The Ghost Of The People’s Party

Posted on March 4, 2025 by thezman

Note #3: Since we are getting signs of spring, it means it will not be long before it is hot, which means t-shirt weather. Just in time for t-shirt season, we have a new shirt for The Occidental Club, which you can buy here.

Most of the ideas that shaped 20th century America boiled up during the 19th century in the aftermath of the Civil War. Some arrived from the Old World before and during the war, things like nationalism and socialism, but most were homegrown ideas that arose out of American Protestantism and the struggle with secularization. Interestingly, the Progressive ideology that emerged was sparked by the populist forces at the time and is now threatened by the same populist forces.

The 19th century was a wild time in America. Prior to the Civil War, it became increasingly clear to the industrializing North that the Constitutional framework was not working for them. The Hartford Conventions, largely erased from the history books now, were a series of conferences in the North to debate leaving the Union. This process was short-circuited by the War of 1812, but the sentiment merely found a new home in abolitionism and finally flowered in the Civil War.

The post-Civil War period was no less tumultuous. Reconstruction was a failure, but a foreshadowing of what would be a feature of the progressive ideology. That is the belief that societies can be reordered in such a way that the people in those societies change how they think about themselves, their neighbors, and the state. The abolitionist fanatics did not abandon these beliefs after the failure of reconstruction. They continued to refine this belief as progressivism flowered in the 20th century.

Of course, progressivism itself is a 19th century phenomenon. It emerged out of American Protestantism as a belief that human society can only advance through relentless social reform. The same people who were sure they could reinvent society to accommodate the freed slaves as equals were now sure they could use the lessons from industrialization to reorder America and the world. Religious social reform became a secular political movement.

The engine that made progressivism possible was populism, which was not unique to America or even unique to the 19th century, but if you look at the populist movements of the 19th century, you see many of the features of what would later be the progressive movement and then progressivism. The populists were not angry mobs assembled outside of the homes of the rich, demanding redress of their grievances. They had an agenda that was mostly crafted by elites in waiting.

For example, the Ocala Demands were a platform of economic and political reforms that became the basis of the People’s Party. It was “produced” by the various farmer’s alliances that had sprung up as mutual aid societies following the Civil War. These groups were brought together in the Marion Opera House in Ocala, Florida, where they approved this list of demands. This was formally called the Ocala Demands and was adopted by the People’s Party.

When you read the demands, the first thing that is clear is that they were not written by a collection of dirt farmers in the South. It was not the work of the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union either. That was a real group that participated in the Ocala convention, along with the Southern Farmers’ Alliance. These were not people debating the abolishment of the futures markets, the regulation of the money supply or the imposition of a graduated income tax.

The platform was the work of intellectuals and reformers who saw an opportunity to ride the wave of populism to power and influence. They saw a grassroots movement of disaffected farmers as a vehicle for building a coalition in support of their reform ideas, so they attached themselves to it. It is not an accident that the populist agenda looked a lot like the progressive agenda that would emerge in the 20th century. Progressivism would not have been possible without populism.

It is why it is fair to wonder if what we are seeing and have been seeing for the last few decades is the death of the last remaining ideology, progressivism. Populism seems to be an end of cycle phenomenon. It is, after all, a disorganized revolt against the current order, which has reached its maturity and is entering decline. What follows a populist uprising is either a replacement of the old order, a reform that replaces the old elite or a reform effort by the elites themselves.

The assault on the Blob by the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk, is clearly an assault on the old managerial order. Elon Musk is the face of the new technological elite, so it is fitting that he is the point man for this task. Managerialism is the traveling partner of ideology. It was a feature of both fascism and communism. Its looming demise at the hands of the Trump administration, which was powered by a populist uprising against it, fits the historical pattern.

Progressivism has had a long run, but for most of the 20th century it served as a bulwark against fascism and then communism. Its social reforms stopped making any sense by the latter half of the 20th century and either disappeared from the agenda entirely or morphed into bizarre sexual fetishes. Its main reason to exist was to fight communism, but once communism was gone, it was left without a devil, so it has gone insane over the last decades in search of Old Scratch.

The populism that brought Trump to the White House in 2016, sustained him in his wilderness years and then returned him the White House was driven by the excesses and insanity of progressives. Populism is usually framed as the people versus elites, but in this case, it was normal people versus crazy people. The best way to describe the first weeks of the Trump administration is the return of normalcy, unless you are a member of the hive we call the left.

In the fullness of time, what this period may be known for is the death of the last ideology, knocked off by the same forces that spawned it. American populism has always been a check on the excesses of the elite, not as a physical or even political force, but as a cultural force. Ideology is always about changing culture, so it is ironic that the last ideology will be vanquished by a cultural phenomenon. The ghost of the People’s Party has finally called progressivism home.

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The Zelensky Problem

Posted on March 3, 2025 by thezman

Note #1: Last Wednesday was the second edition of a show I am doing with Paul Ramsey every Wednesday at 8:00 which you can watch live on Rumble and YouTube and, of course, watch at your leisure after the fact.

Note #2: Behind the green door, there is a post about the events of last Friday, a post about the importance of knowing who is in charge, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here. I was also on with the boys from the Old Glory Club where we discussed the events of the day. The replay is here.

Ronald Reagan was famous for saying that “the closest thing to immortality is a government program.” He was not the first person to say it. There are examples of American politicians saying a version of this going back to the 1930’s. There are probably versions of this concept going back to the Kingdom of Ur, because it is the nature of government to create constituencies in favor of its actions and those constituencies always lobby for more of what created them.

You see this with Project Ukraine, which was largely created by a small number of zealots called the neocons in the Obama administration. They overthrew the government of Ukraine, installed an anti-Russian government and just like that there was money and opportunity in Ukraine. By the time Trump came along in 2016, the Ukraine project had a sizable constituency in the Western ruling class, which is why Trump was impeached. He threatened the project.

Since the war broke out in 2022, the power of the Project Ukraine constituency has grown much stronger for monetary and political reasons. Important interests in Western countries are making money from the war, so they support politicians who seek to keep the war going. The politicians are happy to oblige, as the war is a nice distraction from the boring tasks the voters expect from government, tasks that the political class has thoroughly and completely ignored.

There is also the fact that the European political class operates like a preschool, where they are the children, and the United States is the teacher. Ending Project Ukraine is like forcing them into regular school or maybe sending them home to parents who do not fawn over them like their teachers. The reality of Europe is bleak, largely due to the perfidy of the Europeans political class. They prefer not to face that and instead fixate on this glorious adventure in which they are the heroes.

Of course, like all government programs, there is the program itself, which always adheres to the iron law of bureaucracy. In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people. There will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization and those dedicated to the organization itself. The second group will gain and keep control of the organization. We see this with how the Blob is fighting DOGE like Grendel facing off against Beowulf.

This is what we see with Zelensky. He is the anthropomorphized government program, consumed with defending its prerogatives. It is why he was so nasty in his trip to the Trump White House. He could not believe that these people would have the audacity to make demands upon him. He is the indispensable man, on whose shoulders rests the fate of the free world and through him is expressed the hopes and dreams of the managerial class that created him.

This is the problem the Trump administration faces as they seek to wind down what they consider to be a pointless and costly enterprise. They wisely drove a stake through the heart of that part of the Blob that has controlled American foreign policy, which is why official Washington is struggling to defend Project Ukraine. Legacy media is simultaneously calling Trump Chamberlain and Hitler – he is somehow appeasing himself – but otherwise they have no answers.

The Europeans are another matter. They see themselves like the tax eaters in Washington getting memos from Elon Musk. For them, Project Ukraine is their reason to exist now, so Trump’s plans to end it are an existential threat. It is why they cooked up the scheme to trick Trump into going along with their peacekeeper idea last week and why they are now busy cooking up a new scheme. Ukraine is their teddy bear, and they cannot think of being without it.

Zelensky is the key here, as his very life probably depends on this war never ending, at least not until he has an exit strategy. He cannot make a deal with the Russians because the ultra-nationalist will not tolerate it. The only deal he could make is one that requires Russia to surrender, which is not a possibility. His other choice is fleeing the country, but he would no doubt be tracked down by enemies. That leaves him with no other choice but to keep the war going.

One of the truths of a government program is that when it is finally killed off, the world never ends and the people dependent upon it find something else. After the initial sobbing and moaning, the dogs bark and the caravan moves on. That will be the case with Project Ukraine. What must happen first is Zelensky must exit the stage, and either be replaced by chaos or by someone willing to do a deal to end the war. At that point, the Europeans will adjust to the new reality.

This is where things stand now. At some level the Europeans seem to know it, which is why they put on a show over the weekend featuring their favorite comedian. It was a funeral where they could all hug and reminisce, except the corpse was still walking and talking, demanding more money and weapons. The reason Zelensky keeps talking about resigning is he knows that for this program to finally end, he must exit the stage, so he is hoping to create conditions which drag that out a bit longer.

While it may feel like government programs are immortal, immune to all efforts to slay them, nothing lasts forever. That is what we are now seeing. Along with the death of the 20th century mindset in American foreign policy is the death of its last great program, Project Ukraine and its anthropomorphized representation of it. Once Zelensky is gone, the war ends, and the process of developing new, normalized relations in Europe begins as we exit the post-Cold War world.

The Long Way Home

Posted on February 27, 2025 by thezman

One of the many failings of conservatism was the insistence that with just the right argument using just the right data points, the people they called the left would throw down their weapons and embrace them as brothers. At the core of what later became known as civic nationalism was the assertion that all political actors are looking for objective truth and therefore would respond to it. The reason for political disputes was the failure to flesh out the facts.

Politic is about morality, not facts. It is also about power, specifically the power to impose your moral vision on the rest. Facts have little to do with politics and are often seen by ideologues as a threat. The diversity cult looks at the FBI crime stats as a direct threat to their project, so they worked to suppress them. The flat earth people insist that intelligence testing is a conspiracy of some sort. They label it “race-science” because adding the words “race” to anything anathematizes it.

Another thing that the conservative view of politics got wrong is that it left people with only two choices when evaluating left-wing rhetoric. Either the people chanting about white power structures were lying or they were deeply confused. In both cases, it was assumed that they had to know the truth and that the truth would either set them straight or force them to stop lying. Untold man hours were wasted trying to explain the truth to crazy relatives because of this.

Even now, with all that is happening, it is hard for people to accept that the crazies are in fact crazy enough to believe the nutty things they are saying. This post in the New York Times feels like parody, but it is written to soothe the nerves of the believers while they huddle together plotting how to respond. The writer genuinely believes Washington is being taken over by a Stalin-like figure and he and his coreligionists are the beginnings of a great resistance to it.

This is the precursor to the forming of a narrative. The cult we call the left operates like all cults in that it has a story to explain itself and its destination. Within the story are stories to address the bumps along the way as well as the victories. Soon, others will take this framework in which the good guys are being oppressed by the bad guys and create a narrative that fills in the details, especially the part where they finally vanquish the monster and everyone cheers.

It is hard for normal people to accept that the writer is as crazy as it seems. After all, he had to have sat in meetings at the New York Times where people boasted of ruining critics of the Biden regime. He must be aware of the doxing campaigns and the hooded terrorist gangs sent to harass dissidents. It is inconceivable to a normal person that this guy does not see the irony in what he is writing. The truth is he is that crazy and the audience is right there with him.

Part of how cults respond to disconfirmation and setbacks is they create new pleasing narratives for why things have not gone as predicted. A month into the Trump presidency and the crazies have settled on an economic collapse as the most probable end to the Trump tyranny. According to the Times, the economy is already reeling from policies that have yet to be implemented. The Telegraph reports that the really smart people foresee disaster for the Trump economy.

This gets to another thing that people struggle to accept. These people lie. They will make up whatever whoppers they think they need for their narrative. Extreme partisanship rewards sociopathy, so over time the movement will be overrun by people who see no moral distinction between the truth and a lie. All that matters is whether it serves the cause, by which they mean does it strengthen their side or does it cause harm to their opponents?

Despite all that has been revealed so far, as well as the massive media gaslighting campaign last year, people still think there is truth in the media. There is little doubt that the Harris campaign turned many people from civic nationalist into something else, but for many, the whole thing was forgotten after the election. It is called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, which is when you see something in the media that is an obvious lie but then forget that story and trust the next story in the same media site.

What all this tells us is that even though normal defeated crazy in November and the Trump admin has a plan to defeat the Blob in order to restore sobriety back to politics, the road back to normal will be long and full of trouble. Scan the fever swamps and it is clear that events have had no impact on the crazies. If anything, they have become crazier now that they have shuffled off mainstream platforms into places like Bluesky and Reddit where they are free to fly their freak flags.

Similarly, the media has learned nothing from the last decade. They put everything they had into dragging Harris over the finish line but failed because not enough people trust them anymore. Despite the massive rejection that was the November election, they are now leaning into the same tactics that brought them to this point. The employees of Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post still think they get to tell the owner of the company to buzz off and leave the running of it to them.

While it does appear that we have reached the end of a cycle of madness, perhaps several historical cycles that culminated in the last decade, it is going to be a long road back to normal. The crazies will not simply go away. They must be defeated, caged, and only released when the conditions that created them are eradicated. The normals will have to be trained in the new way of engaging in politics. Much like Russia after communism, America is on the road to recovery, but it is a long road.

The Escapists

Posted on February 26, 2025 by thezman

An iron law of the universe is the opposite law of liberalism, which states that whatever the left is saying, assume the opposite and you will get close to the truth. It is not a perfect rule in that the opposite is obvious or correct. It is just a good place to start when trying to figure out what they are doing. Projection plays a central role in the interior life of the progressive hive mind, so they inevitably accuse the enemies of the hive of doing what the hive is doing or has done.

An old example comes from the heady days of the Tea Party, which was a genuine populist and grassroots response to the cultural revolution. Normal, middle-class people started to organize against the Obama administration, but also the sissies of conservatism who were hiding under their beds at the time. Suddenly, people were turning up to protest and fight back against the gathering madness. It was a foreshadowing of what would come in 2016.

The response by the left was to accuse these people of being part of a conspiracy organized by the enemies of history. Nancy Pelosi famously said it was not a grassroots movement, but an AstroTurf movement. For those who do not know, AstroTurf is a genericized brand name or proprietary eponym for fake grass. Of course, what was true at the time and true to this day is the “grassroots” support of the left was bought and paid for by tax dollars laundered through the Blob.

It was one of those moments that revealed something about the sorts of people who end up in left-wing social movements. They always assume that the enemies of the hive operate as they do and will act like they would if given the chance. It is why they were sure Trump would trample your civil rights after he won in 2016. They knew that if they were in his position, that is what they would do. After the color revolution that toppled Trump and installed Biden, it is exactly what they did.

Now that Trump is back, we see the opposite rule kicking in as part of their coping strategy and effort to organize a response. The crazies are now free speech warriors, claiming Trump is going to start censoring people online. The very same people who chanted “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach” as anyone with a sober thought in their head was evicted from Twitter are now carrying on as if they are Ann Frank, hiding in the attic from the MAGA police.

This story about how a handful of zombies turned up to yell at a Congressman is framed as a populist rebellion. These are people made angry by their television, so they show up on command at this event to be angry. A defining feature of these old, white progressives is they have no idea why they are angry. The person on their television is angry, so they are angry. They are the sort that started saying “keev” the weekend the war in Ukraine started, as if they always said it that way.

Of course, nothing about this is on the level. That is the great lesson of the populist rebellion that started with the Tea Party. Our politics have been entirely fake for decades, manufactured and controlled using government money. These efforts to repeat what worked in the past affirm it. Our politics for the last several decades have been pretty close to the opposite of what was beamed to us. “Our democracy” was absolute party control.

All ideologies rely on lies to fill the gap between their vision of the moral society and the reality of the human condition. This habit explains the violence that comes when the ideologues gain control. The lies are replaced by a program to fill the gap between ideology and reality. That gap is always filled with corpses, but it is never completely filled, so the lies return as the cost-effective option. In time, they become so comfortable with the lies that lying is the solution to everything.

We are seeing this in the “resistance” being rolled out in the media. It is not connected with reality but dreamed up by the same people who claimed they were defending democracy when they were harassing people for Facebook posts. The same narrative makers who swore all their failed schemes were working right up until it was obvious that they were not working are now busy imagining a scenario in which they are carried back to power on the shoulders of the people.

Things like the opposite rule are part of the essential appeal of ideology, which is an escape from reality. This is what ideology inherits from Christianity. The losers drawn to the new religion spreading around the Roman Empire were attracted to the promise of escape from this life. If they followed this new religion, they would one day stand shoulder to shoulder with the great men of this age in the sight of God. Ideology says the same thing but stops at the bit about God.

Libertarians imagine that one day they will be yeoman farmers, totally self-sufficient and liberated like the rich guys they admire. The antifascist imagines herself as a stunning and brave member of the committee, as respected as the men who never pay much attention to her. The conservative believes he will one day be rich like Donald Trump, but classy like Bill Buckley. The fascist imagines himself in a snappy uniform in charge of men, instead of a loser playing video games all day.

This is what brings us back to the opposite rule of liberalism. The last ideology, like all ideology, requires the suspension of disbelief. Accusing the bad guys of doing what you have done or are currently doing is a way to escape the reality of politics. It is not a fight for power, but a great crusade between white hats and black hats. To think otherwise is to be back in the reality from which you are trying to escape. The “resistance” to Trump are not losers, but the heroes of a story they are now writing.

The End Of Ideology

Posted on February 25, 2025 by thezman

One of the great insights from Eric Hoffer was that ideologies do not require a positive agenda, but they must always have something they oppose. That is the point of his famous line, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This makes perfect sense when you realize that being in favor of something means being opposed to its opposite. Often, the first part of the equation rises from the last part of it.

This may explain why we have been ravaged by movements that are focused solely on a devil, often one disconnected from reality. The last several decades in the West have been about creating a new version of Old Scratch, then finding people to either blame for the existence of Old Scratch or accuse of being his allies. The public square has been filled with people who describe their thing with the prefix “anti”, without bothering to explain the point of their efforts.

The anti-fascists are the best example. They have created a fantasy world for themselves where they are the last line of defense against an enemy that exists only in their imaginations. Most are suffering from some form of mental illness, and many are simply losers with nowhere to go. Others could be living useful lives, but they are drawn to this bizarre cause because they need a purpose. They need to believe in something, but they will settle for opposing something.

The same is true for the antiracists. There has been no meaningful opposition to black inclusion for generations. In fact, much of the American culture has been altered to accommodate even the worst elements of black culture, in an effort to make blacks feel a part of American society. Despite that, a billion-dollar industry sprang up committed to stamping out something that does not exist. The cause of civil rights, having reached its goal, was left with the Devil it could not relinquish.

What we may have experienced over the last thirty or so years is the last gasp of the age of ideology. All these ways to hunt down Old Scratch have their roots in American Progressivism, which was the last ideology standing after the Cold War. It turns out that the end of history was a warning to those who had organized their lives around the egalitarian and universalist beliefs that evolved in the United States. As a result, we have experienced a frenzy of effort to provide a reason for it to exist.

It is easy to forget that ideology is an anomaly in human history. Human societies were initially organized around practical concerns like safety. Religion and culture were useful adhesives to bind the people together, but the main purpose of human organization was always rooted in the practical. There was always a divide between the public and private, because the former was about maintaining society as a whole while the latter was about living your life as an individual.

Ideology is the attempt to fuse the public and private so that private actions are controlled to serve the public good, which itself is aimed at abstract moral claims, rather than the practical maintenance of society. Christianity focused on the individual and made the necessary accommodations with the necessities of secular rule. Folk religions went the other way, providing the broad framework of the people, but leaving the individual to sort out his private gods.

In a way, it is fitting that Progressivism is the last ideology. It was always at its best in opposition to something. It is fitting for a warrior people. Whether it was individual vices like alcohol, drugs and sex, or social concerns like inequality, racism and poverty, Progressivism had a way to wage war on them. In the great ideological battles of the last century, Progressivism was useful in rallying the war-minded American to the banner opposing fascism and communism.

With no more ideologies to oppose, Progressivism was left to find new devils around which to rally the faithful. The trouble was these new versions of Old Scratch were either imaginary or so decrepit they could not put up much of a fight. Having exhausted itself fighting these windmills, everyone is ready to move on to more practical concerns, like the economy, leaving the dead-enders and lunatics to pleasure each other in the fever swamps of the internet.

This may be why the early efforts at dismantling the Blob and the administrative state have been met with a tepid response. That apparatus was the tool to organize the people around a great cause. In a post ideological age, where there is no need or desire to rally a diverse and complicated society around simplistic causes, the managerial state is an expensive white elephant. It may be that managerialism can only work within the ideological state.

The end of ideology may also revive religion. Those blue-haired spinsters screaming themselves purple on the street corner can go back to terrorizing schoolboys about their penmanship and playing with their food. Christianity was very good at finding a use for these maladapted mutants. These people will need a place to go that will provide them with the purpose they seek. Perhaps we get a revival of the small-bore proselytizing in favor of tradition and stability that used to be the norm.

That aside, what we may be experiencing is the end of the long pursuit of a universal morality promised by the dawn of reason. The result of the long journey is the understanding that there is no universal morality and no universal truth, other than the truth of the human condition. The purpose of human organization is not to transcend the human condition, but to improve our material existence, so that we can enjoy the time each of us is allotted to the fullest we desire.

Old Think New Think

Posted on February 20, 2025 by thezman

One of the new features of life since Trump came back to town is that things move quickly and if you are not careful, they will move without you. Ten thousand USAID employees learned this in week one. One day they were organizing the resistance and then the next day they were setting up a LinkedIn account. The first month of the Trump presidency has been a whirlwind of change. This is creating two classes of people, one who keep pace and one who are left behind.

One of those being left behind is Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He now finds himself on the wrong side of the Trump’s friend-enemy distinction. He made the mistake of thinking the new boss was the old boss and his tricks would keep working. When those tricks did not work, he made the very big mistake of saying the new boss was misinformed. Now the new boss is making it clear that Zelensky will not be part of the future. Just like that, Zelensky is being reassigned to the dustbin of history.

The reason that Zelensky has so quickly gone from being the indispensable man to the guest who refuses to leave is that long before he was told about any of this, decisions were made about his future. For months prior to the election Trump would say he had a plan to end the war in Ukraine, but he refused to elaborate on the grounds that it was not prudent to talk about it publicly. The only clue he provided was that the war would never have happened if he had been president.

People dismissed this as hubris, but it was an important clue. If Trump had been president, he would have demanded to talk with the Russians and he would never have elevated Zelensky to the status of indispensable man. Project Ukraine was only possible by first anathematizing Russia and then turning Zelensky into a heroic figure at the point of the spear resisting the evil Russians. Remove that friend-enemy set up and the war never gets started.

Once you look at the war the way Trump has been looking at the war since it started, his approach makes perfect sense. He is doing now what he would have done if he were in the White House for a second term. He opened a dialogue with the Russians, and he minimized Zelensky. The reason for that is this war is not about Ukraine or some abstract concepts from the past century. It is about how conflicts between the great powers will be settled in the future.

Here is where you see the two class of people. Zelensky is operating from the old model where moralizing about world affairs was the rule. It was about those old 20th century ideas of good guys and bad guys. Trump is operating from the new model where everything is about business. Project Ukraine is bad business, so it must end and there is nothing more to say about it. Zelensky is the project manager who thinks the project is about something other than business.

Zelensky is not alone in this. His friends in Europe are also trapped in the past, thinking that they are skillfully playing the old game, when in reality they are soon to join Zelensky in the room of formerly relevant figures. The British figurehead Keir Starmer is coming to Washington next week thinking he is going to explain things to President Trump with regards to Zelensky. In reality he is going to be sat down by Trump subordinates and told he has been demoted.

Trump signaled as much when a reporter asked him about Starmer announcing his trip to Washington last week. Trump casually said that Starmer wanted to visit, but he was unsure of when he was coming. He treated it like the pool guy called and said he had to do something about the algae. That should have been a signal to the Brits that Starmer will not be welcomed as an equal, but like everyone else in Europe, they are struggling to come to terms with the new world order.

The same thing is happening locally. Scan many conservative sites or their accounts on Twitter and they are carrying on like it is 1985. Granted, this has been their act since 1985, but it is clearly not 1985 now. They are still doing the “If we use our power then the we are no better than the Democrats” act. The dumbest ones are still singing from the neocon hymn book. Dissidents have often joked that conservativism is a museum to the Reagan years, but now it is painfully true.

In fairness, the dancing partner of the conservatives are struggling as well. This tweet from a progressive chattering skull is emblematic. He is working from the old playbook that says the “left” calls out the “right” about not following the rules and the “right” then uses that to fink on their voters. The people operating in the new way of things just shrug at this stuff. The whole point of the present moment is to flip over the tables in the temple of politics and usher in a new age.

This is not just a struggle for the establishment. Old think is a problem for people who claimed to be dissidents. The people called “right-wing influencers” are struggling to maintain an audience because their act is suddenly irrelevant. Many are now becoming Trump critics because it is the only way to get attention. It turns out that they were never for anything, just against things. Remove those things they oppose, and they are left with a gaping hole in their act.

Where all this leaves us is we have two classes of people now. There are those who are embracing the new way of doing things, even if how it all works is not all that clear, and then there are those who wish to remain in the past century. Perhaps this will be the new political spectrum. The left will be the dead-enders who continue to look backward, and the right will be those facing the future. Regardless of the labels, the future will belong to those who embrace it, leaving the past in the past.

The New Deal Bookend

Posted on February 19, 2025 by thezman

The assault on the Blob has taken up most of the attention in Washington, along with the reproachment with Russia, but the biggest item on the Trump agenda is the restructuring of the American economy. If you listen to what Trump says when asked about what has been happening thus far, it often circles back to the economy and how he imagines it to be after his changes. The thing is no one in the media follows up on it so Trump is never asked about that end goal.

There were some hints in the Russia coverage. One of the participants from the Russian side was the head of their sovereign wealth fund. This is something Trump has said he wants to create for the American government. A sovereign investment fund is a state-owned investment fund that does the same things a private investment fund, except it also has an eye on policy. A sovereign wealth fund acts as an additional level in both foreign and domestic policy.

This is not a thing you typically see in the West, as the Western economic model is built on the assumption that the government should not meddle in markets. This is a big lie, of course, as Western governments regulate everything. The thing is the regulations are dictated by the market makers through the miracle of regulatory capture, so the political class has limited control of the regulations. A sovereign wealth fund would put the political class on an even footing with the market makers.

That brings us back to the administrative state and the Blob that has consumed it over the last thirty years. In theory it regulates the economy in the interests of the people, but in reality, it has been a conduit so that the parasites within the blob can suck the blood, as in money, from the system. That money is used to maintain control of the host and launch projects abroad. Trillions are sent into the system, but what comes out does not make any sense to anyone, even the people inside it.

Take the Department of Education, for example. It was organized under Jimmy Carter for the purpose of housing all educational programs under one agency. Today it has a quarter trillion-dollar budget and employs 3900 people. Now, that does not mean those employees have a sixty-million-dollar salary. Most of the money gets sent to the states via grants and subsidies. Put another way, a tiny number of people in Washington dictate education policy to the country through this agency.

Trump has ordered its dismantling, but it is not about the money. Pell Grants, for example, are not going away yet. They would be shifted to another agency and eventually either automated or killed off by Congress. The reality is things like Pell Grants are a subsidy to colleges and universities, not students. All government subsidies end up in the pockets of the industry getting the subsidy. If you create grants for buying BMW’s, then BMW raises its prices by the amount of the grant.

From the Trump perspective, the federal government meddles in the economy far too much, but even worse, it meddles in the wrong things, while at the same time it ignores the big things that it should be managing. The federal government spends hundreds of billions subsidizing colleges and universities but ignores the bizarre trade relations we have with Canada and Mexico. In other words, Trump-o-nomics is not rebranded conservatism or libertarianism. It is a radical reordering of priorities.

One way to think of what Trump has in mind is the corporate model, but the start-up variety rather than the late stage decline model. American Inc. is an aging company like IBM that is bogged down in old rules and old thinking. It survives, not on making new and better products, but on the proceeds of past success. If you were to revitalize IBM, you would strip out the good stuff into a new company and hand it to smart people and leave the old stuff to the investors.

That is the goal of the Trump program. The new model for American Inc. is to be like a startup where the people running it, the Executive branch, set the general goals and the broad operational outlines, but the people inside of it, the states, business, and the people, are left to figure out the rest. Things like tariffs, global trade deals and the sovereign wealth fund are tools for setting the broad agenda and correcting imbalances that arise inside the economy.

Anyone familiar with startups or growth companies knows that the enemy of growth and innovation is management. In the 1990’s, for example, ambitious people would see the hiring of human resources people as a sign to move onto the next startup, because they understood that human resources were the death of innovation. The assault on the Blob, therefore, is like the termination of the human resources, diversity, and training departments of a struggling corporation.

There is much more to this, but the thing to take away is that what is happening is just the small setup parts for a larger reshaping of the economic order. Those meetings with the Russians are more about economics than war. In fact, you already hear the change in language regarding Ukraine away from ideology and to economics. For Trump and America Inc., Ukraine is a bad business deal. The goal now is to bring it to a quick close and claw back some of the money.

In this regard, the Trump era may one day be seen as the bookend to the New Deal era that gave rise to the managerial state. It has been lost to the need to recast the New Deal to fit modern narratives, but the FDR people were inspired by what was happening in Europe at the time. This is what gave Burnham the inspiration to write the book, The Managerial Revolution. The irony of the man they swear is Hitler bringing to an end a system partially inspired by Hitler should not go unnoticed.

The Post Of Judgement

Posted on February 18, 2025 by thezman

For a long time now, there have been people on this side of the great divide arguing that the real source of power in American society is the media. The media has power because they control the moral framework and the discourse within it. If the media declares a set of facts unacceptable, then no one talks about them, unless they have a desire to be hurled into the void. The media controls what is allowed to be said, so they control how things are done and by whom.

On the surface, this was true, and it was always true to some degree. A popular political quip from the analog days was that “You should never pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel.” If the New York Times decided to declare a fatwah on you, there was a very good chance you were going to lose. This was why so-called conservatives and Republicans would crawl on their bellies to talk with the press, even though the media treated them as the official punching bag.

The model for this was Watergate. If not for media pressure, the political class would not have done anything about Nixon. The reason for that is they had no reason to hate Nixon, even if they disagreed with him. It was the media that made Nixon into a villain and then demanded the political class do something. Congress did not force Nixon out of office because they hated him or they believed he violated the rules of politics, but because they feared the media.

Ever since, the name of the game in politics has been to make sure you manage the media, which meant hiring an army of media consultants. Often, these people came out of the media. Of course, the media was an extension of the managerial class, so this new relationship created good jobs at good wages for people long on credentials and short on practical talent. This peaked under Obama when hundreds of media members got jobs in his administration.

This is why politics shifted from backrooms and onto the pages of the media, where narratives, narrative management and narrative collapse became the defining features of the public debate. The point of politics was to create a story, in which the hero defeated the villain and everyone clapped. This was to herd the managerial class into the hero side and paint the enemies of the managerial class as the villain. Politics was all about good guys and bad guys, as determined by the media.

In the end, American politics was like a Greek drama. The players on the stage were cast in their roles not by their actions, but by the commentary provided by the chorus, which was the media. It reached the point where in the Obama years, people truly thought “healthcare” was a thing that existed in unlimited quantities, but needed to be freed from the grasp of the monster called the insurance companies. Healthcare reform was a bizarre pantomime for the entertainment of Washington.

In the digital age, it went beyond the parlor games of the political class so that media power became the tip of the spear in the cultural revolution. Every activist declared herself a journalist and dedicated her life to finding heretics. Her job was to “report on the heretic” but her hope was that major media would pick up her “reporting” and have the heretic hurled into the void. Like every political terror in the ideological age, what started with the politicians was visited on the people.

This is when ideological and theological fevers break. People can suspend their disbelief and accept even the most bizarre moral framing, when it is limited to the action on the stage. They know it is just entertainment. Even when in the form of a lecture or sermon, they believe they can take from it what they will. When the directors of the moral drama begin dragging the people onto the stage, or off to the gulag, then the people can no longer suspend their disbelief.

The natural questions of all moral disputes then begin to appear. Those questions are “Who says?” and “So what?”. These questions crept up on the managerial class over the last ten years and they were never able or willing to answer them. This became obvious in the runup to the election. The media kept screaming, “Trump is evil!” and the people kept wondering, “Who says?” When they yelled about his alleged crimes and indictments, the response was, “So what?”

A great man once said that you will know that the revolution is upon us when a conservative waddles onto the stage muttering about the various “isms” and “who we are” and the audience remains silent. Then someone giggles, then another laughs and suddenly a wave of laughter sweeps the room. The great preference cascade is unleashed as everyone all at once seems to realize that everyone else thinks what they think about these ridiculous fools.

It is what we are now witnessing. Team Trump has started smashing up the managerial system in ways thought impossible. The media rushed to their pulpits to give their sermons, but the audience just laughed. The Wall Street Journal did the point and shriek at one of the DOGE kids and the audience not only laughed but turned “Big Balls” into a hero of the cause. The Vice President now goes on Twitter and mocks reporters who do the point and shriek.

There was a scene in the movie Braveheart in which William Wallace kills a group the king’s soldiers in an effort to free his wife. The last of them is the magistrate, who had killed Wallace’s wife. Wallace initially lowers his eye when he confronts him, then looks him straight in the eye and slashes the man’s throat. It is a great scene because it reflects the reality of power. The man had power over Wallace, as long as had moral authority, but he had squandered it.

That is what is happening in the United States. The media and the managerial class they represented held the moral high ground and people accepted it. This was the real power of the media. Then they squandered their moral capital on the cultural terror of the last decade. Their excesses not only damaged their credibility but also discredited their moral claims. They are now on the same level as the rest of us and we are cheering as the DOGE kids put them against the post.

The New Sea People

Posted on February 17, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the clash between the formal and informal rules in Washington, a post on the new world order, a video from the new studio and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

This week Marco Rubio will meet with Russian officials to kick-off what Western media is calling Ukraine peace talks, but should properly be called normalization talks, as in the normalization of relations between Russia and America. The topic of Ukraine will be a part of the process, but not the focus of it. This is something that both sides have said regarding the hour-long talk between Trump and Putin. It was about much more than the war in Ukraine and how to end it.

This is what gets missed in Western media coverage. They are still operating by the old system where everything revolved around Ukraine. It was the lens through which all diplomatic relations were conducted. The new way of doing things is for the major powers to have a framework within which they can work out issues of common interest and settle issues where they are in dispute. For that to happen they must rebuild diplomatic relations between the major countries.

This is why Europe is not included. The EU is not a real place. It is a vague concept that has no sovereign authority. Ursula von der Leyen imagines herself as the empress of Europe, a managerial version of Napoleon, but in reality, she is a bureaucrat who failed up into a position that probably should not exist. As for the major powers of Europe, they will eventually play a role in the new security architecture, but they need to join everyone else in the 21st century before that can happen.

There is another reason the Europeans have been shut out from the talks. It is clear that they do not want anything to change. For them, the new world order is an existential threat so they will do what they can to booger up the process. Amazingly, the Trump people anticipated this. That was one reason for the one-two punch delivered by Hegseth and Vance last week. It has the Europeans reeling, and they are unprepared to do anything about the meetings between Russia and America.

This is right out of the Trump business handbook. The Trump organization was infamous for operating like a whirlwind. Once they got into a deal, they moved so fast and in so many directions, the rest of the parties had no choice but to go along with what they were doing. Not every Trump deal was a smashing success, but all of them were Trump deals and Trump got what he wanted from them. That is clearly what they are doing with regards to the Russia talks.

The other thing you see here is the deliberate minimalization of Ukraine dictator Zelensky by the Trump people. They do not treat him like an equal or even as a European head of state. Instead, he is being treated like a subordinate. He flew to Qatar thinking he could weasel his way into the talks in Saudi Arabia but was told that he would not be invited. Someone might call him if the Trump team felt the need to inform him of anything that happened in the talks.

This is part of the process of minimizing Ukraine. Instead of it being the top priority of the American government, it is now one of many issues that must be discussed between the great powers, once there is a process in place. It may be why the Brits have started to blame Zelensky for squandering the weapons given to him. It has dawned on them that for Trump, Ukraine is not going to be a priority. Now it is time for the political class in the UK to catch up and get with the new program.

Of course, the Russians are clearly uninterested in changing course in Ukraine without resolving the root causes of the war, so they will fight on, even as they are working with the Trump people. The Russians are old school and look at the battlefield as part of the negotiating table, so something like a ceasefire is for the end of the process, not something to be traded away in the middle. This means every day the situation for Ukraine grows worse and thus better for Russia.

That may not be so bad for Team Trump. If Zelensky were to suddenly turn up dead or deposed, replaced by a new ruler free of past errors, the Trump team would have more options as far as working out a peace deal. It is why they keep insisting on elections as soon as possible. Everyone knows that elections mean the end of Zelensky, so the sooner there are elections, the sooner the world is free of the little green man who has held the West captive for three years.

Another fascinating aspect of this revolution in global arrangements is the usual suspects have been marginalized. The attack on the financial superstructure is one reason for it. You cannot rent a mob to make loud noises in front of the media if you no longer have billions from the blob to pay for them. More important, the assault on the administrative state has the media spinning, so they are ignoring the usual suspects, leaving them to complain amongst themselves.

What knits it all together is the Trump whirlwind. The reason there has been so much progress in a short period of time is there are so many things happening in so many places, the “resistance” does not have time to figure out what is happening to them, much less organize to defeat it. The first month of Trump 2.0 has been the most exciting period in politics since FDR’s first one hundred days. It is like the Sea People swarming the brittle empires of the Bronze Age.

That is, perhaps, the way to look at this. Over the last thirty years the troubles for the managerial regime built up to the point where they were facing a tidal wave of enemies, but thought they had them under control. Once the walls were breached, those enemies are flowing in, and they are not interested in having a meeting of the executive steering committee to plan meetings for how to proceed. Like the Sea Peoples, the enemies of the managerial state just want to dismantle it.

Prudentialism

Posted on February 12, 2025 by thezman

One of the many interesting aspects of the Trump era has been the collapse of what was called conservatism in America and the rise of a new coalition to replace it as the dominant force in the Republican Party. Most pundits have been happy to call it Trumpism or MAGA, as they hope it is temporary. Others have tried to jam it into the populist bucket, despite the fact it is not a populist movement. Beyond these superficial attempts at labeling, not much has been said about it.

Not everyone in the coalition is thrilled by what they are seeing. Many older conservatives, the paleo variety, are happy to see Conservative Inc. head off to bankruptcy, but they are a bit uncomfortable sharing a pew with people like Robert Kennedy Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard. They wince when Tucker Carlson gets along with old school lefties like Jimmy Dore or Aaron Maté. They spent their lives on the opposite side of these people and now they share the same movement.

In fairness, it is even more difficult for the old school lefties, because for them, politics defines their life. That means they are now faced with supporting that which they were sure was evil until not so long ago. It also means their conception of evil may have been wrong, which means their conception of themselves was wrong. This is why it is difficult for an ideologue to adjust to new evidence. Unlike the non-ideologue, such adjustment requires a reexamination of their soul.

That aside, the issue everyone is struggling with is that our political buckets, like so much of the past, have been a fiction. The left-right framing was never two groups opposing one another, but two groups negotiating with one another. It was Team Fast versus Team Slower, both agreeing on the destination. The “conservatives” were never interested in conserving anything but their sinecures, while the liberals were hellbent on sweeping liberalism into the dustbin of history.

For as long as anyone has been alive, the consensus in American politics has been the radicalism at the heart of progressivism. Egalitarianism, universalism, and the blank slate are the three legs of this ideological stool. What motivates and justifies using this stool to smash up American society and go abroad to smash up other cultures is the intense belief that they are commanded by history or history’s God to impose this ideology on the people of the world.

This is how we arrived at this odd time where John Derbyshire and Paul Gottfried share a pew with RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. The excesses of progressivism, unconstrained by the necessity of the Cold War, have put everything at risk, thus calling forth an old force that has been dormant since Gettysburg. That force is prudentialism. The thing that lies at the heart of Western conservatism is a set of precautionary principles that act to avoid unknowable negative consequences.

If you listen to what RFK Jr. says about medicine, for example, it generally boils down to restoring prudence to the field. The drug makers operate on the assumption that they must rush everything to the market, which often causes new harms while having little impact on the thing they are trying to mitigate. The Covid vaccine is a great example of the recklessness of medicine. Even a little bit of prudence would have avoided this easily avoidable error.

Similarly, Tulsi Gabbard’s main reason to exist is her skepticism of the military industrial complex and the foreign policy community. For the last thirty years, we have staggered from one ill-conceived conflict to the next, never stopping to ponder if what we are doing will have negative consequences down the road. No one seems to be able to think beyond the first move. The main thrust of Gabbard’s critique is that a tiny bit of prudence could have prevented many of these debacles.

The reason these two are attracted to Trump’s movement is that fundamentally, Trump is the great champion of prudence. He would rather not spend money than spend it, not because he is cheap, but because he knows that spending it has consequences and unless you put those consequences in the balance, you are recklessly spending money and that is not prudent. Trump’s foreign policy is motivated by a desire to not create new problems which will lead to new conflicts.

If Team Slower had not abused the word “conservative” for so long, what we are seeing could be easily labeled “conservatism.” Decades of verbicide have left us with a poverty of language to describe what we are seeing. It is why Trump never uses the old labels when talking about politics. He did not call the people running USAID “leftists” or even “radicals” but instead called them “lunatics.” In the current context, it is both the appropriate word and the accurate one.

Even so, Trumpism is the return of prudence to our politics, and it is the necessary precursor for the return of a genuine American conservatism. To paraphrase Michael Oakeshott, “Trumpism is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

The boys and girls in conservative sinecures are hostile to Trumpism because it casts light on their project, revealing it to be nothing more than the sidecar to the radicalism they claimed to oppose. For the neocons, Trumpism is a mirror, revealing their lack of a soul and exposing the vampirism that animates them. For others, it is an uncomfortable calling home of the prudent into a disposition that has defined their lives but never defined their politics.

For lack of a better way of stating it, what we are seeing is the forming up of a new prudentialism, that in the fullness of time may be able to rehabilitate the term “conservative” but for now must settle for Trumpism or MAGA. It is not running around trainyards yelling stop. It is a great rolling back of the progressive project, not driven by superficial romanticism, but by prudent necessity. To make America great again, we must sweep away progressivism and its reckless implementations.

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