It has been roughly fifty years since Nixon was forced from office. Watergate has largely slipped from our collective memory as most of the main players have slipped loose from this mortal coil. At the time, it was considered the greatest political scandal in American history, maybe even a near death experience. Nixon was not denounced as Hitler, but you can see the beginnings of that impulse in this period.
Another thing forgotten is that Nixon remained a bogeyman for the people we call the left long after the scandal. Reagan was compared to Nixon. The Democrat Congress relentlessly investigated him, sure that he was doing Nixon stuff. The Iran – Contra affair was supposed to be his Watergate. Bush I got the Nixon treatment as well with the whole October surprise business.
The election of Bill Clinton seems to have put an end to the Nixon stuff, as it boomeranged back on the Democrats. This also may turn out to be the high-water mark for the forces behind the toppling of Nixon and the aftermath. The managerial state has been in decline ever since. We are now at the final chapter of a period that started with FDR, climaxed in Watergate and may now be coming to an end.
The managerial system that was born under FDR, or at least came into practice, finally took control of the political system during Watergate. It was the “deep state” that took down Nixon and the “deep state” is just a spooky word for the permanent set of institutions that now govern us. The election of Trump in 2024, roughly fifty years after Watergate, may signal the end of managerialism.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- Intro
- Nixon To Trump Fifty Years
- The way To Think About Nixon
- The Managerial Super Cycle
- Nixon To Trump
- Revolt Of The Economic Elite?
- The Decline Of Managerialism
- Managerialism Has Failed
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Full Show On Spreaker
Full Show On Rumble
Full Show On Odysee
couple of typos maybe: At > As and Not > Now
He’s covered that already here: https://www.subscribestar.com/posts/1529327
One aspect of managerialism that gets overlooked is Madison Avenue’s role. Yes, managerialism refers to the layer of management between workers and owners, and also to trying to rationalize the exertions of everything from ladies at switchboards to men on assembly lines. But there is also the Marshall McLuhan aspect of things, the management of the human mind through media. It’s still with us today in “nudging,” the “push polls,” and social proof of everything from celebrity endorsements of candidates to “Fifty Intelligence Agents Say the Hunter Biden Laptop is Russian Disinformation.” Because the agenda of the elites is so… Read more »
The democrap playbook is replete with plays that only work once. They borked Robert Bork but that play / ploy never worked again. They impeached Trump twice, neither got the desired (by the left) result. The entire progressive project is crashed now, all that will remain are embarrassing rear guard skirmishes. The core of the American electorate has decided sanity works, even if sold in a not quite sane wrapper. Watch for truly bizarre leftist escapades coming to a town near you.
If you look at what the left has been up to since 2017 politically, it’s actually pretty stunning. The Russia Hoax. The #resistance. The COVID lockdown hoax. The BLM riots. The color revolution. Stealing a Presidential election. The internet censorship regime. The lawfare they rolled out against Trump and his supporters. The coup against their own sitting President. This is without going into their disastrous policy failures and incompetence. Yet what did all of that end up with? Trump winning an election at a far greater margin than he did in 2016. The sort of people who delivered Indiana to… Read more »
For a great breakdown of the Nixon coup, go read/listen to Geoff Shepard. He was a young law intern fresh out of law school (he also wasn’t Ivy League and was a Midwest guy if I remember correctly) and was on the policy side in the Nixon administration. Tucker had him on and gave a great summary of events in that. He also wrote books and has a new documentary out that summarizes his work. The amount of shenanigans the democrats pulled was astonishing. He also drew the strong parallels between Trump and what Nixon went through. He’s a great… Read more »
Only if he shreds the bureaucracy and reorganizes it in a way that prevents it from reforming. Musk’s BOGE is promising.
Trump is wrong to send DC agencies to other states. In cancer we call that metastasizing. Colorado doesn’t need any more Federal government workers.
This warms my heart, though:
https://redstate.com/rusty-weiss/2024/11/07/fbi-employees-terrified-of-being-fired-when-trump-arrives-hes-going-to-smash-the-place-to-pieces-n2181711
‘It was the “deep state” that took down Nixon and the “deep state” is just a spooky word for the permanent set of institutions that now govern us. The election of Trump in 2024, roughly fifty years after Watergate, may signal the end of managerialism.’ The deep state is the skeletal structure of the empire in the sense that without it the empire cannot function internationally or domestically. Trump can exercise power only through the various mechanisms of the deep state — the armed forces, the intelligence agencies, mass media, Wall Street finance. This is probably the contradiction at the… Read more »
My Jewish seventh grade social studies teacher literally told me, in 1977, that Nixon was worse than Hitler. He popped my “worse than Hitler” cherry, so to speak! It’s been a long road.