Category Archives: Trump

Pink State

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Imagine the space-time continuum gets scrambled and you find yourself in a world where the coming election is between a crazy old cat lady, an old hippie, Hitler and Mussolini. Hitler is leading one major party and Mussolini is leading another major party. The hippie and the cat lady have no party and very little support. As a practical matter, your choice is between Hitler and Mussolini. More important, you know the ramifications of both choices. The former is murder and mayhem and the latter is authoritarianism and long speeches.

To anyone with a soul, the choice is clear. You vote for Mussolini. It’s a terrible option, but so is chemotherapy. No one enthusiastically opts for chemotherapy, but it beats dying from cancer. If you told your doctor that your morals prevented you from choosing chemo, so you were going to visit some guy with magic crystals, your doctor would try to have you committed. Similarly, no one would wants Mussolini as the ruler, but he is a vastly better option than Hitler. You do what you must, even when it is unpleasant, to stop Hitler.

To continue this a bit further, imagine if someone came up to you are said “I’m Susan Wright and my principles prevent me from voting Mussolini, even though I know Hitler will murder millions, so I’m voting for the goofy hippie guy.” You would have dark thoughts about that person. They are willing to stand aside and allow something truly horrible just so they can avoid doing something unpleasant. To make it worse, they demand that you pretend that their cowardice and treachery is high minded.

Further, you would look at those people investing all of their energy ridiculing Mussolini as pro-Hitler partisans. After all, the successful end of the efforts can only mean one thing –  Hitler wins. They could protest all they like that they hate both Hitler and Mussolini, but you would know them by their deeds. They are working to pave the way for Hitler, regardless of their reasoning. If successful, they would be, in part, responsible for what comes next. Blood would be on their hands and you would feel justified in holding them responsible.

Alternatively, if someone came up to you and made the case for Hitler, along with pointing out the faults of Mussolini, you would not feel the urge to punch them in the face. They may be horribly mistaken, but at least they are being honest. They are pro-Hitler and they take responsibility for it. They own it. Who knows, they could be right and Mussolini is worse in the long run. In theory, at least, you can debate this with the Hitler fans and maybe in the process sway some undecided voters to your side.

Obviously, you see what I’m doing here. Replace Hitler with Clinton and Mussolini with Trump and we have the debate between the Cult of Never Trump and the rest of us. No one thinks Trump is the ideal candidate. Many of us think he is a awful candidate, but he is orders of magnitude better than Clinton. Her election means the nation lurches into authoritarianism. What comes next will be unfathomably horrible. If you have a soul, you do what you must to prevent evil from triumphing. Susan Wright has no soul.

This twitter exchange I had with her is the genesis of this post:

Red State, of course, has gone full-on moonbat. Their only reason to exist these days is to bash Trump and Trump voters. A moral nullity like Susan Wright also takes time out to bash other Dirt People like Sarah Palin. Even loopy liberals have moved on from Palin-bashing, but as a dog returns to its vomit, the degenerate social justice warriors of the Never Trump Cult go back to Palin-bashing when they need material. Reading her posts, you could be forgiven for thinking she was a writer for Salon.

To return to my analogy, Susan Wright is the sort that would spend all her time harping about the defects of Mussolini, then claim she is standing on principle, as Hitler rounds up the Jews and packs them off to the gas chambers. She would rather something horrible happen, than get her hands dirty doing the hard work of opposing evil. Of course, that assumes she thinks Clinton is a bad choice. Again, reading her posts, it’s hard not to think she is related to the old bag, not just a supporter.

After the war, many Germans tried to say they did not know what was happening so they should not be held accountable for supporting the Nazis. The question in those cases was whether or not the person should have known or could have known. The Clinton Crime Family has been a known quantity for 25 years. Susan Wright and her ilk know exactly what comes from a Clinton victory. Blood will be on their hands. “I did not know” is not going to be an acceptable excuse when the time comes.

The Virtual Candidate

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In the 1992 election, the one thing that jumped out to me was the enthusiasm for Clinton at public events. He had big raucous crowds, while Bush had smaller, older crowds. The press had all the same horse race stories we see today, but it felt like Clinton had all the enthusiasm on his side, despite the tight polls. One of the things I recall is not seeing any Bush bumper stickers, but lots of Clinton stickers. That always stuck in my head as a useful metric when trying to gauge the intentions of the voters.

This ad hoc measure held up in the following election, as Dole was just a sacrificial candidate the GOP put up just so they could have someone on the ticket. In 2000, this metric really did not hold up as I saw many more Bush signs and his crowds were much bigger than Gore’s crowd, but it was a razor thin result. That said, it held up very well in 2004 as Bush clearly had the more enthusiastic voters. I recall seeing a clip of him at an event that looked like a rock concert. I knew he was going to win handily.

Like any seat of the pants observation, it is prone to your own bias. I think in 2000 I was probably fooled a little by where I lived at the time. I was in Virginia, which was strong Bush country. Even so, we all have our biases and that means we tend to see that which confirms our magical thinking. I think about that when I see the video from Trump events. The guy is playing to massive crowds that we last saw when Obama ran in 2008. Even the reporters covering these things admit they are yuge.

On the other hand, Clinton is playing high school gymnasiums where a few hundred people, at most, are herded into to hear her cackle at them. These are rare, as she spends most of her time at private fundraisers or sleeping. That’s the other thing that is so odd about this election. She takes weeks off, not having any public events. Right now, she has been under wraps for five days. Criminal Genius David Axelrod is now suggesting she skip the next debate entirely. Frankly, would that be shocking if she did skip it?

The disconnect in this election between what we are being told and what we are seeing is dizzying. The polls all show a tie or a slight Clinton lead. If that is true, it means Trump voters are willing to drop what they are doing, stand in line for hours, just to see their guy give a speech. Clinton voters are not all the interested in seeing her or even hearing her take questions. This is entirely possible. Unhappy people are more likely to go out and protest, while those satisfied with the status quo stay home. But, in an election?

The trouble is I can think of no example where this has been the case. Even poor old Bob Dole was out giving speeches in front of decent sized crowds. If I recall, he did a barnstorming thing at one point where he would show up at a few places every day and give a speech. People showed up and cheered. Clinton has become invisible to her own voters. I see her commercials, but she has not held a single public even within a three hour drive of me. Trump has done a few events and my state is a long shot for him.

To make this election even more bizarre is the way the press has ignored the biggest story in political history since Watergate. The Wikileaks stuff is explosive. It is what political reporters used to pray for, back when we had political reporters. The stuff in those e-mails is the sort of stuff that used to end careers and bring down governments. Despite the caterwauling from  the stray moonbat, the media has ignored the story, preferring to spend all their time talking about the Trump bimbo hoax.

One of the things that was clear about the ’92 campaign is the Left studied Reagan. They were convinced Reagan won because of his ability to use modern media to reach voters. As a result, they had ready for 1992, Hollywood film makers to assist the Democratic nominee. The Clinton campaign was the first to use Hollywood to stage their events and produce their campaign videos. They even brought in costume people to help them select clothes for their events. Leni Riefenstahl would have been proud.

The result has been increasingly synthetic candidates on the Democratic side. Al Gore was so scripted people wondered if he was a robot. He was not allowed to pick out his own ties, he was so tightly controlled. Kerry’s campaign was actually packaged for him by the same people that created the Mark Warner campaign in Virginia. For instance, they recycled the hunting skits that Warner used to appease gun owners. Kerry’s job was to learn his lines and convincingly wear the costumes.

By the time Obama came along, the Democrats were fully prepared to run an actor hired to play the role designed by the party. Obama may as well be an actor, for as much as anyone knows about the guy. Even after all these years, his back story remains a mystery to most Americans. He’s simply the young version of  Morgan Freeman playing President in Deep Impact. Staff write his speeches, prepare him for the fake interviews they stage for the public and otherwise direct every aspect of his public performance.

Now here we are with Hillary Clinton running as the virtual candidate. For all anyone knows, she could be a head in a jar and those old fat women we see waddling around from time to time are just body doubles. While Trump is running a real campaign in front of actual humans, Hillary is hidden away somewhere, a virtual presence on campaign videos, but otherwise detached from the physical world. The media plays along, focusing all of its attention on the weird flesh and blood guy talking to humans. This ad from 2008 is turning out to be disturbingly prescient.

 

The Low-Trust State

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Social trust is one of those things that we know is important to economic growth, sound government and social stability. When the people of a society generally trust one another and wish to be trusted by others, their society prospers. The question that always arises is over causality. Some would argue that altruism is a biological trait that scales up to social trust. Others would argue that good government and the rule of law encourages positive economic growth, which in turn increases social trust. It is one of those topics that keeps academics busy.

The distinguishing characteristic of low-trust societies is a near total lack of trust in the state by the people. Russians, during the old Soviet Union, understood that everything that was said by the state was a lie of some sort. In fact, the only thing they could trust from the Bolsheviks was that whatever they said was untrue. This amplified the natural distrust of Russians as they did not have an authority to which they could appeal in order to arbitrate disputes. Contracts have to be enforceable before anyone will enter into them.

The point here is that you can debate the causality of social trust, but a society with a corrupt and untrustworthy state is going to be a low-trust society. Alternatively, to use the language of the pseudo-sciences, social trust correlates with public corruption. The causal arrows may point one way or both ways, but public corruption is a good proxy for social trust. There are measures of public corruption and the most popular is from these guys, who publish downloadable statistics every year for the pseudo-sciences.

Trust in the state is always going to drift over time, but you can spot some trends. Just take a look at the US over the last few decades. In the 1980’s, the savings and loan crisis put a lot of people in prison. Even some politicians got dinged for getting too cozy with the crooked bankers. A decade later we had the dot-com bubble and the accounting scandals, but no one went to jail. They just lost money. Less than a decade later we had the mortgage crisis and the crooks got bailed out by the government with taxpayer funds. This is a trend worth noticing.

Now, look around at what we are seeing today. The Clinton e-mail scandal is so outlandish, it is now threatening the rule of law. In the 70’s, Nixon was run from office from 18 missing minutes of tape. Clinton erased 17,000 emails, some may have been under subpoena. It is blazingly obvious that she and her cronies violated Federal law by mishandling classified information. The most logical explanation for all of this is they were selling it for cash through that ridiculous charity they run. A charity that has systematically violated the law with regards to accounting for donations.

How is it possible that this woman and her flunkies are not in jumpsuits waddling around Danbury FCI?

The first problem is the head of state appears to be a pathological liar. This Iran story is the sort of thing that used to bring down governments. It was certainly the sort of thing that should have administration officials hiring lawyers in preparation for the FBI visit. That would require an FBI that is not equally corrupt. Of course, the FBI is a product of the political class and ours is proving to be astonishingly corrupt. Today we learn that the politicians are conspiring to rig public hearings, which are the bedrock of popular government.

A certain amount of public corruption is to be expected. Politics will always attract shady characters, but it should also attract honest characters too. These are the folks that enjoy the boring work of good government. They police the system, enforce the rules and make public appeals for cleaning up the problems. Today, those people either do not exist or they have become too afraid to speak up. The American political class looks a lot like a corrupt police precinct. The crooks are in charge and they have inverted morality so that the honest fear detection by the corrupt.

It is not unreasonable to think that we may have passed the point where the political class can be expected to reform itself. Their unwillingness to even try to thwart the rise of these vulgar grifters from the Ozarks suggests the the political elite has lost the capacity to feel shame. Anyone willing to defend Hillary Clinton to the public is someone, who will lie about anything, violate any law, violate any taboo. That is a person lacking in anything resembling a soul. A political class populated with such people is a ruling class at war with itself, the very definition of a low trust state.

The truly frightening thing is that the only institution the public trusts is the military. Take a look at what is happening with the sports ball players protesting during the national anthem. This coming Sunday is 9/11 and even the most reptilian of Progressives are saying such a protest on that day would be a slap in the face to the men and women who serve the country. When no one trusts the ruling class, and the military is the only institution in which the public has faith, there is always one result. It does not have to be that way, but that’s the way it has always been.

At some level, some portion of the public understands this. The Trump phenomenon is not about Trump in the conventional sense. There’s a lot not to like about the man, but he is honest, he loves his countrymen and he is not doing this for the money. Whether or not he understands his role and the movement he is leading is unknown. Maybe his election will just be a false dawn and what follows is what always follows the onset of a low-trust state. If things are going to turn out different for us, Trump will win and usher in an era of reform.

Otherwise, what comes next will be much worse.

Estates of the Realm

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For a long time now the pattern of American presidential elections has been that the primaries wrap up in late spring and early summer. The two candidates begin to take shots at one another leading up to their conventions in July. The Republican usually lacks the money to run an air war, so that leaves the Democrat free to pound away in key states with TV ads. The media, of course, swings in on behalf of the Democrat with a relentless drumbeat of attack ads telling us that the Republican is Hitler again.

Then we have the conventions and both parties begin running their ads and doing big campaign events. The media is still in the satchel for the Democrats, but the quantity of noise from both sides diminishes the impact of the media. They are left to cover speeches and interview people from both camps, usually swooning over the Democrat and playing gotcha with the Republican. Then we get the debates and the sprint to the finish as both sides focus on the toss-up states.

This time we are seeing something weird and different. The media is doing their part, but it is mostly the so-called conservative media leading the charge against the Republican. The Democrats have been running ads in the swing states, but they are mostly nonsense videos of Hillary from twenty years ago. They can’t show her today because she looks like death and sounds like she is about to turn someone into a toad. That and she appears to be struggling with serious health issues.

Trump is running his campaign away from the media and not running any ads. Instead he is doing these big events where thousands line up to hear him make his pitch. Trump is running the sort of campaign presidents ran in the 1940’s. The only thing missing is the train, but his private jet makes it a lot like the old whistle stop tour. He lands, does a speech and is off to the next town. On a weekly basis, Trump jousts with the media over their latest attack, but otherwise he has not done a lot of it.

We are seeing something strange this time. It is as if we have three elections going on at the same time. The Democrats are keeping Clinton hidden away for fear people will notice she is seriously unwell. Someone struggling with a cognitive disorder is better off in small rooms with a few people and that’s what we keep seeing. Her events are lightly attended, but there does seem to be an effort to keep her from standing in front of a large crowd. They probably worry that she could topple over like Bob Dole in ’96.

The other election campaign is the Trump barnstorming tour where he does these stadium shows for thousands. They are not running ads to promote these things. Instead, they are relying on word of mouth via social media. They also get local media coverage. Trump is deliberately banning the big foot media from his events and he is not paying for a plane to ferry around the press like we have seen in prior campaigns. Trump is running the first high-tech, grassroots presidential campaign in history.

Finally, we have the mass media election. This is where members of the media debate one another over the latest events. They used to count on the Democrats to supply the copy and some flaks to help sell this to the public, but this time is a bit different. Hillary’s poor health and long criminal history are preventing her campaign from putting her or her close allies in the media for fear someone may accidentally ask a question.

There is a medieval vibe to all of this as the estates of the realm are now fully insulated from one another. There’s also the obvious divisions within the estates, as there were in 18th century France. The media, serving as the First Estate, has a credentialed and high-born top with a rough and tumble, low-born bottom. The nasally twats writing at the NYTimes or appearing on the chat shows all popped out of elite colleges and come from upper class families. The bloggers and twitter monsters are uncredentialed rubes from the country.

You could argue that the forces behind Trump within the political class represent the noblesse de robe while the people backing Clinton are noblesse d’épée. The third estate, just as in 18th century France, is not entirely on the side of the former, but is not all that happy with the latter. The bourgeoisie, in our case, are academics, the vast array of business interests that feed from the public trough and those who profit from global capitalism. You are, in all probability, a free peasant.

It is not a perfect analogy and it is not intended to compare modern America to 18th century France. Sadly, we will not get to lop off the heads of the first estate when this is all over. It does help clarify the current crisis. The people chatting on TV don’t know you and they have no idea what you read or why you read it. The things discussed on blogs like this are as alien to them as proper dining etiquette is to you. Modern American society is now highly compartmentalized and fragmented and we see that in the campaigns.

Kristol Nicht

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In a hilariously absurd post, the #nevertrump fanatic David French declined to be the nominee of Bill Kristol’s new political party. French is prone to drama so this is pretty standard stuff from him. I take some pride in having spotted him as a loony-tune a long time ago. I could just tell he was, in the mold of Glenn Beck, one of those guys who careens from one cause to the next, always overdoing it in a quest for grace. In a better age, these sorts were turned into missionaries and shipped off to Africa.

That said, I am a little surprised that Kristol’s scheme has been such a disaster. He is a smart guy and a very connected guy in the GOP. He has been a made-member of the Bush crime family for decades. His ideological inclinations may not be my cup of tea, but I respect his IQ. He had to know that going third party was suicide. He may be willing to commit suicide for his cause, but unless your name is Mohamed, it is not easy to get volunteers for your suicide mission. As a result, I assumed he was up to something else, like leveraging access to Team Trump.

Even smart guys screw up and smart guys who think they are smarter than everyone tend to make big mistakes. There is also the fact that Kristol is no spring chicken. He is sixty-three, which is not ancient, but that is when some men start to slip. I am not saying he is ready for the home; it is just that he is not going to be as politically nimble as he was twenty years ago. There is also the fact that he has been in the bubble for a long time and his connections to the currents of American life are now entirely indirect.

He and many other neo-cons seem to be trapped in 1995, unable to appreciate that the world has changed, the culture has changed and, most important, neo-conservatism is not so “neo” anymore. Their ideas all seem dated and out of sync with 2016 America. Listen to Kristol or his half-orc sidekick John Podhoretz talk about America and it is as if they just awoke from a twenty year nap. They keep repeating the same slogans from two decades ago as if the last two decades never happened. It is cringe inducing.

That is probably the biggest error Kristol made in his attempt to unhorse Trump. The Bill Kristol brand of conservatism was a horrible flop that nearly killed the Republicans Party and turned the word “conservative” into an epithet. In 2000, conservatives had full control of government for the first time in a century. Instead of rolling back the welfare state, they expanded it and launched into a massive war with Islam that we still cannot figure out how to end. We have been dropping bombs on Muslims for a quarter century now and things are worse.

People can be forgiven for thinking that maybe these neo-cons were never all that conservative. You can only scold people for so long about your principles before they expect to see you act on those principles. It seems like the only principles the neo-cons hold dear are the ones that allow them to take a powder when it is time to take on the Left. The last time conservative won back any ground against the Left was in the mid-90’s. Since then, it has been a long bloody retreat.

There is also the issue of tactics. Kristol’s claim to fame was the purging of Pat Buchanan and the remaining paleo-cons from the party. His trick in the 90’s was to bait them into saying bad things about Israel or the Israel lobby in Washington. Many fell for it and were tarred as anti-Semites. That made throwing them out of the party an easy task. There is nothing that strikes fear in the heart of the Republican like being called an anti-Semite. They would rather be associated with pedophiles like Denny Hastert than tied to someone who is an anti-Semite.

Trump is too smart for that and he is very pro-Israel in the typical American spirit. Most Americans support Israel because they are Christian and they see the Israelis as the underdog, facing a billion lunatics who want to murder them. That is Trump. He does not have deep thoughts on the subject, but he instinctively backs Israel. Having spent his whole life working with Jews in New York real estate, he is extremely comfortable around Jews.

Finally, I think Kristol, like many neo-cons, has forgotten the whole point of their movement. It was always intended to be a sales pitch. It was an effort to stitch together the various strains of American conservatism into a political force that could win elections. To their credit, it worked quite well, but it failed to deliver anything more than hollow election victories. In the end, a viable political movement has to deliver and 85% of GOP voters tell pollsters that their party has not delivered.

It is the old saying from the drug game. Do not get high from your own supply. That is what happened with the neo-cons. They started believing their own sales pitch and soon forgot that it was just a sales pitch. They stopped thinking about the practical reality of politics which is that the coalition that wins expects to get something for it. The neo-cons got swank offices and additional quarters added to their public pension, but the spear catchers and water carriers of the party got nothing. Pleas to ideological purity are not going to work on people who feel burned.

Glenn Beck Is A Dangerous Nut-Job

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There is a guy in my neighborhood who was always known as being the sort who went all in on things. If it was worth doing it was worth overdoing. Hobbies became obsessions to the point of distraction. When he discovered alcohol, it was the same pattern. Drinking quickly went from social to a lifestyle. Then came drugs and the party life was an all consuming thing for him. The gonzo party guy was the over the top drug and alcohol guy to the point where his life was at risk.

Just like with all of his obsessions, he suddenly stopped drinking and using drugs. He quit the lifestyle and quit drinking entirely. Unlike most people who struggle with quitting, sobriety became his obsession. He was not going to be just another former addict. He was going to be the ultimate former addict. In short order he went from gonzo party guy to gonzo sobriety guy, lecturing everyone about the ills of drugs and alcohol, preaching the good news of sobriety to everyone.

Like a lot of former drunks, he drifted into religion. Maybe its the obsessive compulsive behavior or something else, but former addicts often find Jesus. It could simply be that many therapy meetings are held in churches. This guy got into religion and soon became the most devout person possible. He talked about maybe becoming minister. Instead of preaching the good news of his sobriety, he was now preaching the Good News.

Since religion always bumps up against politics, his religion led him into various causes that brought him into contact with politics. The familiar pattern started all over again. He threw himself into the topic, reading and studying everything he could about history and ideology. Being a religious guy, he naturally gravitated to causes and politics that were anti-Progressive. The gonzo party guy was now the gonzo political guy. His life was now politics and everything that came along with it.

By now you can probably figure out that I am not talking about a guy in the neighborhood. I am describing Glenn Beck, the deranged radio and TV host. I describe him as deranged because he has always existed on the edge between over the top political commentary and Jim Jones People’s Temple madness. It was never said explicitly, but the reason he left Fox was that the people in charge were a bit worried that he was descending into madness. Despite his ratings, they were glad to see him go.

Beck, of course, has done a lot to prove that Ailes was right. Beck has gone off and created a little media empire of his own out in Texas. From time to time, he has claimed to have talked with God and claimed to have been struck down with a debilitating disease. Half a dozen years ago the Lord was taking his sight. A few years later he was claiming some sort of vocal cord issue. These maladies are highly dramatized and then disappear.

Those familiar with radio preachers recognize this act. Back in the old days, radio and TV preachers would claim God was going to take them if the audience did not raise money for the new school or the new Mercedes or whatever the preacher wanted. In Beck’s case, it is possibly just attention seeking, but there is a strong case to be made that he is as nutty as a fruitcake. He never attaches a money making effort to his mystery diseases so it appears he really thinks he is Job.

In this election, Beck has eliminated any doubt about his mental fitness. He was telling audiences that Ted Cruz, of all people, was the Lord’s messenger sent to save humanity. Even more absurdly, he claims Donald Trump is the Anti-Christ. Presumably, the Ted Cruz – Donald Trump campaign in the primary was some sort of post-modern version of the final battle between good and evil. The final battle would happen in a TV studio rather than a hilltop in Israel.

Beck has now been suspended from his radio show for teaming up with another howling lunatic to encourage the assassination of Trump. I am unfamiliar with Brad Thor, but my guess is he is a dickhead. I’ve yet to meet anyone named Brad who was not an asshole. I am told he is a popular pulp fiction writer, but I do not read thrillers so I cannot comment on his work. He stalked me on twitter for a few days for some reason, but I do not use twitter enough to care.

One of the problems that fringe movements always suffer is that they attract a lot of nuts. The reason is the nuts are free to join a cause that will have them. The mass movement that is just getting started needs people so it welcomes all comers. The result is a fat naked guy doing the boogie at your big convention. It is why all successful mass movements enter a period where they deal with their loons. This is either a purge or a marginalization. Take note alt-right.

In the mass media age, a similar problem infects the media outlets. There is the gaping maw demanding to be filled with content. There is a finite number of sensible writers, speakers, performs and so forth. The demand quickly outstrips the supply so that means weirdos and lunatics are invited into fill the space. Technology now makes it easy for every nut-job in America to reach a broad audience. An obsessive nut-job can mange to get quite good at it.

Glenn Beck should not have easy access to a large audience. He should be broadcasting over short wave or handing out handwritten flyers on street corners, but satellite radio needs content. Media investors want a vehicle to exploit the audience a Beck attracts. Cable shows need a reason for people to watch so inviting an unhinged loon is a quick way to create content that creates interest. Unlike the political movement, there has been no way to purge the dangerous loonies from mass media.

I mentioned the other day that intolerance is wildly underrated. Much of what ails the West is due to the people in charge failing in their basic duties. Instead of enforcing the codes and customs that keep society on an even keel, they have found excuses to tolerate all sorts of bad behavior. It is how we ended up with hip-hop music and talking hemorrhoids like Al Sharpton celebrated in popular culture. That may seem harmless, but it is also how you end up with nutters like Beck and Thor encouraging people to shoot Donald Trump.

This will not end well.

Checking In On The Encyclopedists

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For those new to this site, I have taken to calling Bill Kristol the Hari Seldon of Republican politics. For much of the 90’s and 00’s, Kristol basically ran the Republican Party. In the Bush years, he was largely responsible for crafting the Forever War strategy that came to define the Bush administration. That disaster seems to have landed him in exile, or maybe he is just re-charging his batteries, it is hard to know, but he is very much back in the game now.

Kristol is leading the charge to stop Trump from gaining the 1237 delegates he needs to secure the nomination. The first part of the plan was an organized media blitz through the usual conservative media organs. The last two weeks has been a steady stream of hysterical rants about Trump and his racists extreme alt-right extremist supporters. The idea is to not only to paint Trump as a racist, but to keep him from making his points. It is the classic game of playing defense by going on offense.

The second part of the plan was to pour all available resources into the Wisconsin primary. They had two weeks to buy off every pol, talk show host and newspaper writer. Wisconsin is one of those weird breadbasket states where being nice counts for more than being right so Trump was always going to be vulnerable there. Cruz would be the nice version of Trump and thus win the primary. The hope was that a big win would deflate Trump’s support elsewhere, thus preventing him from reaching the 1237 delegate number.

The Encyclopedists are smart so you should never underestimate them. Kristol did not become the Hari Seldon of American politics by being a fool. He is also ruthless. A man with no loyalties outside his narrow group, who believes he is chosen by fate to orchestrate the Great Plan, is not a guy prone to letting emotion get in the way. That is why he is willing to back Cruz for now, even though he hates Ted Cruz more than he hates Trump.

That is the genius of this scheme. Cruz will never be the nominee. He is just about eliminated from gaining the 1237 he would need to win the nomination. That means he has to figure out how to win a second ballot convention. Kristol has been working on that since last fall and is way ahead of Team Cruz. All the talk about horse trading at a brokered convention is nonsense. The party controls the bulk of the delegates, well more than is needed to pick the nominee. The rest is just theater.

The results thus far look fairly good for the Foundation. Kristol is surely pleased with the outcome, but he now faces the big hurdle. In April, the primary schedule is NY, CT, DE, MD, PA and RI. These are states where Trump has a massive edge over Cruz. The holy roller stuff really turns people off in these states. A month of Trump winning will inevitably beat down the Cruz support as he begins to look like a fringe candidate and a tool for the NeverTrump idiots.

I am no Hari Seldon, but I am having a tough time seeing how this Wisconsin win carries through a month of losing to give Cruz a chance at being competitive in May. The math says Cruz will be eliminated by April 26th, baring a miracle. His rationale for remaining in the race at that point, is to be a dick and keep Trump from winning. Maybe that is enough for him, but I wonder if his voters will agree. History says support drops off once a candidate is no longer viable.

That means the Foundation has to think they can ignore April by shifting the conversation from Trump winning primaries to some other topic, like his inability to beat Clinton in the general. The flaw in this plan is that the Democrats suddenly have a Sanders problem. Kristol would be fine with a Clinton presidency. The Conservative Industrial Complex could raise money of it and they largely agree with Hillary anyway. Sanders winning complicates the math a bit.

Regardless, it strikes me that everything is now pointing to California. The game between now and June 7th will be to create a narrative around stopping Trump from the nomination, thus making California an important primary. To do that means two months of Trump bashing that will make the last two months look like a Trump rally. The only way the Seldon Plan can work is to marginalize Trump to the point where he cannot win the nomination so we should expect a tsunami of sewage coming from so-called conservative media.

This is where being smart beats being right. Trump is running a tightwad campaign, spending very little on TV and social media. In California, the voters expect and demand a massive air war of ads. Kristol will launch a $50 million ad campaign against Trump in California, starting in May. Trump is too cheap and stubborn to run a TV campaign to match it so the Kristol people have to be optimistic. Reagan won California in 1976, keeping Ford from getting the necessary delegates to lock up the nomination. Ford lost to Carter in the fall.

That is the plan, forty years later.

The End of Mass Democracy

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In modern America, it is impossible to know if what appears in the press is real news or some made-up nonsense intended to trick the public. The increasingly important site Conservative Tree House posted up a sampling of entire fake media people and operations the other day. When you are paid to write on behalf of a party, you’re not a journalist. You are an advocate. When you are an advocate posing as an independent media, you are a fraud.

Even though much of what is in the press is agit-prop, there’s information to be gleaned from it. This story in Bloomberg the other day about how the GOP is preparing to end popular selection of their nominees is a good example. Ostensibly, the “report” is about how they will navigate a brokered convention. What they really want to do is introduce the idea of ending the primary system or at least severely curtailing it.

The Democrats have largely made their primary system a beauty contest. The super delegate system lets party officials put their thumb on the scale to the point where Clinton could lose the rest of the primaries and still win the nomination. Of the 2382 delegates at the Democrat convention, 712 will be controlled by the party. In other words, Sanders will have to have own 71% of the delegates in the primaries to win the nomination.

An important thing to remember about America politics in the technocratic era is that there is only one party. The Bipartisan Fusion Party comprises the elites from technology, politics, culture and finance.  Republican and Democrat are just the two faces of the party so that we can keep up the appearance of being a popular republic. It’s not a lot different than what Augustus did in Rome when pretending to include the Senate in decisions.

Unlike Rome, this system evolved organically. The parties have become play things for the mega-donors, like sponsoring champions in tournaments. Team Red is paid to beat Team Blue. It’s their reason to exist. It’s why public policy never changes, regardless of which team wins. They are no longer competing for the right to set policy. They are competing for the right to hire their friends and relatives. Washington DC is a global Tammanay Hall.

The lesson Team Red drew from the 2008 and 2012 election is that white people are their biggest liability. They have to shed the image of being the party of white people. That’s why they tried every trick in the book to get Marco Rubio the nomination. He was going to be their Obama. It’s also why they appear poised to blow up their own party to stop Trump. In their view, destroying the “white party” may be the only way to save their party.

This bit from the story is a good indication of what’s coming:

“Donald Trump may well end up having the most votes anyone has ever gotten in a Republican primary this time. That was true for Mrs. Clinton and she didn’t get the nomination,” in 2008, said Ron Kaufman, a member of the RNC’s rules committee. “The thing that the party has to do is to make sure the voters believe their votes matter to keep them in the party for November.”

That’s a a classic bit of double-speak. On the one hand, the guy who gets the most votes is not going to be the nominee. On the other hand, they are trying to figure out how to convince the rubes that their votes matter. They don’t have to con all the rubes, just enough to keep up appearances, which is what we are seeing in the Democratic primaries. Low turnout, but enough to keep up appearances.

My bet all along has been that the GOP will eventually allow Trump to have the nomination, but only when they know they can undermine his campaign enough to keep him from winning the general. If they believe they can hold the House and Senate, but starve Trump out in the general, they will let him win the nomination at a contested convention. It’s the intermediate game.

If they cannot be sure of that, and Trump’s political savvy so far makes this a tough sell, then they have to go all in on the long game. That means dumping Trump and Cruz and going with a party man. Karl Rove is out trying to work this angle now by claiming that Trump and Cruz have no chance to beat Clinton in the fall, as if she is this wildly popular rock star in the view of the public.

The short term is getting a nominee, but the long game here is to avoid this ever happening again. Both parties face the same dilemma. They represent the interests of about 20% of the public. They augment this with lip-service to various ideological groups, but that’s wearing thin. If you are a pro-life Christian, for example, you have to know the GOP thinks you’re an idiot. If you are a union guy, you know the Democrats don’t care about you in the least.

The way around it is what we see with the Democrats. They have conditioned their suckers to accept the primary as a beauty contest. The GOP will follow the same path. There will be new ballot rules to keep trouble makers out of early primaries and a super delegate system to let the party pick the nominee from a slate of pre-approved options. The primaries will just be proof of concept exercises. Your vote will no longer count much at all.

Alternative für Deutschland

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Americans always struggle understanding the politics of continental Europe. For starters, the European Right has usually sounded like the American Left, while the Euro Left has sounded like the faculty lounge at Oberlin College. For my European readers, Oberlin is an insane asylum in Ohio. Buckley Conservatives may not have been sincere in their goals, but they put a lot of effort into sounding like small government, Classical Liberals.

Of course, there has also been this weird phrasing that Americans are just now adopting. That is the phrase “extreme far right” that is always center stage, ironically, in European political discussions. The “far left” never gets mentioned. Stalin is never described as “far left” but Hitler is “far right” even though he was a socialist. This has always been confusing to Americans, but we are catching up. Donald Trump is now far-right.

Then there are the political figures. In America, we hold veterans in very high regard, maybe too high, so military service is a good thing for politicians. In Europe, military men command little respect compared to other vocations. In America, we like it when someone goes from rags to riches. Therefore, we like politicians with humble origins. Europeans prefer men and women from the aristocratic and academic backgrounds.

As a result, unsophisticated Americans, like myself, have found European politics a bit murky. Well, that used to true. Americans can now relate to what our brothers and sisters across the Atlantic are experiencing in their politics. The evil Donald Trump is smashing up the political class with his extreme right-wing populism. Across the pond, extreme right-wing parties across Europe are smashing up their respective political classes. It is springtime for Hitlers and they are blossoming across the West.

The most stunning development, the one that has good thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic in a panic, is the sudden rise of Alternative für Deutschland, an extreme right-wing extremist party of the most extreme right-wing kind. Led by the elfin Frauke Petry, this new party rang up surprisingly large vote totals, exclusively on the issue of immigration, particularly opposition to the Merkel policy of Islamification of Germany.

In addition to the ruling class Hitler fantasies, Americans and Germans now appear to have two things in common. One is that the political classes in both countries have displayed a staggering disregard for public welfare in their pursuit of personal salvation. Merkel out posing for selfies with refugees is as tone deaf as Republicans demanding open borders and amnesty for tens of millions of illegals. Cui bono?

The responsibility of the people put in charge, their chief responsibility, is to maintain public order. You cannot have a civilized and prosperous society with civil unrest. Deliberately inviting in these problems, as we see with Merkel in German and the open borders lobbies in America, is a betrayal of the public trust. In another age, the elites would not have to fear these populist parties as the people would have hung the elites before it got to this point.

The other overlap and the most important to consider is the source of support for these extreme right-wing far right extremist movements. Alternative für Deutschland is decidedly middle-class. It has the nickname “the professors party” because its founders were mostly academics. It is vote is coming from middle-class Germans who work in professions. It is support is also overwhelmingly male at this time, with some estimates at 85% male. This is a point that will become central to our future political debates.

Smart people have figured out who is voting for Donald Trump and the thing that jumps out is that Trump has broad-based support across the American middle-class. In fact, he is the candidate of middle America right now. Despite all the hooting and hollering about his angry voters, his rallies look like the crowd at Little League baseball games in a typical American suburb. His issues are also directly aimed at the middle.

Like AfD, Trump is drawing in male voters who have dropped out of the process, but also males who have thrown in the towel on the main parties. Current estimates suggest a 2-to-1 ratio male-to-female for Trump. This is not an accident. German culture has seen the same war on men we have seen in America. German men were literally told they had to urinate sitting down. When you have to get permission from a judge to take a whiz, you’re going to begin to think the people in charge are against you.

One last thing, related to the middle-class nature of these movements, is how the elites are responding. Instead of co-opting the issues, they are trying to link these movements to bogeymen like Pegida and the KKK. That is a telling response and suggests the ruling classes have become decidedly anti-middle class. It is also legitimizing the taboos against xenophobia, racism and ethnocentrism. You can only call decent people Nazis so many times before it loses its power to shame.

What is happening across the West is the people are awakening to the fact that their rulers have a very different vision for their societies than they disclose in public. In many cases, it feels like the rulers have plans for the future that do not include their voters. Those plans may be great ideas, but in stable societies, they must be debated in public. Otherwise, society becomes unstable. That is what is happening in Germany and America. The system is becoming unstable.

Stupid CoNT’s

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Most people think of cults as being a collection of suicidal weirdos led by a madman, who thinks he is Jesus. That’s understandable as they are the most colorful and therefore get the most attention. David Koresh and the Branch Davidians are the gold standard. Before him Charlie Manson was the guy Americans thought of whenever the subject of cults came up in conversation. The suicide cult is a regular feature of television police dramas for this reason.

The truth is cults don’t usually end in mass suicide. In fact, it is rare. Usually they run their course, eventually running out of steam and the adherents wander off to other things. People are natural believers and the more intense the inclination to believe, the more likely they are to sign onto mass movements, even wackadoodle nonsense like UFO cults and recycling campaigns. They go from one to another, looking for salvation, sometimes even signing onto a movement built on the negation of their prior cult.

Think of the nutty aunt who is always into some new age nonsense. Maybe she was into crystals and then it was a fake shaman that helped her discover her aura. Then it was off to volunteer for one social cause after another. We all know these sorts of people, yet we seldom think of them as members of a cult, but that’s what’s going on with them. Cults are just small, temporary mass movements.

The assumption is that cults always have a charismatic leader, but that is not the case. Scientology is a cult and it lacks this feature. Modern American liberalism latches onto temporary leaders like Barak Obama and now Bernie Sanders. The Obamasoxers of ten years ago are BernieBros today. Buckley Conservatives have been calling every GOP nominee “Reagan” since ’92. It’s a type of cargo cult where they think if they pretend their man is the Gipper, they will be transported back to the 80’s.

This brings us to the Cult of Never Trump, known on-line as #nevertrump and billeted at on-line sites like the Federalist, National Review On-line and The Blaze. Like every cult, the adherents are convinced beyond all reason that their cause is based in indisputable mathematical truths. These truths are so obvious, they repeat them with a regularity that resembles a chant. Every CoNT I’ve encountered says the exact same things, like they rehearse them.

This was something visitors to Maoist China and Stalinist Russia noticed about the bureaucrats. They always said the same things in response to questions. In most cases, it was simply pragmatic. The party stalwarts, the spear catchers for the cause, they chanted the party line with the enthusiasm of the fanatic. They did not just believe the party line, they were defined by it and defined by their adherence to it. They would die for it.

As an aside, I knew an Iranian that served in the Iran – Iraq War. He told me a story about how his unit came up to a minefield. The Revolutionary Guards in their unit ran into the field, sacrificing themselves to clear a path through the mines. For these men, their life was only useful in service to the cause. They had given themselves over completely to the cause and the proof of it was their willingness to die for it. Before they stepped on the mine, they were already dead to themselves.

The other thing every mass movement requires, particularly cults, is the bogeyman. To quote the go-to source on these things, Eric Hoffer, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”  The Nazis had the Jews, the Stalinists had the Kulaks and now the CoNT has Donald Trump. The enemy is what comes to define the cult and gives it a reason to continue on, even when all the prophesies fail.

The interesting thing about the CoNT is that it started a lot like a UFO cult, rather than a mass political movement. Last summer, they dismissed Trump as a ridiculous showman and not a real candidate. Then he was a vanity candidate who would drop out by fall. Then he would be crushed in the debates. Then Iowa was going to be his demise. This has been a pattern right up to now. After each setback, the CoNT rejiggers the prophesy and comes up with a new date for when the Dirt Monster will be slain.

The gold standard on this type of cult is the study, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World. The group they studied was a UFO cult led by a woman named Dorothy Martin. It eventually disbanded, but she went on to start other fringe spiritual movements. I’ll just note that she was initially involved with Scientology. Again, true believers tend to move from one mass movement, one cult, to another.

Like a UFO cult, the CoNT becomes hyperactive as the next big date arrives. For the last week they have been waging a campaign to prove that the Dirt Monster is Hitler, hoping to bring about the great reckoning this Tuesday. This will surely go on until Trump clinches the nomination in a month or two. What happens at that point is tough to tell. I doubt we see a mass suicide, like the People’s Temple, but they will have to contend with what experts call “dis-conformation.”

This is when the true believer is presented with irrefutable evidence that contradicts their belief. In the famous Dorothy Martin case, the Seekers explained that the aliens did not come and destroy humanity because the faith of the Seekers convinced the aliens to relent. My guess is the CoNT will come up with something similar, maybe claiming Trump has changed and their efforts to stop have reformed him and made him acceptable.

Others will never go along with this. Neo-conservatives like Max Boot and Bill Kristol can never reconcile themselves to Trump. These are Trotskyites, who have a vision of the world wholly incompatible with anything one can call conservative.  The smart money says they head back over to the Left and find some way to reconcile themselves to their old friends on the

Either way, we are bedeviled with CoNT’s for a while longer, then it will be something else.