anything whatsoever to do with anarchism.” Booing at this point. Amash shrugged and went on: “One must be in the position to compel the person who will not respect the lives, health, personal freedom, or private property of others to acquiesce to the rules of life in society.” “For the libertarian, the state is an absolute necessity” -more booing at that one- “since the most important tasks are incumbent upon it.” “It is not at all shameful for a man to allow himself to be ruled by others.’ …You like that one?” “Libertarianism’s thinking is cosmopolitan and ecumenical.” “It would be really preposterous to propose that the nations turn to imperialistic policies as a favor to the ordnance manufacturers.” Surprisingly little reaction one way or the other. “The libertarian demands that every person have the right to live wherever he wants.” A little cheering there. “The narrow-mindedness which sees nothing beyond one’s own nation, and has no conception of the importance of international cooperation, must be replaced by a cosmopolitan outlook.” “It is manifestly absurd to break up the ever-increasing unity of world economies into a small number of national territories, each as autarkic as possible.” And finally; “The libertarian demands that the political organization of society be extended until it reaches its culmination in a world state that unites all nations on an equal basis.”

Then Amash gave them the punch line: Those were all quotes by Ludwig von Mises. All of them. His point: “Like you, I find a lot of those quotes questionable. … and I think what happens so often with libertarians is we’re quick to judge each other, we’re quick to say someone else is not a real libertarian.. but Von Mises said those things. And if we’re going to be a real political party, forget about being a real libertarian- we need to win over a third of the country- and if Ludwig von Mises, or Justin Amash, or pretty much anyone in this room is not libertarian enough for you, it’s not going to work… just using myself as an example, if Justin Amash is not libertarian enough for you, I’ve got news for you about the rest of the country.”

Apparently a political movement which named themselves after Ludwig von Mises was unaware that he’d said those things.

It’s like seeing somebody with a Pink Floyd T-Shirt and you ask them who their favorite band member is and they go, “Which one’s Pink?”

Which figures. Much like modern “conservatives” do not ponder the details of the Bible or the Hamilton-Madison Constitution, the “Von Mises” “libertarians” do not examine their own source material. Mises, unlike Ayn Rand, did not disdain the libertarian label, but to him liberty referred to a classical-liberal form of government. To liberals like Ludwig Von Mises and F.A. Hayek, the best system was not minarchist or anarcho-capitalist but had some regulation of both society and commerce, as Adam Smith intended. Now, that approach to government is still too pro-capitalist and individualist for the woke Left of today, which is why there’s a distinction between libertarianism and what calls itself “liberalism.” But apparently that’s still too statist for a self-declared Von Mises faction.

But even Amash’s speech wasn’t the biggest joke on the Caucus. The biggest joke was the background of the speech. See, they’d set up cameras to record the events of the day including not only Amash’s speech but the floor proceedings for who got to vote on the platform. This was done through the allocation of delegate tokens. If you look at the YouTube link for the May 27 section of the Convention, someone is asking, around 5 hours and 40 minutes in, someone announces that tokens will be collected in seven minutes for the Party floor debate. Then they started debating while on the mic about whether and in which medium the Party agenda was going to be posted. At 5:41 someone presses on whether, after the 30 minutes time allotted for the keynote speaker, all the debate tokens will actually be counted. He is told “I don’t know. I can’t predict the future.” Amash comes on around 5:42. He starts by saying “This is my first national convention, I think. Do they usually run like this?” He gives the Von Mises quotes after 5:48. But while Amash was speaking you could see a carton of take-out food on camera behind him and as he went on, people were walking around the stage behind him. He had to stop to turn off a ringtone because somebody left their smartphone by the podium. By the time he got to the point of “the point of a political party is to win elections”, you had at least eight people on the stage behind him taking out boxes and counting the tokens, cause apparently that’s how this Party is going to win elections.

I mean, you’re not going to take over the third largest political party in the United States and then set up a camera so that everyone on YouTube can see your organization doesn’t have its shit together, am I right?

The Amash speech ended at 6:06 (so he only used 24 of the alloted 30 minutes). The first person to address the podium after the speech described the scene behind Amash as “the height of rudeness” and “we should be ashamed of ourselves.” The chairwoman apologized that the need to assemble the tallies during a speech “was an unfortunate circumstance that was left, um, because of the agenda adoption.” Oh, so they hadn’t hammered that out before everyone got to debate and vote on it. Good to know. They kept going on with the tallies for the better part of thirty minutes. During that time at least one person asked to skip the procedure to vote for chair while the tallying was going on. One person asked if the tokens may have allowed a person to vote both ways on proposals “because I do not see a mechanism to keep that in mind.” Around 6:40, Sarwark came on to say that only a limited list of candidates was fostered despite the number of tokens collected because “shenanigans occurred.” He said “we are not following our own values – we are trying to silence voices because we disagree with them” – at which point the camera veered quickly away from his mic.

Look, we’re Libertarians. We’re used to Party conventions being Amateur Hour. But guys: When people on the floor of the Convention were telling the organizers it was a shitshow, then it was a shitshow.

Well, that was the stuff that was funny to watch, but the end result was ridiculous without being so funny. Previously the Libertarian Party platform had famously included a statement saying “We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant.” But according to coverage in Reason Magazine, “Mises Caucus founder Michael Heise defended the deletion of the language because “libertarianism isn’t about wrongthink. It’s about non-aggression, self-ownership, and property rights,” and said he believes that the anti-bigotry condemnation fed what he calls a “woke,” or “cultural Marxist” agenda.

“What is happening nowadays with the ‘wokeism’ is people are using language as dialectics along cultural lines to push for collectivist ends,” says Heise. “So back in the day…the Marxist revolutions, they had the dialectics of the rich versus the poor and the owner versus the worker. And they were pushing towards collectivist ends. It’s the same ideology that’s happening now, but they’re pitting cis versus straight and male versus female and trans versus whatever.”

Basically they’re saying, “We’re value-neutral on bigotry. Also on being irrational and repugnant.”

Ultimately the statement was removed although at the initiative of former vice-presidential candidate Spike Cohen they added a new line saying the Party would “uphold and defend the rights of every person, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or any other aspect of their identity.”

But it’s kind of telling that a movement which prizes individualism against a collectivist agenda is invoking the junk-food catch phrases of the alt-Right like “woke” and “cultural Marxist”, to justify removing a pro forma statement against bigotry that was in the platform years before “woke” was a thing, and implying that anybody who disagrees with that is guilty of creating “wrongthink.”

Similarly the Caucus got rid of the Party position on abortion. That always had been value-neutral, because many Libertarians are Christians or secular humanists who hold that abortion, like the death penalty, is the ultimate form of coercion. Thus, the platform had read: “Recognizing that abortion is a sensitive issue and that people can hold good-faith views on all sides, we believe that government should be kept out of the matter, leaving the question to each person for their conscientious consideration. ” But apparently even that was too much for the Von Mises Caucus. One pro-life Libertarian site quoted a pro-choice Libertarian who voted to remove the statement, saying: “It was a self-contradictory plank: It claimed to be neutral, but it was clearly pro-choice.”

Well, in the immortal word of Cher Horowitz, “DUH.” Didn’t we used to say we were pro-choice on everything? This attitude assumes that “pro-choice” is the same thing as “pro-abortion.” You can, on libertarian or fiscal conservative grounds, refuse to endorse government funding or facilitating abortions that are morally repugnant to many taxpayers. But this posture defeats the purpose of being conspicuously non-neutral on the matter of bodily autonomy and asserting the right of the individual to make their own health choices, including choices that could kill them or (in the case of a pandemic) people around them who didn’t make that choice. Why are Libertarians demanding an end to mask mandates and vaccine mandates and demanding that state governments not dictate how parents can raise their children when they’re apparently “neutral” on the state dictating whether people should become parents? In removing an actually neutral statement asserting a right to conscience under the pretense of neutrality, the Von Mises Party, like Samuel Alito, has in fact clearly taken a side.

It matters now, after Dobbs v. Mississippi, because we have a whole host of unwanted babies that the government (The Supreme Court and the Trump states) expects private citizens to care for, at their expense, we are putting that much more pressure on adoption agencies, and the only “choice” some people have left is hoping they can stretch the cash to drive hundreds of miles out of the way to an abortion clinic, or to move to a state with decent resources for child care. Yet “libertarians” don’t seem to care about the unnecessary costs that “conservative” government has chosen to impose on the individual.

I am again reminded of the Harry Browne joke about how government is like a guy who breaks your leg, throws you a crutch and then brags, “If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be able to walk.” Well, Republicans are that much more laissez-faire than Libertarians, cause they won’t even give you the crutch.

Wouldn’t it be more moral (and more practical) to just stop breaking legs? The Libertarian Party I voted for would say so. But not anymore.

And RE: “small government” –

Just watch this, and then get back to me.

@racabacar

republicans’ messaging problem

♬ original sound – Josh

Money quote: “They claim to be for ‘small government’, but that really means that a government that tells them what to do should be as small as possible. But when the Republican Party recognizes it has an opportunity to tell people what to do, the government required for that tends to be large.”

Of course, leftists have been pointing out this issue with the “small government” Right for quite some time, as if it were a problem unique to right-wing psychology, and as if libertarians have not been warning them for quite some time that a government that is big enough to give them abortion rights and “free” healthcare is also big enough to take them away.

Which is why, again, it is simply not enough to base your political agenda on “I don’t want the government telling ME what to do” because at some point that attitude applies to everybody. The billionaire doesn’t want the government telling him to pay more taxes and the teenager doesn’t want the government telling her to bear her relative’s baby. Are these the same thing?

Yeah, “freedom lovers” used passive resistance to effectively kill mask mandates. Good for you. Now take a look at all the other stuff government is doing under our noses. We still have to take off our shoes at the airport when 9-11 was almost 22 years ago, and the Libertarian Party was never so hopped up about that.

So really, the matter should start from a point of ethics: Do I want the government telling everybody ELSE what to do? And why? How do you justify that? Cause right now we’ve got a Supreme Court saying “I don’t want the government telling the government what to do. Wait, we ARE the government? Well, hey!”

Amash, who actually IS a Christian, pro-life Libertarian, had it right. You are not going to catch any new people with an attitude of “I don’t want the government telling ME what to do” and sotto voce, “I’m okay with government telling other people what to do.” Those people already have a party. It is certainly not a position that will appeal to those of us who were already in the LP and thought we were libertarian before the woke Right changed the definition of “libertarian” the same way they changed the definition of “conservative” and “Christian.” And even if you could get more votes with the Von Mises Caucus than you got with the previous agenda who weren’t already going to the Republican Party, further gains would have to assume that the current party organization has the brains and coordination to act on its new recruitment. And right now, the Von Mises Party makes Gary Johnson look as organized and focused as Mitch McConnell or Lyndon Johnson.

And liberals, keep in mind, I do NOT think that going “third” party, in and of itself, is “throwing away your vote.” If I thought that I wouldn’t have been Libertarian for as long as I was. I AM saying that voting for this particular iteration of the Libertarian Party IS throwing away your vote, and it is throwing away your vote BY right-wing standards. Because if you have no idea how government works but still want to run for office anyway, and think the only purpose of being in office is to suck off the government tit while going on social media and making fun of welfare queens and woke socialists, we already HAVE a party for that. It’s called the Republican Party. And at this point, the main difference between them and the LP is that the Republicans can get people elected to federal office. So what we have right now is at best a duplication of effort. Now, if you want a party that actually follows what the Constitution says and does not believe government can spend all the money it wants and do anything it wants to the public just cause it can, that party doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever really did.

I will say this, you will see more pastel-colored hair and tie-dye T-Shirts in a Libertarian Party Convention than you ever will at a Republican convention, or for that matter, a Democratic one. But that just goes to the old right-wing critique about liberals’ “tolerance for diversity”: You can have a myriad variety of appearances, but inside you’re all the same political robot.

Now- if I can’t deal with the Libertarian Party any more, am I still a small-l libertarian? Well, yeah. Because libertarianism means being true to your individual self regardless of what the collective thinks, and if not even other libertarians agree with me, I must be fucking Ultra.

“You have become the very thing you swore to destroy.”

-Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Well, it’s been over a year since Trump Virus (TM) made it big in the States, and as the cartoon goes, it would like to dedicate this next song to all the people who never believed in it when it was coming up.
Cause if it wasn’t for all those people, it wouldn’t be as big as it is today.

Even after we developed a workable vaccine distribution program, there’s still at least 25 percent of the population nationwide that refuses to take it, and that’s an average. In some Republican states the numbers are a lot higher, as are coronavirus cases.

Again, Trump himself tried to get his cult to get vaccinated, and that’s one direction from their Leader that they just won’t take.

I saw something recently at the store that explained everything. It was on a box of Pop Tarts. If you are a connoisseur, you would know that while Pop Tarts can be eaten raw, they are supposed to be heated in a toaster, or in extremis, in a microwave. So consider that. I looked at the back of the box, and in large capital letters, it said: “REMOVE FROM FOIL BEFORE HEATING”.

When you have fully pondered the implications of this directive, namely the fact that the food company deemed it necessary in the first place, you will understand why we haven’t beat COVID.

Meanwhile, I don’t know if this is a case of being on brand or just trying to jump on the culture war, but the national Libertarian Party is putting up social media posts and ads saying “Already Against the Next Mandate.”

I have come to the distressing realization that the word libertarian is one of those words that should only be used in air quotes, much like “conservative” or “progressive.”

I mean, last weekend we had to commemorate the 20^th anniversary of the 9-11 attack – and you know, it’s distressingly commercial how 9-11 Season seems to keep coming up earlier every year – and it really amazes me how the people who scream and howl and threaten civil war over wearing a mask or getting a vaccine for a temporary situation don’t care so much about the fact 20 years after 9-11, we STILL have a TSA and it’s STILL making us take off our shoes at the airport over airplane hijackings that we learned how to counter maybe a week after the event, when largely thanks to these “patriots”, we are losing a third of the people we lost in the 9-11 hijackings to COVID EVERY DAMN DAY.

You know, the same people losing their minds over Joe Biden mandating employer vaccines through OSHA, saying “he doesn’t have that power!” and all the Liberal Media going, “well, yes he does, cause this is part of OSHA’s charter and it’s been that way for years.” Now, all the actual Libertarians, who don’t assume government’s powers as existing a priori, would be telling you, “uh YEAH, that’s what we’ve been warning about” but apparently this is a huge shock to everybody whose first definition of “libertarian” is “not being a Demonrat.”

I mean, good for you if you’ve finally realized that government doesn’t always (if ever) have your best interest at heart, but strange that you only feel this way about the one mass initiative that is doing something right, and just happens to be the one that the grievance media wants to use to gin up the next round of the culture war.

In the last few decades the libertarian movement was greatly associated with the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, but Rand herself despised the original libertarians, calling them “hippies of the right”. This is why. As I say, Rand as a person had more issues than TIME Magazine, but those personal issues were largely due to her disregarding her own statement: That reality exists objectively (thus the name), independent of emotion and perception and it can only be properly apprehended through reason and examination, not “whim-worship” and emotion. And nobody seems to get that these days, because the only opponents of the normie Democrat system are a Libertarian political party that is not very organized at all and an organized political party that must rely on emotion and whim-worship because its “conservatism” is that much less coherent than it was in previous years. And when, as a natural result of that trend, the movement experiences identity fusion with the most emotional and whim worshiping politician in our history, you can’t just turn on a dime and ask them to suddenly start thinking. When said figure (in his own long term self interest) asks people to get vaccinated, the cognitive dissonance is too great. It’s like Uncle Festus saying you CAN’T get drunk and fuck your cousin.

I don’t think we should need a mandate or government action to take the vaccine. I also don’t think we need a law banning people from sticking forks into wall sockets, but if enough “freedom lovers” decide that’s the best way to own the libs, that might happen.

But then, I told people that joke on a Libertarian Party Facebook page and got pushback on that. I was told, “do you want government to have the power to tell you what you can put in your body?” I said, “there’s this thing called The Law of the Excluded Middle you might want to look up. Also the word ‘sarcasm’.”

Let me see if I can break it down for you, people.

To begin with, viruses are real. Like God, they cannot be perceived with the naked eye. Unlike God, they can be perceived with advanced microscopes, so if you can believe in God, you can believe that viruses are real. Moving on. On a related subject, science is real. And as Neil DeGrasse Tyson was quoted as saying, “the beautiful thing about science is that it exists whether you believe in it or not.”

One aspect of viruses is that they mutate. This is only a matter of time. It is the reason new viruses pop up despite our immunization procedures. It is that much more likely that a virus will mutate if there is no immunization procedure, which we did not have until Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” program, and even then the benefits did not really manifest until after Biden’s inauguration. (Oh, that reminds me of another fact you might not have been aware of: Biden is President.)

This would be happening whether government was restricting public action at all. It is in fact, happening for largely the reason that it hasn’t restricted public action much during the last year of the Trump Organization or the first few months of the Biden Administration. Part of that is because the US actually is a federal system where states have power, as opposed to a ‘unitary’ government like Britain or France, and virus containment policy was not a matter of scientific consensus but a governor’s decision on what would benefit them with their pet voter demographic. Neil DeGrasse Tyson also said in regard to the coronavirus that because virii do not acknowledge state boundaries, this means that not having a national mask mandate or expecting mandates to only be enforced by some governors and not others is “like designating a peeing section of a swimming pool.”

A virus spread can only be contained and reduced if the virus is not given the opportunity to go to new hosts, because since a virus is not actually a life form, it needs the cells of a biological host to infect so that it can replicate itself. Social distancing before the vaccination program was a very imperfect method of preventing the spread, and so is masking, but they are better than nothing, which was what we had last year. Because we had vaccination proceeding nationally we were having state and local governments remove mask and distancing restrictions and were on track to making things controllable, but then people decided to make disease treatment into a political football again at the same time the coronavirus achieved its Delta mutation. (This is from the Greek alphabet where ‘Delta’ is the fourth letter in sequence. We now have scientists warning of Lambda and Mu variants, which are the eleventh and twelfth letters. THAT’s the timetable of mutation and spread we’re dealing with here.) Delta is more effective than base COVID-19 at infecting people even when they are vaccinated, so yes, kids, vaccines are not a cure-all. They are however still better than nothing. In fact, according to the CDC (if you’re one of those gullible sheep who believes experts) ‘breakthrough’ cases among people who have been vaccinated are still a lot less likely to lead to hospitalization. But because the virus continues to spread and mutate, restrictions are coming back, and if you are not vaccinated you do not even have the imperfect defense that the vaccines give you.

In other words:

THE ONLY ENTITY WHOSE FREEDOM YOU ARE EXPANDING IS THE FREEDOM OF THE VIRUS TO SPREAD AND MUTATE, AND BECAUSE OF THAT EVERYONE ELSE STILL HAS TO WEAR A MASK AND WAIT FOR BOOSTER SHOTS, BECAUSE YOU DECIDED NOT TO FOLLOW DIRECTIONS. EVERYONE ELSE IS LESS FREE BECAUSE OF YOUR “FREEDOM”, INCLUDING YOU, BECAUSE YOU ARE THAT MUCH MORE LIKELY TO GET STUCK ON A VENTILATOR IF YOU NEVER GOT THE SHOT. AND I AM PRINTING ALL THIS IN ALL CAPS ON THE OFF CHANCE THAT YOU WILL FIND BIG LETTERS EASIER TO READ.

The 2016 election, in which the two most unpopular and incompetent candidates the duopoly ever presented faced each other, should have demonstrated the bankruptcy of the system and given the Libertarian Party the perfect opportunity to capitalize.

And yet you have somehow managed to combine the feckless incompetence of the Democrats with the childish ideology of the Republicans. Now, if you could combine the popular civil libertarianism of Democrats with the Republicans’ skill at winning the game no matter what, you’d actually be dangerous.

The Libertarian Party still has the best chance to challenge the Republicans if only because the Democrats are the only other popular alternative, but you can’t challenge them by being that much more emotional and stupid than they are. You can’t challenge them by being more “punk rock” than they are. Once you might have been able to present yourself as being anti-establishment, but after Trump, the Republicans pretty much stole that act. The problem there is that too many people define “the establishment” not as the Democratic Party but as the whole concept of a constitutional republic. And given the backlash against Republican childishness, it does not help a smaller fringe party to be even MORE childish and unpopular just to prove how Xtreeem and Edgee we are. At this point you are no longer challenging the Republicans, you are following them. And that’s not going to work.

As I said recently:

“There has been a lot of talk about ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ being thrown around, not only by right-wingers but by leftists who look at them and see ‘liberty’ as a joke. In fact the coronavirus crisis (the crisis being not the virus itself but our response to it) does a lot to demonstrate why we don’t have a more libertarian world or in particular a more libertarian America. In a perfect libertarian world (itself a subjective hypothetical) we would need less laws because people would be educated enough to make decisions for themselves and exercise common sense. We have all the laws we do because people do not have education and common sense. And every time there’s a crisis, government uses that as a pretext to take more and more liberties, and they can do so because people do not exercise common sense.

“Liberty doesn’t just mean rights, it means responsibility. And contra libertarians, it used to be conservatives making that assertion. Liberty means not only taking responsibility for one’s free will but accepting that we need to protect others’ rights. But some people define ‘rights’ as belonging only to them, not even to ‘white people’ but only to white people of a certain tribe and political alignment. And these rights do not imply taking responsibility for one’s own decisions or extending the same right to others.

“Just as their role model demands all the power and none of the responsibility, the cult demands the freedom to do as they please without acknowledging the consequences.”

Libertarianism at base is nothing less than what liberals have been calling “the American experiment” – the idea that We, the People of the former colonies are fit to manage our own affairs without the Parliament in London or the King in his court overriding our priorities. But that assumes we are in fact fit to manage our own affairs. If you want a more libertarian world, you need to demonstrate that you DON’T need a whole bunch of new intrusive laws because you acknowledge common sense ways of living. Coronavirus has made it that much more clear that the reason we have all the laws we do is because common sense ain’t all that common, at least in this country.

That is, if you want to be treated as a rational adult, you first need to start acting like a rational adult. If you want to act like a child who wants everything except responsibility, you should expect to treated like a child: That is, to be pushed around by grownups and told what to do because you are clearly incontinent to make your own decisions. There is a reason that adults don’t let children run around naked and throw their own shit, and it’s that much more obvious when the “shit” in question is a deadly contagious disease.

And I can hear the response even now: “Why CAN’T I run around naked? What do you mean THERE ARE ALREADY LAWS against public nudity? Who says?? That’s just another step towards The Holocaust! Do you want the Democrats to turn this country into SOCIALIST NORTH KOREA?!?!?”

No, I don’t, “freedom lovers”, but if anything is going to make that more likely, it’s you. You are exactly the sort of libertarian that the Left points at to say how useless the movement is and now you’ve made it that much easier for them to brand any dissenters as a public health danger. It would be a lot harder for them if you were not in fact a public health danger. Again, this is exactly how government grows and spreads, because not only are there opportunists in authority taking advantage of a real crisis, other people react to that crisis by making things worse for themselves and others, and that makes the heavy hand of authority that much more popular.

In fact there are a couple of recent articles (both in New York Magazine) indicating that this anti-Democrat virtue signaling might actually be helping the Democrats. One September 10 article quoted a previous article in The Atlantic on the California recall effort, and then says more generally, “Democrats also are aware that the ranks of the fearful and possibly angry vaccinated include a disproportionate percentage of seniors and college-educated people, who are the most likely to vote in non-presidential elections like the California recall or next year’s national midterms. It’s not safe to assume that all vaccinated people will embrace mandates (which is where these predictions of this being a 75-25 winning proposition for Biden come from), but it’s not unreasonable to think that on balance it represents smart politics for a president who’d rather be talking about fighting COVID-19 than about not fighting the Taliban or about Democrats fighting with each other over his domestic agenda.”

This leads to a Sunday article reviewing the current status of California’s ballot initiative to recall Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who was never all that popular to begin with, but the recall effort didn’t really get serious until what the article describes as “a series of slapstick-quality self-owns” like Newsom appearing maskless at a fancy restaurant when mask restrictions were still on. Once the petition for recall got enough votes, the referendum started to gain more attention as right-wing talk show host Larry Elder entered the race as a Republican. Elder is fairly famous in talk radio, but if you didn’t already know who he was, don’t worry, liberal outlets like New York Magazine will be happy to tell you. “Shortly after Elder got in the race this summer, Newsom’s political consultants sat the governor down with a highlight reel of the radio host’s most offensive claims. A sampling: Systemic racism is “a lie”; employers should be able to fire women who get pregnant; the women who marched against Trump in 2017 were too unattractive to be sexually assaulted. “What the fuck?” Newsom said, according to someone who was there. “Is this serious?” Soon Politico reported that Elder’s ex-fiancée had accused him of waving a gun at her while high. “I say he’s even more extreme than Trump,” Newsom now routinely tells supporters. It’s worked. By the end of August, Newsom had reeled in huge donations from unions, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. Netflix’s Reed Hastings has donated more to Newsom than most of his opponents have raised in total, while producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Priscilla Chan, and Connie Ballmer aren’t far behind.”

The result: “Polls that showed “keep” and “remove” voters almost evenly split in August, thanks to liberal apathy and right-wing fury, have now widened to a comfortable 13-point margin in Newsom’s favor, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average.” The article implies that a lot of the turnaround is because of the two different factions’ approach to the virus, not to mention other things: “And yet Newsom, in the final stretch, has now allowed that there’s something to the idea with the politics of COVID blending into Republican power grabs blending into a wave of anti-incumbent sentiment around the country. “You see what’s happening in Florida! You see what’s happening in Texas! We have to give those ballots back in!” he said on an early-September Zoom call with LGBTQ+ activists. “Forgive me for being intense about this, but, man, this is real! This recall is real!”

If there is anyone who epitomizes limousine liberalism and its clueless, statist approach to the virus more than Nancy Pelosi, it would be Newsom. And he might win this recall because the presented alternative, one of the most prominent “small l libertarian” right-wingers out there, is perceived as being even worse.

In this Cold Civil War between left-wing faith in government and right-wing “liberty”, each side is handicapped by its own disadvantages, namely deserved unpopularity that will only increase as everyone becomes more polarized. Thus the fight will end up being won not on a positive level, with one side proving the worth of its arguments, but on a totally negative level with one side losing because its malice, incompetence and compulsion to alienate the general public ends up pissing off more voters than the other team. Well, I guess we know who’s winning that fight.

“I bear true and an existing witness to this barrel of monkeys.

A self proclaimed immoral success, Perfected by each whereof

Individually deadly and equally so

And spread about the surrendered troops,

For even thousands of miles will not tear apart their communication, or the lack thereof.

Vultures, liars, thieves, each proclaim their innocence

In no suggestion or rhyme, your weapon is contained in the wrecking of the keeping the desired effect.

The breaking of the spirit thwarts the whole being.

Your weapon is guilt, your weapon is guilt, your weapon is guilt.

Guilt.”

-Alice in Chains, “Sludge Factory”

It’s almost time for Congress to go into its annual August recess. If you need to ask why Washington must have a recess in August, you have obviously never visited Washington in August.

Before that can happen, there’s a couple of bits they have to get out of the way. Tuesday they finally started the “1-6” investigation in the House of Representatives, which in its first day gave us the surprising news that the people who attempted to kill black police officers while storming the Capitol were racist, giving MSNBC the opportunity to play the N-Word more times than an episode of The Dave Chappelle Show. The investigation started no thanks to House Republican “leader” Kevin McCarthy, who last week attempted to throw House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a curve by announcing his Party’s picks for the investigation panel would include Gentleman Gym Jordan (BR-Ohio) and a couple others who voted not to certify the 2020 Electoral College results, in effect endorsing the January 6 attack on the process. When Pelosi said she wouldn’t let the election-deniers on the panel, McCarthy said he was withdrawing all Republicans from consideration, including the ones who did vote to certify the election. Basically McCarthy’s posture was that if he can’t get his way and troll the committee with joke picks, then he’s going to take his ball and go home. The joke’s on him, cause he has no ball.

The Democrats, as the party in charge this Congress, offered a “9-11 style” bipartisan commission on January 6, but this was under the impression immediately after the event that Republicans, who were threatened by the attack too, would be willing to investigate it. They are not, for the same reason that Osama bin Laden would not have cooperated with the 9-11 commission, because he knew what they would find. The only threat McCarthy could make was to withdraw his party’s endorsement and thus the appearance of bipartisanship. But having already given up on bipartisanship, and conceding his Party’s identification with the rioters, McCarthy had only the pretense of legitimacy in the debate, and since everyone knew it was not sincere, he gained nothing by refusing to cooperate.

And in what is allegedly not a related event, Democrats in the Senate are having trouble passing a $600 billion dollar infrastructure bill, which apparently cannot be passed as a simple-majority budget bill because West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin (of course) wanted it done on a bipartisan basis. Which of course requires negotiating with Republicans, who since Bill Clinton have decided that giving Democrats any help doesn’t help them.

It also didn’t help that Donald Trump, He Be King Dick Who Got Biggest Of All Dicks, ordered his subordinate microdicks in what used to be a political party to not cooperate with the Democrats.

Trump Calls Republicans “Weak Fools and Losers” for Negotiating Infrastructure

I am not so sure that this is a brilliant Machiavellian strategy so much as Trump’s usual reactive emotion when the grownups are doing something serious without him in the room: “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAA nobody’s payin’ ATTENTION t’ MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”

But as I keep saying, not like it really matters, cause even when the Crybaby Caudillo does the right thing – like getting the COVID vaccine and telling other people to do so – it’s with a lot less emphasis than when he tells people to do the wrong thing, cause he is at least as much follower as leader. Trump is the leader of the former Party of Lincoln because he is what they want. He personifies the attitude they already had even before he became a presidential candidate.

To a very limited extent, very far back in time, this intransigence was understandable. If you saw much of American history after FDR (after Wilson, really) as less “progress” and more an entropic slide towards more and more statism and unnecessary government controls, even compromise that gained some of your goals was a defeat in that the other side got further toward what they wanted, especially since victory by gradualism is an explicit strategy of democratic socialists.

But even if you favor socialism over evil “selfishness”, the real problem with the Right these days (including a lot of libertarianism, sadly) is that reliance on talk show hosts as intellectual role models has rotted their former reputation in philosophy. This was made that much worse by the fact that radio hosts and their descendants on basic cable were able to monetize politics, and that meant telling people what they wanted to hear, not the hard facts. They never put their ideas up for test and debate; rather Republicans used “safe” districts to maintain their place in national government, and since certain seats were safe, primaries were really a contest of the biggest whacko ideologue. This created a party where appraisal of facts was not only not a priority, it was actually unwelcome. This was BEFORE Trump. The Right got lazy, basically. So Trump is just the logical extension of that. He can tell the redcaps to hate science and hate eggheads and not cooperate with the Beltway establishment. That’s what they want to do. If he tried to push people towards vaccinating to stop the Delta virus, that wouldn’t be popular, and you can’t be a leader if you don’t follow the crowd.

The stubbornness of the NotDemocrats is not a Randian refusal to compromise with evil. It is a five-year-old who refuses to have peas for dinner. (And yes, liberals, there IS a difference, not that Republicans care to acknowledge it.)

Regarding the infrastructure bill, Jonathan Chait wrote in New York Magazine, “As it turns out, the (bill’s) sheer size creates a kind of protection by reducing Biden’s agenda to a single vote. Some moderate Democrats from conservative states or districts might wish to position themselves to the administration’s right, but none of them can afford to let Biden’s presidency come crashing down in Congress. Perhaps the most important clue to the president’s fate came from Joe Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in Congress, who said in January, “We’re going to make Joe Biden successful.” The worst possible outcome for any Democrat — the opening that will let the Republican Party back into power — would be for their party to be seen as having failed at governing. They can and will negotiate the parameters, but the only leverage they hold is mutually assured destruction.”
Which is of course the same reason Republicans have to stick together: to make Joe Biden unsuccessful. Which is basically the same motive as making Barack Obama unsuccessful. Blame the other party for not being able to keep its promises (eliding the role you had in that result) and say that you’ll do a better job if you get elected to Congress. The problem of course is that they did that with Obama, it didn’t work, they tried it again and that time it did work (cause Obama’s successor was Hillary Clinton) but then Republicans had to spend the next four years proving they would do a better job than Obama Democrats, and absolutely failed. Not that Trump’s (sorta) fiscal conservative policy didn’t have real benefits for the economy, which was the main reason he had as much popularity with serious people as he did, but the crash in face-to-face business thanks to Trump Virus (TM) followed by the rapid recovery of the Wall Street sector made it clear to a lot of people that Wall Street is not the entire economy and should not be treated as such. This also means that middle class Americans are becoming less sympathetic to the idea that whatever is good for Big Business is automatically good for them and should be promoted at their expense.

What is happening is that each party is doing what makes sense for them, and many Democrats (namely Joe Manchin) can’t understand that what makes sense for Republicans is not what Democrats think makes sense for the country, and they ought to give up assuming good faith from them, since Republicans have already decided to assume the worst about Democrats. The two ruling factions have been a state of cold war (not competition) for a while, and Democrats are finally starting to realize it.

The architects of duopoly are now becoming victims of the system they sought to create. Democrats have painted themselves in a corner with duopoly – however much they claim they need two parties to have a political debate, it’s not something they really seem to believe. Well, now they’ve gotten their wish because now all of the centrist non-progressives are basically on their side, but that means, as with the Affordable Care Act, that all political debate is within the Democratic Party, because Republicans refuse to offer any ideas. And that means that despite their technical majority in numbers, Democrats can’t get anything done because they aren’t one movement, they’re just a coalition of NotRepublicans. The altruist-socialist Left that claims to be the real Democratic Party has never really been a majority of public opinion, and if I do find myself voting with the “progressives” more, that’s only because the last two years of Trump Virus (TM) has made it clear that this country’s lack of support systems is an outright national security issue that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. (And if those leftists sneer that the virus proves people can’t be trusted to do the right thing without being forced, it also proves that government can’t make them do the right thing, either.)

Meanwhile, if it seems odd that Republicans are only enacting the Trump agenda of voter suppression and vote nullification after he lost (as opposed to succumbing to his demands in the moment, like he wanted) it’s because the aftermath of January 6 has made two things clear: However much the sensible Republicans wished Trump would go away after Biden’s inauguration, the “base” will not give up Trump no matter what, and the factors that caused Republicans to lose the suburbs and critical Electoral College battles will only get worse as sane people realize that electing Republicans would mean electing Trump and electing Trump would mean January 6 every damn day. It was all the Party could do to get swing states with white people and Hispanics and now they have to worry that not even a majority of white people are on board anymore.

Republicans have basically painted themselves in a corner with duopoly: they survived mainly by suppressing any competition for the not-Democrat vote, just as Democrats suppress any competition for the not-Republican vote. And just as Democrats scare their people into voting for them on the premise that if they don’t, America is going to become a fascist hellhole, Republicans scare their people into thinking if Democrats win, America will become a socialist hellhole. But Republicans were starting to gain the advantage in that, one, Republican presidencies may have been disagreeable to liberals but were not Hell on Earth to the rest of us, and two, the Democrats’ main constituencies were sick of waiting for that party to keep their promises, and despite outnumbering Republicans on paper, didn’t vote in enough numbers to throw Republican governments out. Meanwhile Republicans did have voter loyalty because their main constituencies were convinced that the evil Demonrats were going to have all the white babies aborted and then turn them gay. The difference is that Democrats are starting to listen to people outside their inner circle and are trying to get a majority of votes, and however haphazardly, are starting to do so. Republicans however are only listening to their biggest fanatics, which is how we got Trump, who may not have believed in all the birther-Tea Party-Q nonsense at first, but told the suckers what they wanted to hear, to such an extent that he bought into it. Basically, Trump is to lying what Al Pacino in Scarface was to cocaine: He used to just be a dealer then he became his own biggest customer.

And just as Trump single-handedly killed Atlantic City by putting his casinos in competition with each other so that they cannibalized each others’ business, he eventually created a situation where his continued lying and incompetence meant that his fortunes as president were at odds with his Party’s generally strong performance in the 2020 elections. The short term results of that became clear as Trump sabotaged his own Party in the Georgia US Senate runoffs by saying that his loss could only happen cause the system was rigged, therefore the whole thing was rigged, by implication meaning the same system by which other Republicans won. In that runoff, the dynamic started to reverse: Now that people besides leftists saw America as turning into a fascist hellhole, it was the Democrats who were turning out to vote no matter what, and it was Republican constituencies who stayed home cause they felt like they were being lied to. And then the day after Kelly Loeffler lost her Georgia Senate seat, the Congress had to certify the Electoral College result, so Trump, his family and his stooges came out to the mob of thugs who’d been organizing for weeks and implied that it sure would be a shame if Mike Pence and the other Republicans didn’t throw out that whole “Electoral College” thing and declare God-Emperor Trump our immortal Lord and Savior. And for some reason the guys who had been bitching about the election online for two months, coordinated over social media, and came to DC with zip ties, riot gear and scaffolding for a hanging suddenly decided to get violent.

And as amazing as Democrats find it that the senior Republicans haven’t run Trump out of their Party by now, if not voting with them on impeachment (given that he tried to KILL them and all), you have to look at it from their side. I’m sure Mitch McConnell would want to make sure Trump can’t run for President again, even if he wasn’t going to let his perfect little boy get convicted on impeachment, but Mitch knows that if the Party did what it should have done a while ago – kicked out Trump and any other politician who supports his lies – then all the registered Republicans who believe those lies will quit voting Republican and either stay home or vote for whatever clown car of a political organization Trump wants to put together. At that point, Republicans might still have a few places where they could win, but most of the places where their seats are safe are only safe because of Trumpniks. Kicking out Trump would mean the end of the Republicans as a competitive national party, and if Republicans won’t openly admit this, Democrats are too polite to bring it up. In any case, Republicans are clearly less afraid of a permanent dictatorship of Trumpism than a permanent dictatorship of the Democratic Party, because in effect, that is what abandoning Trump would accomplish.

However much I might not want a one-party state, even under the Democrats, I still have to ask Republicans: whose fault is that? Your whole attitude is “You HAVE to vote for us, no matter how horrible we are, cause you don’t want those OTHER people taking over, do you??” Dudes, ask yourselves: How well did that work for Hillary Clinton?

Because going into the 2022 elections, the question is not whether Republican strategy makes sense for their priorities but whether their priorities are good strategy. In his orders to the troops, Trump said, “Don’t do the infrastructure deal, wait until after we get proper election results in 2022 or otherwise (Hmm?), and regain a strong negotiating stance”. Now, given the strength of Republican performance in November 2020, and the usual weakness of the president’s party in a midterm elections, Republicans would have reason to believe that they can just hold out and be “strong” and end up getting what they want if they just wait out the election cycle. It’s what they’re inclined to do anyway. But then again there was every reason to believe the incumbent US Senators of Georgia would win their runoffs and keep Mitch McConnell as Majority Leader. And then somebody had to open his mouth and cause problems. And THEN January 6 happened.

To say that this “conservative” movement is evil would be true, but it avoids the point. Because whether you want to admit this or not, Americans like evil. We like Nazis. We like Confederates. We like rooting for the Empire in Star Wars and the Klingons in Star Trek.

But to paraphrase General Patton, one thing Americans absolutely will not tolerate is a loser.

And while real Christians might have been waiting over 2000 years for Christ to come back to life and regain dominion over the universe, I don’t think even Republicans can afford to give Cheeto Jesus that much benefit of the doubt.

“We’ve got to rise above the need for cops and laws”

-Dead Kennedys, “The Stars and Stripes of Corruption”

The Fox News website said that last week, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire “ignited a social media firestorm” when its Twitter account posted: “Legalize child labor. Children will learn more on a job site than in public school.”

First let me say: I actually agree with this. But that is not an endorsement of child labor so much as my assessment of the public school system.

Now, the text of the article indicated that the LP position had a little more nuance: “”Our proposal is that the minimum age requirement be lowered to 16 without school superintendent approval, if a child is homeschooled, this option is difficult for them,” (party chair) Jarvis said. “We also propose that if a minor has graduated high school or obtained a GED, they have already proven themselves and should not be required to obtain permission to be employed. The law in [New Hampshire] currently prohibits these individuals from seeking employment without a signed written document from a parent on file.”

Even so, 2016 Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson went on record saying, “I’m sorry, but no. This isn’t what libertarianism means to millions of Americans – pushing a disturbing and out of touch stance on child labor is entirely detached from what people need in America today. This does not advance liberty, or help change people’s opinions”. Jiletta Jarvis supported his right to an opinion even though she said “I know that there was an emotional reaction to his criticism and we are working internally on that issue.” Personally I think they should take Johnson more seriously. I mean, he’s the leading expert on how to make libertarianism look bad by taking a public position with absolutely no knowledge of the subject.

As far as the “working internally” on the emotional reactions, this whole thing seems to be just one example of an extremely confusing mini-civil war, where other state parties of the national Libertarian Party are having their say, where Jarvis asserts that “I have watched secret plots occurring” and new members wish to discredit the Party and use the same tactics to take over the Republican Party. The LPNH Executive Committee, or “Mises Caucus” (Twitter page ‘Temporarily the home of the @LPNH Executive and Communications committees’) published a tweet from the Connecticut Party saying “There was no convention … that disaffiliated the original LPNH… Jilletta Jarvis’ actions were not authorized by any noticed meeting under any set of bylaws… Our Regional Representative is ORDERED, DIRECTED and COMMANDED TO BRING A MOTION TO THE LNC FOR THE REMOVAL OF THE CHAIR”.

Now here’s the real fucking joke: Nobody else knows this. There are a few newspaper websites covering the story, but you’d have to know to look for them. The only reason I even bring it up is because I know any time I try to advocate for libertarianism against authority, some smart aleck liberal is gonna look up that LPNH child-labor tweet and go “Yeh whaddya thinka THIS, Mr. Glibertarian? Ha? Ha? HA? Oh, I almost forgot: SOMALIA!!!”

Nobody else is gonna CARE, because it doesn’t matter. For all the impact you actually have, the Libertarian Party may as well be a bunch of SciFi geeks arguing over whether the Millennium Falcon could beat the USS Enterprise, and on that score, the Millennium Falcon is to the Enterprise what your uncle’s 1970 VW stoner van is to a modern US Navy guided missile cruiser, the Falcon is using a point-to-point hyperdrive jump system when the Enterprise can operate at faster-than-light warp speed, and in any case, neither of them are real and at the end of the day you’re just debating the minutiae of fictional fantasy BULLSHIT.

Not that fantasy and science fiction are bad. Take the cellphone. A ubiquitous convenience of modern life. A lot of Star Trek fans would say it was inspired by the flip-communicators the Enterprise crew used in the Original Series. I always thought it was derived from Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone. But in any case, it used to be fiction, and now it’s reality. That’s the difference between supernatural fantasy and science fiction, science fiction shows you that there is a path between desire and reality. But you still have to create that path. You still have to have organization and planning and marketing to get the cellphone to be other than just a cool idea or a project in your friend’s basement. And you also have to acknowledge that some cool ideas are more feasible in the present than others. Our science does not yet allow us a feasible path to cold fusion, the atmospheric conversion engine, or immortality technology, let alone a social system that makes government obsolete. And here’s the thing, we’re that much LESS likely to get there if we disregard what science we do have cause the coronavirus or the vaccine or both are some kind of government conspiracy to control the masses. If you know how many people have already died and you don’t want to get vaccinated cause “FREEDOM” then the Science Fiction future you’re most likely to advance is the one where chimpanzees and gorillas on horseback oversee naked humans in labor camps because We, the People have chosen to become inarticulate apes.

Now, any professional libertarian-hater would be telling you all of this and already has, but I AM a libertarian. If you’re a libertarian who thinks I’m NOT one cause I think we should be practical and reform the government we already have rather than pretend it doesn’t exist, well, who cares? Your premise is, “libertarianism means you can’t label me or tell me what to do.” Right back at you, guy.

And why would I still call myself a (L)ibertarian, especially after this shit? Sadly, it’s the same reason I still called myself a Libertarian in 2016 – as sad as the LP is, the Party of Trump is that much worse. As for the Democrats, I already reconciled myself to the practical reality of having to vote Democratic because the greater evil is not simply disagreeable but an active threat to national security. That doesn’t change the fact that while the Democrats may be the only party with any relation to reality, sometimes it’s hard to tell. At times they seem that much more smug and naive in their assumptions about the world than the Libertarians, and it’s that much more irritating because they claim to know better. They’re constantly telling us all the wonderful stuff that they’re going to do now that they’re in charge, and constantly crying about how they can’t do any of it because the Republican bullies are taking their lunch money every day, and only a few of them have figured out that they need to stop wringing their hands and fight back.

According to a 2021 Gallup poll (that President Biden referred to this week) only 25 percent of voters identify as Republican and only 30 percent identified as Democrats. Now, when you add independents who lean to one faction or the other for practical reasons, you have slightly less than half of polled voters (49%) identifying as Democrat or Democrat-leaning, but only 40 percent of people are Republican or lean Republican. Do the math and that’s a 9 percent gap in favor of the Democratic coalition. But this also means you have 19 percent of voters as “left” independents and 15 percent as “right” independents and when you do that math, that total is 34 percent. So we have reached a point at which the largest group of voters, over a third, might not agree on anything else, but agree they can’t align with the duopoly.

But when someone in the Libertarian Party seriously pushes an idea like child labor, that is to the libs what “Drag Queen Story Hour” is to the conservatives: Waving the freak flag in front of Middle Americans that we might have otherwise been able to persuade.

There was this one guy discussing the subject on YouTube who lamented the situation insofar as libertarians almost don’t want to be taken seriously. They do have some real critiques, such as, that our government is too powerful and unaccountable, or our civilian police are too militarized. He also said that what usually happens when he debates a libertarian is that they’re capable of a cogent argument for about 72 seconds, then they go off into the Ether. That clip also led to the usual dopey, sneering arguments like “libertarians are just Republicans who like pot.” It’s a lot harder to argue the point when libertarians concede it. A lot of them seem to be more exercised about taxes and COVID regulations than the fact that a large segment of the society is more oppressed than white people were under COVID, and have been for decades if not centuries.

But that just gets to the point that the problem is not the stupid leftist caricature. The problem, as with their caricature of the former Republican Party, is when right-wingers obsessively seek to live up to and exceed the caricature. Because a lot of these guys are living on social media and think that the main aspiration of life is to be a cartoon. This is why both libertarians and “conservatives” will promote child labor, or reducing the voter franchise or some other innovation from the 19^th Century, cause they’re trying to show their punk rock edge.

And that just gets to the point that you’ve already got one party in government that is actively against government and has written itself out of any idea of what they want to do when they get a majority, that thinks asking what voters want is too much of a compromise of the ideal, that as a result, they’re losing voters left and right, and as a result of that, act like majority rule is communist. I am again reminded of that one time where Thomas Massie, a Republican Congressman who claimed to be libertarian when that was still sorta cool with his team, said: “But then when I went to Iowa (in 2016) I saw that the same people that had voted for Ron Paul weren’t voting for Rand Paul, they were voting for Donald Trump. And the same thing happened in Kentucky, the people who were my voters ended up voting for Donald Trump in the primary. And so I was in a funk because how could these people let us down? How could they go from being libertarian ideologues to voting for Donald Trump? And then I realized what it was: They weren’t voting for the libertarian in the race, they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race when they voted for me and Rand and Ron earlier. So Trump just won, you know, that category, but dumped the ideological baggage.”

If all you have to offer is being the craziest son of a bitch in the race, you can’t compete with what the Party of Trump is now. THEY STOLE YOUR ACT.

Maybe try writing some new material?

With what we have misruling the country, there is plenty of room for alternatives. There is plenty of opportunity for Libertarians to take advantage. Which is why it pisses me off that they refuse to do so.

I am sick and tired of my Party and my movement being taken as a joke.

But apparently you’re not.

So maybe I’m getting sick of you.

“No advocate of reason can claim the right to establish HIS version of a good society, if such society includes the initiation of force against dissenters in ANY issue. No advocate of the free mind can claim the right to force the minds of others.”
-Ayn Rand, Letters of Ayn Rand

One will note that I called my last post “The Once And Future Libertarian” without doing much to advocate for libertarianism or the Libertarian Party. That’s because, having gone over what’s still wrong with the duopoly, and why simply assimilating into the Democrat Collective is not sufficient to solve this country’s problems, it requires a bit more analysis as to why going libertarian is a good idea. Especially these days.

Since one of the major issues in the news the last few weeks is Texas. What specifically about Texas? The whole thing. First, while the winter storms of February were intense for most of the country, it was only in Texas that the weather caused both power and water to go out across the state, since lack of power also caused the systems heating (and cleaning) the water lines to freeze. And that, it turned out, was because a, the Texas power grid is separate from the rest of the area around it, and b, the state didn’t protect that power grid by winterizing the equipment. And of course, now people are getting charged four-digit power bills for that period, because Texas utilities were allowed to charge customers “what the market will bear.” One company, Griddy, had actually warned customers to leave. The first time I’d heard about that story, I thought they were telling people to leave Texas, which is good advice regardless of the weather.

And then on March 2 Texas Governor Greg Abbott (three guesses as to what party he is, and the first three don’t count) publicly announced, as though it were something to be proud of, that he was lifting all COVID-19 restrictions in the state “100 percent.” This was exactly at the point that vaccines were about to roll out, but before the sectors of labor most likely to require contact with the public, such as medical and service workers, were vaccinated. Which sort of defeats the purpose of acting like the pandemic is over.

How is a right-winger, especially a libertarian, going to say that lack of restrictions is necessarily going to lead to good results? You can’t. Which leads to the second lesson I want to impart to the Right. To recall, “The first thing that right-wingers (Republican or Libertarian) have to learn is that the Left is going to call them a bunch of heartless ogres and witches whether they earn the reputation or not. Which is what makes it imperative NOT to earn it.” The second lesson is that the reason we have as much government as we do is that someone saw a need for it, as I’ve also said before. Since the kind of disaster that we’ve seen in Texas can happen if you just let the private sector do as it will, this makes it possible to enact heavy regulations under the impression they’re actually going to help people. I say, “under the impression” because that’s not usually how it works, and that’s really not the reason we have the bureaucracy that we do. In fact, much of the regulation we have is specifically intended to protect the businesses ostensibly being regulated, and is written on their behalf, sometimes actually BY them.

Believe it or not, the best explanation of this point I’ve seen is from leftists on social media.

Here is an example of what would happen if we treated the local pizzeria like we treated health care: https://www.facebook.com/james.gillen.969/posts/3737875906261472?notif_id=1614799095747641&notif_t=feedback_reaction_generic&ref=notif

And then there’s this: (https://www.facebook.com/kirstin.hamaker/posts/3784372801624524)

I wasn’t able to see anything else referring to this tweetstorm on my Internet searches, so I just posted the link.

Even if you see the need for regulations of the dairy industry (in this case) or the corn syrup industry, or whatever, the regulations we have are designed not only to benefit giant industries but to corner out smaller farmers and producers that not only would do things in a more capitalist, competitive way, but would also behave more ethically and follow the regulations and practices that the liberals and socialists actually want.

And in regard to the particular crisis, before Greg Abbott was Texas Governor, he was the state Attorney General, and had taken the (Republican) state government’s position against the Obama Administration that it should be able to operate its power grid independently and not have to enact the winterization procedures that everybody else did. Now he’s calling on the utilities to do so, even as politicians are telling us we need to rescue the people stuck with bills from unregulated companies. The Texas Tribune article: “Lawmakers have demanded that the utility commission roll back its decision to allow the huge rate increases, or suggested cobbling together some package of emergency waivers or relief money to buffer Texans’ from the high bills.

“We cannot allow someone to exploit a market when they were the ones responsible for the dire consequences in the first place,” said state Rep. Brooks Landgraf, R-Odessa.”

If only they could have guessed that such consequences were possible.

I opened with that particular Ayn Rand quote because it could be interpreted for more than one purpose. With COVID, for instance, is it “initiation of force against dissenters” if the state government imposes laws restricting people’s freedom of action, for example, mandating masks, to stop the spread of the pandemic?

Well, let’s look at it another way. If a storm takes out an old bridge and the state has to put up barriers until a crew can be sent and they have to put up a sign saying “BRIDGE OUT”, is that a restriction of your right to use the roadway? You could interpret it that way. You could just blow past the barrier, go “FUCK you I won’t do what ya tell me” and cross the bridge, at which point, it won’t be the government that’s restricting your freedom. It’ll be gravity.

Pretty much the same point can be made with regard to coronavirus restrictions. We didn’t have to have them, and not every state does. Deciding that your state is “free” of coronavirus restrictions doesn’t make the state free of coronavirus. Plus which, in a lot of cases during the early reaction to COVID-19, private businesses were quicker to create social distancing rules than government, and in the current situation, a lot of places in Texas have announced in the wake of the governor’s decision that they will still mandate pandemic rules, at least for their own employees. (In the case of airlines, they are operating under federal restrictions.) Now surely right-wing followers of Ayn Rand will respect a business owner’s right to dictate the use of their space? Well, we know the answer to that question.

In the Dallas Morning News article, the CEO for the Texas Association of Business said in response to Abbott’s announcement that “The association believes businesses understand the protocols needed to ‘function safely’ and that ‘Texas companies will operate responsibly’.” But if we could trust businesses to operate responsibly, you wouldn’t have the situation you do in Texas with the power grid and the other utilities. At the same time, like I said, businesses on the whole have been more responsible about pandemic restrictions than certain state governments or American Presidents. As I say, it is possible for two different things to be true at the same time. On a case by case level, I can trust people to do the right thing, but not as a rule. There has to be a default standard. THAT’s why you have a government.

But what if the local government is less responsible than the public at large? Ay, there’s the rub.

Part of the problem is that invocations of “freedom” versus “socialism” are not only dodging common sense, they’re using deceptive political labels. The most officially socialist country in the world is the “People’s” Republic of China, which is no less socialist in its desire to have one party control all aspects of the country, they just figured after a few decades of Leninist/Maoist ideology that they wouldn’t get to run it for much longer if the masses were starving and near revolt. So they incorporated just enough capitalism, under strict controls, to keep the structure going. So you have one country that apes a leftist ideology but really has a bunch of guys in business suits in control.

Meanwhile here you have a bunch of professional Christians and ostensible conservatives who want to preserve a nationalist and capitalist system but are finding themselves increasingly unpopular – since after a few decades of ideology the masses are starting to starve – so in order for the guys in business suits to stay in control, they increasingly ape the posture of a one-party socialist regime that among other things says that only people the ruling party deems “patriots” can get to run for a local government. Where have I heard that one before?

That would be the danger to the American experiment even if the Republican faction of the duopoly were competent. As it is, the real danger from a right-wing (or non-socialist) standpoint is that the only alternative presented against the Democrats is a bunch of bad-faith culture war initiatives that are not taken seriously and really are not intended to be taken seriously. Now, if you’re to believe the polls, three out of four Americans approve the $1.9 trillion “Rescue Plan” passed by Congress and signed by President Biden March 11, including at least half of Republicans. The actual Republican Party isn’t even trying to compete with that, even though they still have the numbers to do so. Instead they’re using their media to read Green Eggs and Ham.

So from a right-wing standpoint, the longer these guys are the official NotDemocrat Party, the less likely it is there will be any serious resistance to genuinely bad left-wing ideas, especially when the Party of Trump took the real bipartisan concerns about “the swamp” and used them to promote incompetence, corruption and spite. The only opposition to an open borders policy is internment camps and separating families. The only plan for balancing our trade deficit was a tariff war with China that simply let them expand their trade with everyone else without benefiting us, and shutting down some of our retailers in the process.

And from a left-wing standpoint, a “conservative” party that doesn’t even try to represent its voters is just there. Like a lump. Or an obstacle. They are serving literally no purpose in the government other than to make the Democrats negotiate everything amongst their “progressive” and centrist wings. That does serve the moderating function that a multi-party system would otherwise create, but again that merely emphasizes the twin points that the more the Democrats are expected to absorb every voter and faction that is NotRepublican, the more they have to do everything themselves, for people who are not their natural constituency (if they even have one), because the Republican Party is worse than useless.

If you expect politics to get anywhere and you expect elections to be taken seriously, the Democrats are going to need competition. Do you seriously want that competition to be the Republican Party?

So that’s why I’m going back to the Libertarian Party. There needs to be something else. And please don’t tell me their ideas are horrible and they can’t be taken seriously. You HAVE one faction of the duopoly that has truly horrible ideas that shouldn’t be taken seriously, and yet are. The matter, bluntly, is whether the ideas have any support, and it looks like Republicans are starting to lose that support. Which leads to my third lesson for Libertarians in particular. We’re already against government. But assuming we DO want to get elected, we have to take government seriously. You’ve already got the people who are against government IN government and making a mess of it. You’ve already got the Merry Pranksters. As long as they’re there, they’re going to be making the Right worse and the country as a whole worse. It can’t be that hard to present a constructive alternative to them. You just have to be the grownups in the room, and the fact that Libertarians can be the grownups compared to Republicans shows where we are now. This is a real opportunity that I think must be taken.

Mind you, I will probably be voting Democrat in several elections simply because the Libertarian Party doesn’t post candidates for those races. But you have to start somewhere. I already know there’s no point in trying to change anyone’s mind in the Republican Party, and there’s really no point in trying to sway Democrats either.

I want to have a party for the rest of us.

I’m not really in the mood to give Viceroy Trump a political obituary the way I did with Barack Obama. For one thing, The Trump Organization will not actually be dead until it is staked in the coffin, has its head chopped off, then has the coffin blasted to bits in a sealed room so that the ashes cannot escape, at which point the ashes will be collected and shot into the sun. Trump is the anti-Tom Joad. Whenever someone is being a belligerent idiot, he’ll be there. Whenever some businessman is driving a creditor into bankruptcy cause he won’t pay his bills, he’ll be there. Whenever you see a cop beating a guy, he’ll be that cop. Trump is immortal.

But that hasn’t stopped some columnists from doing the same, for example at National Review, whose new motto seems to be “We’re not PRO-Trump, we’ve just got a funny way of showing it.” And as part of the literate Right’s desire to play Schrodinger’s Conservative and have their “benefits” of Trumpism and their “deep concern” too, they’ve given a piece to David L. Bahnsen, who “runs a private-wealth-management firm and is a National Review Institute trustee.” This piece, “A Final Assessment of the Trump Presidency, and the Path Forward” is supposed to be a warts-and-all review of Trump’s presidency, but in its typical desire to rationalize conservative Trump support, reveals a cluelessness surpassing Julianne Hough wearing blackface to the Halloween party. And so I have decided to give this particular column a fisking in order to help sum up the effects of The Trump Organization on our country, and on Republican politics in particular.

Remember, “fisking” is a term that first referred to the point-by-point rebuttal of leftist journalist Robert Fisk, back in the Bush Administration days when some people on the Right still had enough brains to form a philosophy other than “The Trump is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Fisking is not to be confused with “fisting”, even if the intent and result are similar.

In hindsight, I wish I had published this article before the events of January 6 at the Capitol building.

I’ll bet.

My goal in this piece has been important to me for a long time — an objective, thoughtful, and fair assessment of the Trump presidency, complete with some suggestions for the path forward in political life after Trump. The ambitions of this article are not changed by the riots, and in fact some conclusions are reinforced by them. However, the already high volume at which this particular conversation takes place in all circles is now even higher, and when everything is this loud, it seems that nothing gets heard at all. I have never written an article before where I felt such a burden to manage the volume to the end of the takeaways, even if not everything will be found agreeable by all.

That strange and awkward preface is not something I can ever imagine writing for the typical articles I author in the fields of economics, culture, and social thought.

Well, that should tell you your chances of success in this endeavor.

…my intent in this article: to assess the overall presidency of Donald Trump, and to do so with no need for vindication, no axe to grind, and a truly open and humble disposition. The advantage (and burden) of such a piece versus all of the various ad hoc events, policies, tweets, and decisions over the years is that I am now trying to “pull it all together.” There is some finality in this, and that means final conclusions will offend or bother some readers. I hope the offense or bother this piece produces for supporters and critics of the president will be minimal and even pre-forgiven. I write on this subject because I want a path forward.

I do not worry about the offense or bother this piece may or may not cause in the far Left — in those whose efforts at critiquing Donald Trump have been unhinged, unfair, and completely counterproductive. The undeserved martyr-like treatment given to Trump by many of his supporters is mostly the by-product of his treatment by the media, which makes no sense to me. I don’t suggest they did not have material available to them, because they had it in abundance. I am suggesting that rather than critiquing the president with the obvious things right in front of them, a huge portion of the country chose to chase absurd conspiracy theories, wild insinuations of Hitlerian tendencies, and often overt lies that served to create insurmountable distrust when there were truthful criticisms to launch. The “CNN camp” has made the role of presidential critics such as myself almost impossible, lumping us in with the unhinged camp. For purposes of my piece, I ask you to fairly and rightly separate my efforts from that camp, because they do not belong there.

Well, let me go into some detail. First, Mr. Bahnsen, you should not stress over whether your opinions cause any offense on the Left, because they’re going to find something to be offended about no matter what you say. Secondly, it is superficial to say that attacks on Trump are all exaggerated or “Hitlerian.” I personally find such comparisons to be a big insult. To Hitler. After all, Hitler actually volunteered for the army, and he led an economic recovery for more than three years before starting a major catastrophe that killed everybody. The thesis of my response is that your very equivocation betrays the problem with presenting an ‘even-handed’ treatment of the subject Mr. Trump. If there are indeed good things about the Trump time in office from a neutral or right-wing perspective, the fact that both the praise and hate for Trump are exaggerated out of proportion to results (I differ as to how exaggerated these opinions are) indicates the problem for the critic who presents himself as even-handed. Not just in that the Left will not hear anything good you have to say about Trump, but more that the Right will not hear any criticism of their Leader. My suspicion borne out by the last four years of observation is that the Right will be a tougher sell for your “path forward”, for that reason.

Many who had the “Never Trump” label ascribed to them sacrificed needed credibility, either early on or, for others, later into the presidency, for a willingness to sacrifice previously held beliefs if it meant being aligned with the president.

There’s a difference between “sacrificing” previously held beliefs just because they’re associated with an individual and changing one’s beliefs because you’ve learned something with experience and perspective. By the same token, if one’s experience causes a person to align against a given individual, that doesn’t necessarily disqualify their opinion just because you want to defend that subject.

And the so-called “Always Trump” camp never found a way to generally support an agenda without an unhealthy, often sycophantic, loyalty to the president. The bipolarity of these two positions has taken over the Right these last four years, leaving some who have genuinely believed that there was not just room for, but the necessity for, a more nuanced position in exile.

Yes, except that bi-polarity implies there are two positions. Those “Never Trumpers” who committed heresy against Our President have in effect excommunicated themselves from the Right, no matter their positions on taxes or abortion or such. Their main opportunities for media exposure are with the Washington Post media, or MSNBC, or one of those other mainstream outlets, which means they will be shut off by Republican listeners just as surely as The Liberal Media deplatforms Republicans and cancels their book contracts. It is not the Never Trumpers who were preventing “a more nuanced position in exile” – they were trying to create it. They could not, because the “Always Trump” position is now dominant in the Republican Party and conservative movement, and nuance is the enemy to them.

I want to say something to the president’s most ardent supporters, the group I fear will be offended by many of the conclusions of this piece. Whether you come out of this reading convinced of this or not, I really do, from the bottom of my heart, understand. I understand the frustrations you feel, the fear you have for what is happening in our country and our culture. I understand the desire for there to be someone who you feel is pushing back or fighting. It makes perfect sense to me why you find the media contemptible, and why you see someone such as President Trump who so often fights with the media as your friend, and maybe even your protector.

Ah, so a riot is the language of the unheard. I get it.

The very heartfelt and rational critiques I offer herein about Donald Trump are not because I disagree with you about those problems; they are because I disagree with you about Trump as the solution.I hope you will find my arguments for such persuasive. …Those who are the most significant critics of Trump on the Right have too often failed to strive for any level of empathy for those identifying as Trump supporters when significant empathy is warranted and even required.

Guy, their favorite slogan was “Fuck Your Feelings.” I wasn’t aware that was a cry for empathy.

And to the extent that I agree with your central point, sir, it’s that the Trump fan club that took over conservatism (to the extent it blends into the Tea Party) had some real points about business-as-usual government (mainly from Democrats but also establishment Republicans) and the fact that they were completely wrong about the solution doesn’t change the fact that there are real issues with pre-Trump government. More’s the pity, because association with Trump means first and foremost that such supposedly conscientious people really cared more about the negative impulses they got to indulge in Trump’s cult of personality. More to the point, the fact that Trump IS identified as “the solution” because he has absorbed the Right and will brook no debate makes it that much less likely that real reform can happen outside “the swamp.” He hasn’t drained it, he has made it stronger, because he has made it look preferable to the alleged solution.

The Good

There are some things that have to be said about the Trump presidency in a “final hour assessment” that are unambiguously good. And I will start with the single greatest achievement of the entire Trump era: He kept Hillary Clinton from ever being our president. For all the other good and bad, I have absolutely no problem rooting this piece in the simple observation that President Donald Trump meant there was no President Hillary Clinton, and that is an unalloyed good. I haven’t compromised a single bit around the case that Hillary Clinton would have been an unfathomable disaster for our country. Her defeat is something I will celebrate forever, regardless of who it was who defeated her. I do not share the belief of some of my friends that in 2016 “only Trump could have beaten her.” What we know is that President Trump did defeat her, to the surprise of many — including myself. This remains the hallmark achievement of the Trump era.

Ehh, almost, but not quite.

The fact that Hillary can inspire (and deserve) such hatred even now, and that both Biden and Obama won clear victories when the Electoral College slipped out of her fingers, indicates in retrospect that almost anybody could have beaten her, and my personal conspiracy theory is that Donnie’s old buddy Bill put Trump up to running against Hillary Clinton as the ultimate wrestling heel as part of the effort to tar the Republican Party for good. They just forgot that people like wrestling heels more than Hillary. And I personally agree with the Clinton camp that James Comey’s revival of the email investigations just days before the election did more to kill her momentum than any thing the Russians did overtly or covertly. Indeed, given how close things were, had Hillary won, the Right might be saying that anybody BUT Trump could have beat her, given that he was the only Republican candidate who approached her negatives with the unconverted.

Another significant policy achievement of the Trump presidency is his three Supreme Court justices.

This is of course, the Right’s go-to justification for everything else.

This is also the crowning achievement of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. For some reason, MAGA hates this man, and I have absolutely no idea why.

Because Mitch has an existence outside Donald Trump.

There are a few other accomplishments often brought up when constructing Trump’s presidential resume. The corporate-tax reform was a needed and important piece of legislation, not as — contrary to popular leftist lies — a support for the rich, but as a support for the job creation, business investment, capex, global competitiveness, repatriation of foreign profits, and reduction of loopholes it fostered. That this accomplishment actually went through a real legislative process makes it even more important — it cannot be reversed so easily, and it was actually done properly in the context of the Constitution.

True. And as you imply, if there was anything good about all this, and it is the sort of thing that any Republican would want, then that implies any Republican president would have pursued it. That begs the question of whether these gains were worth the loss of the Party’s reputation, and your words as a whole provide the answer.

I am glad the president relocated to the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, ended the Iranian nuclear deal, and pulled us out of the Paris accord. These things carry more symbolic than practical significance, but symbolic gestures do matter.

Given liberal Jews’ longstanding support for Israel, the fact that Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to take a similar position has less to do with the wonderful genius of Donald Trump (other than his capacity to push on with an idea no matter who it offends) and more to do with external factors: specifically the fact that Israeli government is even more dominated than American government by a “conservative” government that is even more corrupt and pandering to the fundamentalists than ours is, plus a realization on the Arab states’ part that they never really cared about the Palestinians much anyway, and were willing to trade them for deals with the US and help with containing Shia Iran.

It may seem like small ball to many of you, and with some of the ghastly pardons that are included in his actions, may even rub you the wrong way. But I would include the president’s pardons of Michael Milken and Conrad Black as two of his greatest hits. I’ve written enough about the Milken pardon but will celebrate it long after Trump is gone.

You’re right, David. Pardoning Milken in particular does rub me the wrong way. As a matter of fact, this one paragraph almost invalidates everything you say by itself. At Milken’s sentencing, Judge Kimba Wood told him: “You were willing to commit only crimes that were unlikely to be detected. … When a man of your power in the financial world… repeatedly conspires to violate, and violates, securities and tax business in order to achieve more power and wealth for himself… a significant prison term is required.”

I do not disagree with President Trump’s defenders that he has been one of the most pro-life presidents we have ever had.

I do.

His voice, rhetoric, public support, judicial appointments, and HHS personnel are high up in his report card for this tireless defending of the unborn.

Which is to say, years after he quit attending Jeffrey Epstein parties. Look, Republicans, you have to ask yourself what the endgame is here. If you honestly think abortion is murder at any point in pregnancy, then you can stop with nothing less than not only the repeal of Roe v. Wade but a Human Life Amendment or state laws to either ban abortion or do as good as. And even invalidating Roe v. Wade would mean that all the motivation and momentum leaves your side and goes to the baby-killer side, and if they can’t campaign against your scrubbed, fresh-faced young judges, they’re certainly going to campaign against the Senators that approved them. Your side is already the dog that caught the car. Soon, it’s going to shift in Reverse.

The Bad

Well, I’ve gone over this in extensive detail, but lets’ see what you think.

It is at this time that I regretfully suggest that the presidency has been an abject disaster in so many ways, not generally because of his policies, but because of the character, temperament, ego, and pathology of the president, that time and time again blotted out the good and undermined opportunities for success. Ultimately, it is my position that the things we were told didn’t matter inevitably damaged the things we were told did matter. [my emphasis]

This is my strongest point of agreement.

First, allow me to numerically offer categorical critiques that I believe warrant very little controversy on the Right. There is a certain sequence here, but they are not ranked in an order of importance:

1) “But he fights” is the most universally uttered argument in defense of President Trump, and in this phrase sits the core of my disagreement with MAGA world. “Yes, I know he tweets silly things sometimes, but at least he stands up to the media and cancel culture and the Left.” “I don’t like his temperament either, but he gets things done.” You know the lines to which I am referring, and they are universal from many who have supported President Trump.

Now, I would be happy to rebut the conclusions of this thinking — that because he “gets things done” and “stands up to the Left,” it is easy to tolerate the tweets, insults, conspiracy theories, childish behavior, boorishness, and so forth. I vehemently disagree with that thinking, but I will avoid even that argument, because this one is so much easier, and so much more undermining of that proposition: The temperament and behavior could not be ignored for the greater good, because the greater good to which you refer failed as a result of the temperament and behavior.

I spent four years pleading with people to understand that the president listened to the masses, and if he got pushback on his behavior, his craving for popularity would mean a shift in behavior. Instead of feeling pressured to change, he felt emboldened.

This should not be a surprise to so many people. We are dealing with a symbiosis. I have mentioned more times than I care to recall that Trump’s uncanny bond with his fan club is a case of identity fusion, or as the joke goes, Donald Trump is what the average Donald Trump fan would be if they had money. When you’re dealing with pivotal figures, there’s always a debate between the Hegelian position that history is formed by “great men” and the Marxist position that “great men” simply follow the mass and are subject to the same material circumstances. The truth is a little of both. If the “base” saw Trump in themselves, it’s not because they wanted a government that was more informed by F.A. Hayek or Thomas Aquinas. They wanted somebody who would run things the way they would if they got the chance. That’s exactly what happened. You can look at tapes of Donald Trump not that many years ago and see that even if he was no deep intellectual, he was at least articulate. Now all he can do is parrot the same slogans the Republican masses and their representatives have been parroting to each other for years, because a conman plays to the mark. It would be one thing if he were cynically manipulating that mass with lies and hate, but Trump has gotten high on his own supply to the extent that he resembles Al Pacino in the last scene of Scarface. Trump tells his lies to the crowd, and they cheer him on, so he eggs them on even more. They make each other worse.

But allow me to strike at the heart of what cost President Trump reelection: that first debate. I can criticize President Trump for much, but I do not criticize his marketing savvy and even his political instincts. How could I? President Trump either entered that first debate wanting to lose the election, or actually believing that the nation liked and wanted petulance of a variety we have never seen in American presidential history. Any review of the strategy he utilized in the second debate versus how he behaved in the first debate decimates the argument that “you have to let Trump be Trump.” As we saw in the second debate, he is highly capable of reining it in when he believes it will help him pragmatically. His performance in the second debate was masterful, not just because he articulated needed truth about the COVID moment, but because his temperament was sober, respectful, serious, and right. By then, nearly half of voting had already happened. The inability to empirically prove cause and effect does not change what we know instinctively to be true — his conduct at the first debate destroyed his candidacy.

Sir, if you think that Trump’s second debate was “masterful” and that he presented any truth about COVID, that is part of the problem.

But I will use even clearer data to make my case: Do you know that he still enjoyed high levels of approval and support even a month into the COVID moment? Even as death tolls were climbing and his own orders for national lockdown were decimating the economy, the country had not yet blamed President Trump for it. It is in this area that I vehemently disagree with many of my friends on the Right who have been outspoken critics of President Trump: The idea that he “caused the deaths of 300,000 Americans” is absurd. One can do revisionist history on what transpired in January and February of 2020 all they want, but there is very little President Trump could have done or should have done differently. “But he knew it was serious and did nothing.” What was he supposed to do? Shut down the economy before we had experienced a single death over a totally unknown and pre-understood respiratory virus? It’s partisan nonsense, and everyone knows it.

What’s partisan nonsense is dodging the point because it doesn’t fit your thesis. Trump indeed enjoyed high levels of support not only at the start of the COVID “moment” (such a lovely euphemism) but all the way through the election, not so much in Liberal Media opinion polls, but in the only poll that counted, the one taken in November. He just managed to alienate that many more people, or that many more people thought Joe Biden did a better imitation of a human being. No, he didn’t cause the deaths of 300,000 people… he just refused to ban China travel until their virus had already spread to Europe, declared the European travel ban on such short notice that airports were slammed with passengers trying to get back in the country in conditions ideal for spreading a virus, refused to admit there was a crisis in the first two months of the spread, shuffled Alex Azar and Mike Pence in control of the task force and then eventually took over their press conferences so he’d have a national audience for his blame-the-media pity party, belittled Dr. Fauci, belitted Dr. Birx, encouraged the herd immunity theory, and consistently treated masks as though they had cooties on them (which is kind of the point, actually).

TOTALLY NOT the same thing!

I do not know why so many decided that President Trump accusing Ted Cruz’s dad of killing JFK was acceptable or why the mocking statements about the physical appearance of Carly Fiorina and Heidi Cruz were tolerated during the 2016 campaign. But I do know that when the exact same behavior inevitably carried in the COVID moment of 2020, it was unpalatable for many Americans.

Not nearly enough of them.

I am not suggesting that President Trump lost in 2020 because he tweeted that President Obama faked the killing of Osama bin Laden and had Seal Team Six killed. Rather, I am suggesting that he tweeted it because he thought he could. A numbness had built up such that the totally unacceptable became ignored. And in a 40-40-20 country, on the margin, it was political suicide — not merely this tweet, but the entire lot of them.

And that’s what your party hasn’t figured out, David. You were scared of that 40/40/20 margin going the wrong way, and rather than do anything to counter that other 40 or wean the 20 in the middle to your view, you doubled down on stupid. “he tweeted it because he thought he could.” Yes… and who gave him that impression?

2) Those who believe the federal government is too large, should be reined it, should spend less, should extract less money from the private sector, and should seek a greater fiscal responsibility have surrendered any semblance of credibility for years. It has to be said that this is not just because we spent trillions of dollars more than ever thought possible — and this was before the COVID stimulus packages.

I understand there was excessive spending in past Republican and Democratic administrations, but there were always objectors. The Tea Party movement was a response to profligate spending under the Obama administration. And during the Bush Jr. spending years, there was a significant, though inadequate, resistance from the Right in the House and Senate. Trump did not merely spend us into oblivion, he got the “freedom caucus” to spend us into oblivion. He wasn’t hypocritical. Bush Jr. said he favored right-sized government, and then overspent. Trump overspent, and said it was because he didn’t favor right-sized government.

Hi. Welcome to the Libertarian Party.

Thanks for acknowledging that the Republicans never really gave a rat’s tail about government restraint in the first place and certainly didn’t under Trump. As you say, the difference between Trump and the respectable cloth-coat Republicans is that Trump didn’t bother with the hypocrisy. But Hey – he’s authentic!

The various cultural fears I alluded to earlier have been used as an excuse for his entire term in office to ignore the economic recklessness playing out both in deed and word, and yet having ceded the high ground to the leftist argument for size of government, spending, and budget math, we will now face the cultural ramifications of abandoning basic first things. I want to be clear — I am not merely worried that the Left will now call us hypocrites regarding spending; I am worried because it is true. And it is not true because we said one thing and did another.

Faced with a big-spending Republican president who said he wanted negative interest rates, trillions of dollars of deficits, and unlimited budget increases in each category, the GOP House and Senate, either afraid of a mean tweet, a MAGA primary opponent, or perhaps genuinely converted by the intellectual force of the Trumpian argument, capitulated. I cannot imagine what it will take to establish credibility. And when Democratic spending offends us, I cannot imagine what many in MAGA will say. For many, they would be wise to sit that argument out.

In the immortal word of Cher Horowitz, “DUH.” To paraphrase, the things you were told – ahem, the things WE told YOU – did matter were things you thought didn’t matter, and for the sake of your goals, you killed the things you say do matter. Almost as if the venal cult of personality and the chance to “fight back and make liberals cry” mattered to you more than Christian ethics or responsible government, otherwise you wouldn’t have done so much to enable a guy who makes Bill Clinton’s impeachment case look like a parking ticket. Now nobody believes you as a moral authority, and they certainly won’t take you seriously when you look at Joe Biden’s spending agenda and realize that you’re supposed to be the party of fiscal responsibility. The irony being that your most libertarian, pro-capitalist president EVAR hollowed out small business to such a great extent with the effects of Trump Virus means that we’re actually going to need that massive Keynesian spending to prime the pump. You’re doing more to justify the left-socialist spectrum than anything they could do with their limited imaginations. “I am not merely worried that the Left will now call us hypocrites regarding spending; I am worried because it is true.” As the kids say these days, sounds like a You problem.

3) One of the major premises of the Trump presidency was that he would bring in the competence and get-stuff-done mentality of a businessman to Washington. The results may set back the cause of a private-sector businessman fixing Washington for decades. The constant “palace intrigue” management style of the president (a style that sits at the heart of his business philosophy, too), created the most volatile and unstable White House staff and cabinet in generations.

Several fine patriots of great prestige and competence have come into the administration, and I differ with those Trump critics who believe those patriots had a duty to leave when Trump misbehaved throughout his presidency. I am quite confident that those who were on the “A-team” of the administration represented a superior alternative to the reality TV stars and campaign grifters who could have potentially replaced them.

Well, this is again what you get when you let your projections blind you to the fact that Trump was never a successful billionaire, he just played one on TV. And yes: the results will set back the chance for a similar pitch for decades. We can only hope. As for the ‘A-Team’ giving way to the grifters, what do you expect? Trump doesn’t want competent people, because he’s incompetent, and at core, jealous and insecure because of that. He wants bottom-feeders who look up to him because that treats his insecurity. The results are what we got. Geez Louise, if liberals could figure that out, why couldn’t National Review? It seems erudition and culture aren’t everything.

…It is my humble, gracious, yet unwavering view that what many of the president’s supporters see (and love) as a “won’t back down/fight the Left” attitude, is really a character malady that happens to sometimes align with the Right’s agenda.

Quite.

… Let us dispel of the myth that the only options are the gentlemanly passivity and ineffectualness of a Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney, or else the vulgarity and narcissism of Donald Trump. Have we truly come to a place where we do not believe we can engage the cultural and political fights of the day with energy, force, and boldness, yet without the self-defeating traits of ego and childishness that so often defined President Trump? Is this not the falsest dilemma of our time?

David, I think this whole essay is a therapeutic attempt to avoid coming to grips with the fact that you already know the answer to that question, and you don’t want to say it.

Reagan gave us “Morning in America.” Trump gave us “American Carnage.” Literally. That says it all.

Reagan won 49 states in 1984. Trump’s one clear victory was only because certain key states had a margin of “third” party votes exceeding the difference between Trump and Clinton, which liberals never fail to remind me. Reagan didn’t need to come up with ghost stories and fish tales about stolen ballots and landslides, because he earned what he got. Republicans used to be popular. Even with Dubya, they were sorta popular. Not anymore. To go back to Republican budget hypocrisy, I think that’s a lot more consequential than whether Republicans are supposedly racist. For one thing, we all know how many more black and Hispanic votes Trump got this time. For another thing, institutional racism is a problem that will ultimately solve itself as demographics change. The question is what kind of government we have, and if “conservatives” keep screaming about socialism but are just as spendthrift and statist, they have no claim to be an alternative.

Wailing and worrying about association with Trump betrays the point that you followed him because, for one thing, he really was the most popular and competent national politician you had. If you had anybody better, you would have taken them, cause at one point you did have better. For another, just as the “base” influences the leadership, the reverse is also true. I like to say that this was the Party of Trump for years before 2015, Republicans were just waiting for him to show up. For years “Tea Party” people had gone past legitimate skepticism of Big Government to attacks on government per se, and they arranged things so that you had to appeal to their wingnuttery just to win a primary, even though candidates had to tack left and pretend to be moderate to appeal to the general audience. Trump showed them they could get their populism straight from the tap.

The respectable, cloth-coat Republicans, like the ones who work for National Review (or used to) have scared themselves into thinking that rather than challenge the opposition 40 percent or adapt to the middle 20 percent and poach them from the Enemy, they have to stick with the “base” and adopt counter-majoritarian tactics to make sure that’s enough. And since that really isn’t enough, they’re scared to death of losing the once-Tea Party/now-Trumpnik/future-Q people. No one in the Trumpnik movement has ever stopped to think that they would be in that much more of a demographic slide if the respectable conservatives left them instead. I wonder why.

The Way Forward

I agree with those critical of the president that there will likely be a period of reckoning ahead, but I do not agree that we ought to hope for such. Rooting for various dependable conservative Senators to lose for blood-sport because they tried to thread the needle in dealing with Trump these last few years is counter-productive. Seeking to “cancel” those who dared to bring some competence and productivity to the administration is silly, unfair, and wrong.

These are Senators we’re dealing with. Lindsey Graham is fine. Tommy Tuberville is fine. Mitch McConnell is fine. The only way people like that lose in this system is if they’ve made themselves that unpopular, and that takes a lot more than “cancel culture.”

…If I could wave a wand and make it so, we would have a resurgence of fusionism tomorrow — this time juxtaposing a toughness in demeanor, an appeal to disenfranchised working-class voters, and traditional movement conservatives. I see nothing contradictory in any of those three components, and I see no choice of forward progress for our movement (politically) without all three for the time being.

Another assortment of a “Big Tent.” A wise position: Except it has to acknowledge that the last Big Tent of Christianists, libertarians and neocons collapsed because their views are really not that compatible in the end, and the working-class and “traditional” (Christianist) people are even less so. The fact that factions are contradictory doesn’t mean that a coalition can’t be formed – it’s been done before. But that takes not only leadership but intellect. “Toughness”, while necessary, is not synonymous with leadership and it certainly isn’t synonymous with intellect.

The war big tech seems determined to fight against conservatives is not going to make this dynamic any easier. Many will get bogged down by the technical details of Section 230 and big tech’s freedom as private companies. Others still will demand exhaustive regulation and reversals, allowing their desperation to move them from the frying pan to the fire. A Trumpian authoritarianism is more palatable to so many than Silicon Valley authoritarianism, but I prefer neither. When I am asked if I want what we have these last few years, or a Silicon Valley dominance in partnership with a woke Democratic Party, my answer is, “None of the above.” We have every right and every chance to work for an affirmative vision of our movement, now. In fact, we have every duty to do so.

Hey, David, there’s at least one party that’s “None of the above.”

Ultimately, the substantial phenomena of Trump’s personality is what has to fade for conservatives, not merely meaning his personality, but the excessive reliance on personality. All things being equal, I am quite sure the GOP has little chance of winning a presidential election without a candidate of forceful and charismatic personality. But as Matthew Continetti suggests, what is needed now is a “depersonalization of the right.” We will need dynamic and high-character people to deliver, and yes, they will have to be fighters.

A very good point actually. As much as pre-Trump Republicans seemed to worship Reagan, they did not make him a personality cult the way they did Trump. But that again betrays the fact that they’ve got nothing else to work with. Paradoxically, for a political party to depersonalize, it has to have more than one personality.

But if we care about the size of the state, the character of the country, the virtue of the people, the futures of our children, the protection of our Constitution, and a permanent defeat of the forces of socialism and collectivism, we are best advised to fight these evils with less reliance on the mere appeal of a big personality and more commitment to defensible principles.

I want to reiterate my empathy for those who feel we are on the losing side of a culture war and need reinforcements that include the “strength” and “toughness” of Donald Trump. We are in a culture war and a debacle of secular-humanist wokeism, and we will need strength and toughness to prevail.

[much dross follows in conclusion]

For people who go on so much about strength and toughness, you’re more Princess-and-the-Pea than all the social media lefties.

It never seems to have occurred to you that people of a generically conservative temperament ARE the majority in this country – and by ‘conservative’ I mean, keeping the traditions that work, gradually changing the things that don’t, making the system work for everyone and using common sense. I DON’T mean “we hate abortion and gays.” This is why Biden, who differs with his Church on the abortion issue, comes off as more Christian and Middle American than Trump, who has probably paid more for abortions than for building contracts. You’re losing not because the great middle disagrees with you about the Left. They don’t. That’s the only reason you’ve managed to coast this long. The Left is starting to beat you anyway because for all the photos you show of riots and burning in the BLM protests, you’re the ones in charge of the national agenda – right up to January 20, 2021. And you, by your own actions, have made the Democrats and Left look like the sane alternative to you.

You can only get so far on empty promises and propaganda and “no matter how much you hate us, those guys are always worse.” That didn’t work for Hillary Clinton. How long did you think it would work for you?

Don’t try to present yourselves as the sane alternative to the Left until you actually become that. If you want to, that is. To paraphrase from above, “And when Democratic (policy) offends us, I cannot imagine what many in MAGA will say. For many, they would be wise to sit that argument out.”

Well, this Thanksgiving week, I was thankful that Viceroy Trump, who ran for re-election as president mainly to keep himself out of jail, is less likely to get help from the courts than ever, because believe it or not, Republican judges didn’t all buy the legal argument of “Biden votes aren’t legal, so just hand me the election, cause I’m Donald Trump, and I always get my way and I’ve never been told otherwise.” In a general overview, as of November 23, “at least” 38 cases have been filed nationwide and “at least” 26 have been denied, dismissed, settled or withdrawn, including the Pennsylvania case Trump v. Philadelphia Board of Elections, in which the plaintiffs argued that Republican observers were not given access to ballot tabulation, and after Trump’s attorney had to admit that Republicans had a “non-zero” number of vote observers, the judge asked them, “I’m sorry, then, what’s your problem?” And then over the weekend we had the hilarious news that after Team Trump paid $3 million for a recount in Wisconsin, it actually ended up giving Joe Biden more votes.

At this point, the attempt to “stop the steal” by performing an actual steal is done. Not just done: Well done with ketchup.

That of course doesn’t stop scaredy-cat liberals and centrists from worrying that the next fascist can look at what Trump did and make a more serious effort to take over. It’s not an invalid fear in itself. After all, in the short term, Trump is doing everything he can to make his sheep not only doubt the results of this election, but elections in general, turning them against anything that isn’t his brand of cult of personality. And more broadly, the level of support that Republicans got downballot and the fact that Trump did get more votes than last time indicates a real audience for a political movement that is not what we once called “conservative” but is actually reactionary.

But I’ve already gone over why Trump in particular and the Republicans in general are not a good comparison to the Nazis. “Given how many Americans either actively support “alt-right” racism or just don’t care, the real danger of Trump’s election was there was a chance that Trump could have done just as well as Hitler – if in fact he had done just as well as Hitler. Most Germans didn’t really care about (or hate) Jews as much as they cared about getting their jobs and their country’s prestige back. The comparison of the Trump Administration to the Nazi regime would hold up better if the Leader of the movement had even Adolf Hitler’s level of emotional maturity and common sense. Fortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

I’ve often thought that it’s an insult to call Trump a Nazi. It’s an insult to the Nazis. At least Hitler could run an economic recovery for MORE than three years before starting a major catastrophe that killed everybody.

Fascism trades on a reputation for competence. This is of course exaggerated. Anybody who wants to bust the illusion of Nazi German efficiency just has to read William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. But again, they lasted six years before starting World War II. Mussolini actually lasted a lot longer than that, and Franco ended up dying of old age. The perception is that the fascists just get what they want by bypassing all the petty rituals of democratic government and debate, which is good if you’re a “traditionalist” or other reactionary who perceives a culture war that’s going against you. This disdain for liberalism and power-over-principle mindset is shared by Leninists, even if they have the radically opposite background and goals.

Maybe if there was somebody who had the more appealing features of Trumpism – being an “outsider” who actually WAS going to “drain the swamp”, control immigration and get our trade balances and domestic industry back in order – I might back that person. I have less confidence that that could happen though. Just as most of Trump’s “pro-life” cult are less concerned about prenatal and child care and actually saving innocent life than they are in using abortion as a club to demonstrate their self-righteousness, most of Trump’s appeal is based not on reason and policy, but emotion. Trump has such a huge bond with his audience because they’re the same needy, entitled, emotional personality type that he is. They knew damn well that Mexico wasn’t gonna pay for a wall; they just wanted to HEAR it. So the problem with Trumpism in practice is the same reason that Trumpism in theory isn’t going to work: Whatever genuine substance there might be in Trump’s stated agenda from a right-wing standpoint, the political success of Trump was not based on substance, but on appeal to dysfunction.

This is why despite my qualms about the Democrats and establishment Republicans, I never got on the Trump train, cause I’m Las Vegas, and he’s Atlantic City, and I’ve watched this guy be an obnoxious failure for literally decades.

If this is fascism, I like to call it “whiny fascism.”

The idea that Trump could have “used his powers for Good, not Evil” or that he was put in office to do anything other than be Trump, reminds me of what is probably the most hilarious single panel in a superhero comic ever. It’s when Spider-Man is in the Savage Land and has to confront Sauron, a mad scientist who’s used his genetic wizardry to turn himself into a humanoid pterodactyl. And he explains his mad scheme to turn the rest of the human race into dinosaurs like himself, and when Spider-Man realizes that this technology could work, he says “Wow, that’s amazing! But with your science, you could do something constructive! You could cure CANCER!” And Sauron says, “But I don’t WANT to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs.”

Adam Serwer said that for the Trump Organization, “the cruelty is the point.” It would be just as accurate to say that the failure is the point. Trump won because he bonded with a certain spectrum of people who, despite their individual privilege or lack thereof, still cast themselves as put-upon victims because they belong to a cultural establishment that is currently unfashionable. And they wanted Trump to do what he’s done his entire life: fail upward, making life that much worse for everyone else, yet continue to get away with it. It was their revenge on a system that wouldn’t let them get away with individual failures. The fact that they are among the people being hurt by Trump’s incompetence doesn’t matter, because now their identity fusion is so complete that as long as Trump is winning, whatever he does is okay. However, Trump is no longer winning, and without immunity from prosecution, he may no longer be able to get away with his shit.

We can already see where the Republicans’ apparently invincible coalition is showing cracks. Trump, in his way, is determined to make sure that if he doesn’t have the White House, no one else will get to enjoy anything – including Republicans. His campaign to make The Church of Jesus Trump Latter-day Suckers doubt the validity of the election in the long-term is intended to undermine Joe Biden’s authority as President, but in the short term it really serves to undermine those voters’ faith in the election process at exactly the point that they need to get people out to the polls in Georgia to re-elect their two Republican Senators in a runoff, because if they both lose, the Democrats get an even 50 seats and Vice President Kamala Harris will break ties. Given Republican obstructionism, Democrats probably still won’t get to actually do much in the Senate, but that technical majority would mean that Democrats control important committees, and it means that Mitch McConnell would no longer be Majority Leader. And it would just be the SADDEST thing in the world to see Mitch McConnell cry.

And that’s all because a lot of people, not just Trump, can’t seem to understand that an election that did so well for Republicans down ballot did so badly for Trump. Trump himself can’t seem to understand it. Granted, there’s a truly AMAZING scope of stuff that he can’t understand, but it is confusing. There was a really good article about the Michigan recounts from Tim Alberta in Politico last week. When Trump called Michigan state Republican leaders to the White House, “As the meeting went on, it became apparent to some people in the room that more than anything, Trump had called his Michigan allies to Washington to get an honest assessment of what had happened there. He wanted to know if there was any pathway to victory. They told him there was not.

“I don’t get it,” the president said, venting confusion and frustration. “All these other Republicans, all over the country, they all win their races. And I’m the only guy that loses?”

But as I said last time, it’s actually fairly simple once it’s explained: The presidential election, even if it isn’t a straight national popularity poll, is the only federal election where everyone in the country votes in the same race. All the other races are statewide for Senate or per Congressional district. So even if the presidential votes are determined state-by-state, all the winning candidate has to do is get enough high-elector states. Last time, Hillary Clinton didn’t get those “firewall” states that Trump took, and Biden took them back. This is perfectly consistent with Trump winning Florida, Texas, and North Carolina, where other Republicans also won.

This goes along with the simple point that it was indeed possible for conservative voters to vote for their favorite Congresscritter down ticket but either vote Biden or not vote for president at all. Given the huge increase in votes for both Democrat and Republican presidential tickets, this split-ticket voting isn’t the only factor in the result, but it was a factor. In a local Pennsylvania news article several voters were interviewed and told reporters that it came down to trusting their local Congressman and not trusting Trump. “Jim Hagan, 68, of Chalfont, Bucks County, has a simple answer. His distaste for Trump did not extend to others in the GOP. ‘Although I voted for Mr. Trump in the previous election, I was very dissatisfied with his performance,” he said. “I think he completely dropped the ball on the COVID thing.’

“Hagan is a longtime Republican. He’s retired now, but his old job in the chemical industry allowed him to do a lot of international travel. Lately, he said, he has mourned what he sees as a loss of U.S. standing on the world stage. This cycle, Hagan said he voted for Biden and one other Democrat: Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who kept his seat.

“I like the way he does the job,” he said of Shapiro. “He’s very professional at it. He doesn’t seem to play partisan politics in the job, and I thought he was very proactive in doing the right thing for the people of Pennsylvania.” The mixed results were also reflective of the fact that in this election, Pennsylvania no longer uses the ‘straight-ticket’ voting option where a person can just choose the slate of candidates offered by their party all the way down. One political analyst said “returns in at least some counties showed higher turnout for the presidential race than down-ballot ones, which means some voters must have voted for president, but kept the rest of their ballot blank.”

Which indicates that on some scale the opposite problem may occur in some voting areas, where people are more enthused to turn out for the presidential contest than the other races. And that’s part of the problem Trump is creating for the cult of personality that used to be a mainstream political party. In the Politico article, Tim Alberta said: “(as mailed and early votes came in), two realities became inescapable to Michigan’s GOP elite. First, there was zero evidence to substantiate widespread voter fraud. Second, they could not afford to admit it publicly.” He cites the case of Ronna McDaniel, nee‘ Romney, who was an experienced and respected figure in Michigan politics, but “(that) changed after Trump’s 2016 victory. Tapped by the president-elect to take over the Republican National Committee—on the not-so-subtle condition that she remove “Romney” from her professional name—McDaniel morphed into an archetype of the Trump-era GOP sycophant. There was no lie too outlandish to parrot, no behavior too unbecoming to justify, no abuse of power too flagrant to enable. Longtime friends worried that McDaniel wasn’t merely humiliating herself publicly; she seemed to be changing in private. She was no longer coolly detached from the passions of politics. If anything, she was turning into a true MAGA believer.”

This has of course extended to the post-election period, where McDaniel told confidants she had no reason to suspect voter fraud but nevertheless felt obliged to enforce the Trump dogma: “If this sounds illogical, McDaniel’s thinking is actually quite linear. The RNC will vote in January on the position of chair. She is anxious to keep her job. It’s bad enough that despite an enormous investment of time and resources in Michigan, McDaniel was unable to deliver her home state for the president. If that might prove survivable, what would end McDaniel’s bid instantaneously is abandoning the flailing president in the final, desperate moments of his reelection campaign. No matter how obvious the outcome—to McDaniel, to the 168 members of the RNC, maybe even to Trump himself—any indication of surrender would be unforgivable.”

The article describes how one of the two Republicans on the Michigan election certification board voted with Democrats (while his Republican colleague abstained) and received actionable threats that required the involvement of the Michigan State Police. The former Republican state party head who recommended him to the board is now out of favor in the next race for the chairmanship because he had recommended the guy who refused to go along with Trump’s scheme. But this need to subordinate facts to political loyalty is not working, or not working with enough people, in the Great Lakes states Trump needed to turn the result, and it is actively working against the Republican Party in Georgia. “Driven by Trump’s insistence that Georgia’s elections are indelibly rife with fraud, conspiratorial MAGA figures are calling for a boycott of the two Senate runoff races, slated for Jan. 5, that will determine which party controls the upper chamber. Their reason: The two GOP candidates, Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, are not only insufficiently pro-Trump, they may be complicit in Georgia’s electoral fraud. It doesn’t matter that both candidates are essentially lock-step with Trump, or that there is no evidence of links to electoral malfeasance. On Twitter and its less-restrictive alternative Parler, Trump’s more hardline followers have linked the duo to the president’s favorite — and untrue — voter-fraud theories. Hashtags like #CrookedPerdue and #CrookedKelly are flying around. The two lawmakers’ Parler accounts are brimming with posts accusing them of being secret “liberal DemoRats.”

Because it doesn’t matter how conservative the two Senators are or how conservative the Secretary of State is or how conservative Governor Brian Kemp is, the Trumpnik definition of “conservative” is “I agree with everything Donald Trump says.” If he says the moon is made of green cheese, your only choice is to say it’s American or Swiss. And then of course he’s going to say it’s Monterey Jack, and you’ll be cast into the Abyss. You can’t keep up even if you wanted to. And I think a huge part of why the institutional Party is pushing back on Trump’s need to deny reality is that they’re getting sick of trying to keep up. At the same time, a large section of the Party IS still trying to do so, because they don’t see any other options.

This gets to a broader point that I don’t think the Left gets and that the Right is not willing to acknowledge. For any political movement to really get anywhere and really have popular support in this country, people have to imagine it as synonymous with mainstream opinion. The Right was a lot more successful in this regard under Reagan and even the Bushes than it is under Trump. In 1984, Reagan didn’t need to cheat or make the courts step in to hand him the Electoral College. He won 49 states the old-fashioned way. Even after Reagan-Bush, Bill Clinton felt obliged to say, “the era of Big Government is over.” If the Right is so obsessed with the Left dictating the terms of the “culture war”, and so obsessed with letting politicians pick their voters instead of the other way around, it is a tacit admission that they are losing the majority. The Republican Party of 1980 and 2000 may have been propped up by Religious Right reactionaries, but neither they nor the Beltway politicians would have come begging to Trump. Because they wouldn’t have needed to. Now they do.

Put directly, if Republicans and their ideas were still as popular as they were under Reagan or even under GW Bush, they wouldn’t need Trump. They had more mainstream support when they could still appeal to both the financial class and blue collar folks, but for several years they’ve been playing this game where they had to appeal to the most fire-breathing fanatics to win primaries then tack to moderates and the investor class to win general elections, and by the time the Tea Party turned into MAGA redcaps, they’d managed to catch on. In the meantime they’d managed to alienate most people who weren’t either redcaps or in the financial class, and the only reason this “Big Tent” still holds together is that Donald Trump is the only Republican who can seriously pose as both an elitist and a populist.

When the redcaps and the more sensible people had the same goals, everything was great. For them, at least. But now that the fortunes of elections have diverged for Donald Trump and his party as a whole, the Republican rank and file are now being asked to choose between the two. It seems as though Trump and his family are trying to head off the potential issue, with Trump announcing that he’s going to be campaigning in Georgia for the Senators, but it’s still causing damage. And the fact that he let things get to this point just confirms that he sees the Party as something that serves his interests and not vice versa. Which may be another reason some Republicans are no longer that supportive.

It gets back to that old Vox website question of whether Trump is a fascist. And while at the time, and even after a 2020 update, the expert consensus was that while Trump is an actual danger to democracy, he can’t be called a fascist because fascism is a collectivist movement and Trump is too much of an individualist to create such a movement. That may seem like little distinction given how many individuals are willing to subsume themselves in Trump’s cult of personality. But to the extent that Mussolini and other Fascists did explain their philosophy, it is an explicitly collectivist movement which foremost holds that one must have loyalty to something greater than oneself, namely the State. Trump clearly doesn’t have loyalty to his own party, let alone America. Reagan may have given us the 11^th Commandment, but the First Commandment of the Trumpnik is “I am the LORD thy Trump, thou shalt have no principles above me.”

Howling emotionalism, a perpetual sense of victimhood and a need to pick on the weak may be prerequisites of fascism, but they are not traits exclusive to fascism, and they are certainly not the only defining traits, especially if you want your fascist paradise to actually succeed. The other thing the movement needs, again, is actual popular support. Republicans used to have that, but now that they don’t, the only way the sane people can have a national platform is to attach to Trump’s cult of personality. But that means becoming the Party of Trump, and it’s pretty clear that a party that consists ONLY of Trump and his priorities isn’t going to get anywhere with the rest of the country, especially when so many people have clearly decided they can have the Party without Trump.

All of which means that Trump, or even “Trumpism”, to the extent that such a thing exists, is an unlikely vehicle for the success of American Fascism. For one thing, the fact that events have shown fascists what to do and what not to do in pushing authoritarianism now means that more liberal people also know what methods could be used to undermine democracy, and they will now have the opportunity to be on guard.

But that assumes they will take advantage of that knowledge. Ay, there’s the rub.

For all our talk about how America has a written constitution, as opposed to an “unwritten constitution” of precedents like Britain, the real danger that Trump represents wasn’t his approach to the election, because everyone knew he was gonna stamp his little feet and whine if he didn’t get his way. The danger was how much of the apparently sacred system of government was really just a set of “norms” and when approached by a thug with no norms or sense of the sacred, all our written laws are useless. Because the “norm” is that nobody enforces them. We have never dared to have a political apparatchik defy a congressional subpoena – until now. We have never had a president since Nixon refuse to release his tax returns – until now. We have never had a president refuse to put his business assets in trust – until now. We have never had a president flout the laws against nepotism that were put in place after JFK made Bobby Kennedy Attorney General, because the fact that the laws existed meant no president wanted to take the political risk for flouting them. But now we know there is no political risk.

Even before Trump, the “guardrails of democracy”, such as the Congress and the media, have been far too deferential to the president and far too indulgent of the idea that the president can do whatever he wants because he’s the president. And if my liberal friends would tell me that Obama relied on executive orders precisely because of Republican obstructionism, that just reveals the problem. This government, like the Roman Republic it was based on, has no counter to a squabbling and dysfunctional Senate other than to give the executive officer more and more power. This is a nation of men, not laws.

That is the real problem. That always HAS been the real problem.

The fact that the closest thing we’ve had to a fascist leader in American history is a whiny little child just stands to reason, because the President of the United States, Trump notwithstanding, is by far the most spoiled head of government in the developed world. We let the president do more things than any other head of government would do. And while Donald Trump may not actually like to work, and according to some sources was shocked that he did get elected, once he did become president, that status fused to his identity the same way the redcaps fused to their hero, because if the premise of the modern presidency is “the president can do whatever he wants, because he’s the president”, this status became the most objective rationale for Trump’s existing desire to believe “Donald Trump can do anything he wants, because he’s Donald Trump.”

And in terms of that old cliche, “government should be run like a business”, well, most major companies these days are run as corporations, which means they are collective entities, not the private concern of one individual, and are technically responsible to shareholders. Trump has never run a corporation. All of his businesses are family outfits. So to speak. If one were to apply the analogy of a corporation, if Trump is the CEO, he technically has a Board (Congress) and shareholders (voters), but they don’t hold him accountable. Of course, ultimately “shareholders” did hold him accountable, but only after the Republican Senate directly abnegated its responsibility to do so under impeachment. But that’s what happens when half of the Board members think the CEO is their boss and not an officer subject to their review.

Needless to say, you do not want a government that caters to the mindset of a Donald Trump and is run the way Donald Trump runs his businesses, but that is exactly what we have. It’s just that nobody noticed it was a problem before because up until now the President was not to the government what a malignant tumor is to the body, only without the brains.

Of course, given that Democrats themselves are loath to give up the premise of an unaccountable president when it’s THEIR guy in charge, the idea of limiting the office may seem a bit much. But then, when impeachment happened, a lot of them discovered that even such laws as there are have no provision for enforcement. That needs to change. We need to make sure that Congress has real subpoena power, meaning the legal authority to enforce it. We need to lift this bullshit unwritten privilege that the FBI isn’t allowed to indict a sitting president, as if the most powerful person in the world with access to the most sensitive information should be the only American who’s not under surveillance. We need to STOP SENDING THE MILITARY TO WARS WITHOUT A DECLARATION OF WAR. In other words, we need the rest of the government to do its job and not let the President do everything.

And given that Democrats will be the Senate minority or only technically a majority, I don’t count on them getting such reforms through the Senate in the next few years. Unless of course, Texas finally goes blue along with Georgia and that whole “Southern Strategy” the Republican Party has been based on for the last fifty years just crumbles.

It ought to be a really simple lesson, but apparently it isn’t. So briefly: If you don’t want the President to be a fascist dictator, then don’t let him have that level of power, even when he’s on your team. And if you don’t want an all-powerful government destroying your freedom and rights, then don’t let the government become all-powerful.