Category Archives: Trump

The Apostate

Posted on by

Back in the late 1990’s, James Byrd was murdered by three white guys in Texas. It was a terrible crime and the three men involved were quickly arrested and put on trial. It was a quick trial with two getting the death penalty and one getting life in prison. One has been put down while the other lingers in the system. Whatever your views on capital punishment, the fact that it takes decades to administer it says a lot about our society.

Now, our betters should have been congratulating themselves for what they had done. A generation earlier and this crime may never have been prosecuted. Instead, the three white guys were treated like any black criminal in the same circumstances. The real test of equality before the law is not at the admissions department at Harvard. It’s in the courtroom.

That’s not what happened. The Left used this case to tar normal Americans as bigots and later tried to blame Republicans presidential candidate George Bush for the crime. They ran very ugly ads trying to convince people that Bush was responsible for what happened because he was a raging bigot and racist. Naturally, the Republicans howled in protest, calling it a Nixonian smear and dirty trick.

A couple of days ago Jonah Goldberg doubled down on the absurd claim that Donald Trump is a member of the KKK. He’s been doing this carefully choreographed routine where he pretends to merely be curious about the story but is really trying to spread the smear that Trump is a secret Klansman. As I pointed out in the comments, it’s the sort of odious smear David Brock used to pull on Bush ten years ago.

Somewhere else, responding to another commenter, I pointed out that Goldberg lives in a whites-only neighborhood in a wealthy suburb of DC. It’s the sort of neighborhood Steve Sailer says, “home prices discriminate so the residents don’t have to.”  Goldberg, I’ll note, makes armpit noises on TV and his wife was a Bush appointee. If you want to see an example of managerial class sponger, it’s Jonah Goldberg.

Writing that comment, it occurred to me that I used make this point with regards to liberal commentators back in the Bush years. Chris Mathews used to rant and rave about racism, despite living in one of the whitest towns in America. In other words, the one thing to change in the last ten years is the Buckley Conservatives now sound just like the Progressive from a decade ago. Put another way, I did not leave conservatism, conservatism left me.

What was plainly obvious in 2000 when Bush ran for President was that the Left was not upset about his politics. They were horrified that he was a class traitor or more accurately, an apostate. He was from a clan that is the epitome of Yankeedom, yet he declared himself a Texan, abandoned Public Protestantism for Evangelical Christianity and was throwing in with the bad whites.

No man is hated more than the apostate, even more so when the apostate was a former member in high standing. In every mass movement, the apostate is the villain, who must always be found and destroyed. The Scientologists don’t try so hard to ruin the lives of former members because they have free time. Stalin did not have Trotsky murdered because he thought he welshed on bet or left the seat up too many times.

Apostates are hated not because they reject the cause or the group. They are hated because their very existence calls into question the rightness of the cause.  After all, if the traitor is able to prosper outside the cause, maybe he is right and the people in charge have been lying. That’s why he must be destroyed and never allowed to prosper. Otherwise, the logic of the cause no longer makes any sense.

The interesting thing we are seeing with this smear campaign against Trump is that it is a copy of the one launched against Bush. Trump is supposed to be allied with Yankeedom. If he had backed Rubio or Bush, the people at National Review would be holding parties in his honor. They would laud him as a great “conservative” behind the campaign of Jeb Bush! Instead, they are driving around in the broken down progressive clown car from the previous decade.

That tells us something about our managerial elite. The Left side freaked out over Bush the apostate. Now the Right side is doing the same over Trump. Their loyalties are to their class. The Right side is now finding solace in the arms of the Left side as they huddle together in the castle. All the jibber-jabber about party loyalty, conservative principles and fair play from the Right side have been cast aside in order to defend their class interests.

The big difference this time is that Trump is not Bush and Buckley Conservatives are not Progressives. Trump is a very smart guy who is fully aware of what he is doing, while Bush was an amiable nitwit, who just wanted to make the family proud. Similarly, Buckley Conservatives lack the skill of their brothers on the Left. It’s not called the Stupid Party by accident.

At this point, it looks like the Right side may have permanently damaged itself with the people it counts on for support. The Left side was at least able to provide it’s partisans with a chance for a catharsis. They voted for Black Jesus, had a big party and jeered at their friends and neighbors, who had been Bush supporters. Smashing things up is great fun, which is why looters are always willing to mug for the cameras.

It’s tempting to think this is a one-off phenomenon, but the managerial class evolved as a two-headed monster. It is a game of bad cop/worse cop on the voters. If one side is permanently damaged, the other side can no longer function in its natural role. The near total lack of political and intellectual talent on the Left side may simply be what awaits the Right side. How it all holds together is the big question, which is why it is so important to snuff out the apostate.

The Attack of the Dirt Monster

Posted on by

When an army is defeated on the battlefield, the first thing that happens is the lines break and order breaks down. Some units surrender right away, while others try to reform and keep fighting. Still others will retreat, finding the quickest way to escape in order to avoid capture or potential slaughter. The military saying is that you learn everything about an army when they are defeated.

That’s true of political arrangements as well. A political party or an ideological movement takes on a very different character when it runs into trouble. That’s because we get to see inside once it is cracked open. The things that were hidden behind the rhetoric, tactics and institutions are not only made public, but the motivations behind them are made public. It’s never a pretty picture.

The feuding and bloodletting we are seeing in the American political class is one of those rare chances to see behind the curtain of power, at what really is going on with our rulers. The other day the NYTimes dropped a bombshell report on how Chuck Schumer, Marco Rubio and Roger Ailes tried to hoodwink conservatives into buying off on amnesty. The gist of the story is it was an orchestrated effort to have Fox News sell a Democrat policy to conservatives.

As much as this damages Fox News, it also damages the Left. Their voters loathe the idea that the fix is in and that both parties plot in secret to hose the voters. Liberals hate this more than conservatives, who tend to suspect it anyway. In the past, this is the sort of story that would never be reported, but today the lines are breaking and it is a free-for-all. The NYTimes is taking a shot at Fox, even if it helps Trump, who they hate.

Of course, the on-going implosion of conservative media offers the best glimpse into the reality of the so-called conservative movement. We see some of them pledging to support Hillary Clinton. Others have broken into the old liberal chants from the Bush years. Still others are claiming Trump is a member of the KKK, the Nazi Party, the Italian Mafia and a Progressive Democrat. I guess that’s what George Bush meant when he said he wanted to be a “uniter” not a divider.

The shocking part for many Americans is seeing people who have spent decades claiming to be their champion, suddenly turn on them and call them morons and fascists. But it’s what happens when the lines break down and there is no longer anyone around to maintain order. We see the true nature of the combatants. In this case, most of the people in conservative media never cared much for their customers. The audience is just there to be farmed, like cattle.

Scrape away the ranting and raving and what you see is that all of them have been committed to the open borders project. Mickey Kaus pointed out a year ago that the simplest way to derail Donald Trump was for the party to adopt the polices of Jeff Sessions. These are wildly popular with voters and well within the traditions of America. They could not do it. They were willing to go to war with their own voters in order to save the open borders dream.

There are plenty of examples from history where the ruling elite has decided that a popular belief had to be purged. Wodinism was purged from the British Isles by force. Whole villages were forcibly converted to the new religion. This only worked because the people doing the converting were believers too and their new religion offered something of value to the converted. If Christianity was good enough for the king, then the people could go along with it.

The fantasy of open borders turns this on its head. The managerial elites live in bunkered communities, immune from the costs of open borders. They live in these Potemkin villages that resemble college campuses, where the diversity is only skin deep. Everyone has an advanced degree, a job in government and a worldview to match it. The people they plan to forcibly convert are the people they intend to stick with the cost of it, while the elites plan to enjoy the benefits.

The insanity of this plan is that it assumes things about humans that, if true, would spell the end of the managerial class. After all, if people are willing to go along with having the value of their citizenship vaporized, that means they no longer see it as having any value. How in the world will the managerial class command loyalty from the people when there is no longer any point in being loyal? After all, you can’t have patriotic duty without patriotism and you can’t have that if it no longer has any value.

What we are seeing here is something about how the Cloud People view the Dirt People. Loyalty to a society has always been anchored in loyalty to the people in that society. A man is willing to take up the sword on behalf of the king, because the king is doing the same for his subjects. In other words, you’re not fighting for the king, you’re fighting for what the king embodies, what the king represents. Loyalty flows in both directions.

What’s happening is a realization on the part of the Dirt People that the Cloud People hold them in contempt. What started out as some small skirmishes over the last decade, have now turned into a full blown war and the lines of the political establishment have broken. We’re getting to see the ugly truth that lies behind them. For most people, this is infuriating and that’s why they have flocked to the evil dirt monster that is Donald Trump

It’s also why the bellowing from conservative media over Trump has backfired. The people are angry at the Republicans for their treachery. They are hardly going to listen to the party’s propaganda organs lecture them on the need to be loyal in the fight against the dirt monster. If anything, like the peasants in the Italian countryside when Alaric approached Rome, they will side with the wrecker.

The Turd Sandwich Salesmen

Posted on by

One of the interesting things about what’s happening in American politics is how the chattering skulls are struggling to understand it. In fact, they are not really trying to understand it. Their efforts are much closer to denial than genuine interest. They feel threatened, so they try to jam the bad news into a box they have labeled “bad think” hoping that will make it go away. At least it fits into their comfortable worldview, even if it is still stinking up the place.

The Trump story is the most obvious example. The crooks and hustlers of the Conservative Industrial Complex see him as a dire threat to their cozy lifestyles so they have been churning out copy “explaining” why Trump is evil and his voters are stupid. The hope being that people don’t want to be thought of as stupid so they will go along with the assertion that Trump is Hitler.

I don’t think guys like Matt Walsh are sitting around thinking it through. He’s not that bright. It’s a visceral reaction to dis-confirmation. Red Team leaders were supposed to wave their banners and the Red Team supporters were supposed to respond with the team cheers. Suddenly those people are at another rally, singing different cheers for different people and different banners.

There are two possible explanations for this unexpected event. One is the people running Red Team have failed in some way. They either have a bad product or they failed to know important things about their customers and supporters. The people are walking off because they don’t like what Red Team is offering.

The other answer is that the people are stupid or gullible and the guy leading them astray is evil. In this case, Trump is casting a spell on stupid people like the Pied Piper. Human nature being what it is, it’s no surprise that the response from Red Team has been to blame magic. The evil spirit called Trump has put the whammy on them.

Reality is something different. The problem both American parties face and what mainstream parties face all over the West is the dilemma of the turd sandwich. One side of the political class offers the voters a turd sandwich on rye. The other side offers a turd sandwich on whole wheat. Both sides lecture us nonstop that voting is our moral and civic duty. Therefore, we must eat our turd sandwich.

Of course, there would be riots in the streets if it is said candidly so both sides of the political class ignore the filling and focus on the bread. We are repeatedly told by Team Whole Wheat that rye is poison and only lunatics eat rye. Team Rye tells us that wheat eaters are bigots and want to put rye eaters in chains. Their hyperbole aside, there is a very real difference between rye and whole wheat. No would deny it.

In a mass media culture, you can keep a lot of people busy shouting back and forth over trivia, like rye versus whole wheat, to keep the analogy going. What’s going on right now is a big chunk of voters has decided to look at the filling. They don’t like their turd sandwich and they have no interest in debating which type of bread is better. The trouble is the menu at the political deli only has turd sandwiches.

That’s what the boys and girls of the commentariat cannot fathom. They ticked all the right boxes on their way into the club. They memorized all the arguments and they know how to tell you rye is better than wheat or wheat is better than rye. They are filling in all the right circles so everyone is supposed to fall in line. They just can’t understand that it’s not the sales pitch, it’s the product. The public is just not interested in their turd sandwich.

That’s why the pathological Trump bashing has had so little impact. In fact, it has probably helped him more than hurt. He represents a rejection of the party and its pitchmen in the media. The fact that they hate him is his best asset. Voting for Trump, for most people, has become a vehicle to express their disgust for what the party has been feeding them for 25 years.

If you are on the party payroll or you work in conservative media, you really can’t face that reality. You have to keep believing that it will once again be a debate about the merits of whole wheat versus rye. That’s why they keep trotting out new arguments for why Donald Trump is a fraud, evil or about to implode. That’s why they have gone all-in on a guy like Marco Rubio.

Otherwise, these self-proclaimed intellectuals and opinion makers have to face a terrible reality. That’s the fact they are not, in fact, intellectuals or opinion makers. They are just hired staff in paper hats selling turd sandwiches for the people signing their checks. That’s a lot to ask of people who think a lot of themselves but lack the sort of introspection required to admit error.

Trump: The Low Risk Option

Posted on by

Elections have become big business with tens of thousands of people making a living off politics. It’s not just the politicians and their handlers. There’s a massive consultant class that does nothing but setup and operate campaigns. Then you have the commentariat that exists solely to comment about campaigns. The result is a wall of Bravo Sierra obscuring even the most obvious things about elections.

Elections turn on three categories of issues that are bound together by a fourth issue, which I’ll touch on last. The three main categories are security, economics and culture. Everything we debate falls into one of those broad categories. Immigration, for example, is a culture issue, even though the political class tries hard to jam it into economics. That’s why Trump owns it and Rubio does not.

These categories work at all levels of politics. The small-town mayor will run on taxes, crime and the fact he grew up in the city. The Senate candidate will talk about spending caps, foreign affairs and reforming the culture of Washington. Depending upon the election and the events of the day, these broad categories have varying weights on the election. In bad times, for example, economics will dominate the discussion at the expense of culture.

It’s why single issue candidates can win elections. If one issue is dominating all else, the guy that is best on that issue is going to win. Sometimes a category falls off the table entirely like we saw in 1992 with security. The strong suit of Bush was off the table so the voters were willing to consider an amiable degenerate promising to “fix” the economy. Bill Clinton would have had no chance when the Cold War was raging.

When looking at the candidates, you can do a little math in your head to figure out why Rubio, for example, is doing better than Bush in the primary. Rubio appeals a certain type of Republican. The guys the alt-right call “cucks” on twitter see Rubio as the one they would like to bring home to the wife. Even though Bush is infinity more qualified and has all the same positions, he is out and Rubio is giving third place victory speeches.

The thing that holds it all together, that fourth issue I mentioned at the start, is trust. Can the candidate be trusted to be what he claims to be on these three categories of issues? That’s why experience in office is so important. Candidate X can say, “When I was town dog catcher, I did these things and when I’m mayor I’ll keep doing them.” If it’s true, people can trust him on that issue.

Mitt Romney’s main problem in 2012 was no one believed him. His record was the opposite, in many cases, of his positions as a candidate. Even though he had a carefully crafted platform that ticked all the boxes for a majority of voters, no one really believed he would do any of it. When that big fat women from CNN pushed him around in one of the debates, a lot of people were reminded why he could not be trusted.

That’s the problem the modern GOP has with the voters. No one believes them anymore. They have no credibility with their core voters. That’s why the voters are flocking to candidates the party seems to hate. In part it is spite, but it’s also a natural instinct. When confronted with a habitual liar, you naturally assume the opposite of what they say is close to the truth.

That’s what was so offensive about that Charlie Cooke article the other day. Buckley Conservatism is nothing but technocratic managerialism these days. They are convinced conservatism is just a collection of policy positions. Tick the right boxes and you are conservative. Tick other boxes and you’re a liberal. Of course, tick the bad boxes and you are a racist xenophobic hater. That’s not who we are!

That’s simply not how humans view the world. The tick list is fine for a trip to the market or a list of chores around the house. Human beings don’t judge one another that way outside the managerial class. It’s a gut instinct about whether you can be trusted to do what you say you will do. Nixon may have been a crook, but normal people could trust him to punch the hippies.

That’s the thing with Trump and why he is winning. He’s all over the map on the issues and some of his statements are nuts. People still support him because they trust he will be what they expect him to be in office. He’s a pugnacious fighter who loves the country as much as normal Americans. He’s pissed at the same stuff and he pisses off those jerks sneering at us on TV.

It’s entirely possible Trump will be another Obama or another Bush, once he gets into office. He may end up doing nothing about immigration, trade, spending, taxes etc. So what? The generic GOP option is not going to do anything good on those issues. In fact, they could start another war or pass open borders. Even if Trump is a dud in office, he’s still a safer bet than Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz.

The truth of modern mass media democracy is that voters only have a heckler’s veto. It’s simply too easy to dress up an actor with the help of party-run media and fool the voters. When sorting through the options for a vacancy, we’re rolling the dice, hoping the winner is not a fink. What we know is whether or not the guy holding the office has done what he said he would do. Our duty as voters is to vote out the bums and liars. It’s the best we can do.

Donald Trump is, in many respects, a vehicle to clear the decks of the GOP and the political class in general. He’s a protest vote that people hope will force reform on the GOP and maybe do some good in office. Voters are increasingly aware that he is the safe choice, if they want change. The downside is he turns out to be more of the same. The upside is we actually get something useful done.

Revenge of the Dirt People

Posted on by

One of the things I have been looking at in the polling data is the fact Trump seems to have a steady vote share across demographics, excluding race. Despite all the blather from the Conservative Industrial Complex about Trump relying on low-skill angry losers, he polls well with the college educated and he does well with higher income earners. In the GOP field, Trump is the broadest based candidate running.

That said, he seems to be locked into a range from 25% to 35%, with some polls in some places ticking up a little higher. Members of the CIC have started to look at this and cheer, thinking that once the field narrows, their guy will get the other 65% and charge to victory in the later primaries. It’s a comforting thought, I bet, so it is easy to see why they are clinging to it. Whether or not that happens is debatable.

Humans tend to emulate one another, which is why candidates get a “bump” after doing well in public opinion surveys, early primaries and the on-line polls after a good debate performance. If a lot of people like Candidate X, you will at least give Candidate X a look. Trump winning New Hampshire and then winning South Carolina would send a powerful signal to other voters that it is OK to vote for Trump.

Putting that aside, the question no one wants to ask is whether the GOP can win without the Trump vote. If you look at a Trump rally, it looks a lot like the Buchanan and Perot rallies back in the early 90’s. By that I mean there are more garden variety white guys than you typically see at a political rally. No notices that rallies are mostly middle aged women and young people bused in so the campaign can seem hip.

Trumps’ rallies are much more a normal mix of adults, which means more males than you usually see at these things. These are the people Sam Francis described in his essay, Message From MARS, with “MARS” meaning Middle American Radicals. (I don’t have a link for it, but you can probably find if you look for it.) These are normal people who try to ignore politics until they have no choice.

I don’t want to get too deep into the anthropological weeds, but there are a class of men with varying degrees of economic and cultural success, rooted in what we used to call working class values. These are men who get married to one biological women, have kids and do what was necessary to make sure the wife and kids have a good life. They may have been in the service, some went to college, while others went into the trades. These are the Dirt People

In 1992, the GOP pissed off these voters and many either skipped the election or voted Perot. Enormous effort was put into denying this reality to the point where the Conservative Industrial Complex internalized it as part of their dogma. They did not need to be more like Reagan. No, they needed to be more like Clinton! Eventually, Democrats offered up a bad candidate and we got George Bush the Minor, a sort of booby prize for Dirt People sticking with the party.

That’s the real lesson of 2000 and 2004. Al Gore appeared to be having a nervous breakdown during the debates with Bush. That and his loopy policy proposals allowed an otherwise uninteresting George Bush to win the election. In 2004, the Democrats offered up a ridiculous gigolo that no one in their right mind would elect to dog catcher. The fact that it was still a close election says a lot about what people truly thought of George Bush the Minor.

Regardless, the Conservative Industrial Complex drew a different lesson. Seeing waves of little brown guys washing up on our shores, changing the ethnic mix of the nation, they decided that the lesson of the last quarter century was that white guys were finished. Their time had passed. The future of the party and country was a Latin Yugoslavia with as many Africans and Muslims that could make the swim.

The Right concluded that in order to keep pace with the Left, they had to race into the vibrant future where the only pale penis people that matter are the homosexuals. For over a decade they have been yapping about how immigrants are natural conservatives, apparently not understanding the glaring contradiction in that assertion. The result was a push for amnesty, open borders and the whole buffet of multicultural nonsense.

The disaster that is unfolding for the GOP and the CIC is not simply due to getting too far over their skis. Mitt Romney built his campaign around polling, and he knew he needed to be against amnesty. He tried to split the difference between what the data said and what the party leaders said. The result was no one believed him, and he lost a winnable election.

The GOP concluded, amazingly, that the reason Romney lost was he did not embrace amnesty. Trump, for all his defects, was smart enough to see that the future is not now and America is not yet the vibrant multi-culti paradise. This revolt of the Dirt People is based on the obvious fact that a growing majority of people are thinking it is time to put the brakes on the madcap dash to the vibrant future.

Whatever the long term outcome, some basic math says the GOP can’t win without the Trump vote. Even if 10% of it abandons the GOP, it means millions of votes that never materialize. Given that Trump has enjoyed far more success than Perot or Buchanan, you have to assume that the potential boycott numbers could be quite large if the party screws the Dirt People.

Tonight, the Dirt People have spoken.

The Revolt

Posted on by

Back in the 1992 election, I was sitting in what we used to call a working class bar. This was a downscale neighborhood in Boston and people still worked so working class was the correct label. Nowadays, “working class” almost always means not working. As soon as you hear the phrase, “working families” you know that no one is working and there’s no father around to make it a family.

Anyway, this bar was white Irish working class. I was just killing some time, so I stopped in for a beer. The place was busy, but not so loud that you could not hear the TV. Pat Buchanan came on and the Irish girl next to me started to hiss. I was a little surprised, but then she volunteered that Buchanan was a racist and hated immigrants. She was as white as a ghost and her people came over in the 19th century.

As these things go, others joined her in talking about Buchanan and some other pols. I no longer recall most of the details, but the main take away for me was that these working class whites were trying really hard to not be working class in their attitudes. They may work in service jobs and construction, but they were not going to be blue collar. Class for them was not about economics. It was an aesthetic. It turns out Engels was sort of right.

Sam Francis said back in ’92 that Buchanan, while being right, was too nice for electoral politics. He was right about the last part as the managerial class painted Buchanan as a quasi-Nazi bigot and anti-Semite. About the former, the conventional wisdom was that Buchanan was a yesterday man, advocating policies that went out of style in the 1950’s. The future was technology, mass media and working class Irish gals worried about racism.

What happened, of course, was that the credit boom following the Louvre Accords allowed the people in charge to keep the party going, without the people taking notice of the great hollowing out of the middle. Cheap credit meant buying better stuff made in foreign lands so everyone could feel like they were doing well. Cheap credit also sent the stock market soaring, so everyone felt like they were rich.

I was at lunch today with someone who is a solid suburban Republican. We were laughing about politics and he said something odd. He said, “You know, old Bernie is a nut, but his description of what’s wrong with this country is not that far off. He’s the only guy talking about this stuff. I’m not kidding. If his solutions were not so crazy, I’d probably vote for the guy.”

I was a little surprised, but I had to agreed. In fact, I have agreed for a while. Somewhere along the way we deified rich people and they get to run wild. Look at all the bankers who walked away from their wreckage with millions in bonuses. The robber barons of Silicon Valley are trying to bring back slavery and supposedly sensible people defend it. Liberal Democrats defend open borders. Then there is the political class that seems to live a life without consequences.

That’s the thing about this election that does not get discussed. Bernie Sanders lacks all of Trump’s media savvy, yet he is about to drop a house on Hillary Clinton. These are Democrats so some portion of the vote really thinks communism is the answer, but the great bulk of those planning to vote for Sanders are doing so out of spite. It is a big middle finger to the political class.

Trump, with all his faults, is a better candidate than Sanders, simply because he does not have a head full of nutty ideas. Even so, he is no one’s idea of a great candidate. He’s rude and he is often crude. His speeches don’t make a lot of sense most of the time. My bet is most people planning to vote for him get that, but they want to send a message. They also trust he will not do anything crazy if he ends up in the White House. That and he is right on the big issues like immigration.

I think what we’re seeing is the long overdue reckoning for the mistakes of the 60’s and 70’s. The disastrous welfare programs, the massive expansion of the federal state, the rise of Cultural Marxism as the official religion of the ruling elite. The squalor of the 70’s should have forced a roll back of all these things. What should have happened in the 80’s and 90’s was a return to normalcy. Instead, the credit boom put all that on hold.

Worse still, it fueled the growth of the managerial class that is decidedly hostile to normal people. Turn on the TV and you see an endless stream of degeneracy that mocks the foundations of western civilization and the traditions that have preserved and nurtured it. Traditional America is treated as a hate crime. The people in entertainment live like royalty, while accusing middle American of an endless list of crimes.

Pat Caddell, the veteran pollster and social observer, is calling this a revolution. He may not be way off base. It is a revolt, but a revolt against thirty years of a ruling class papering over the mistakes of the past. Egalitarianism, anti-racism and multiculturalism are fine in the faculty lounge, but they are a cultural dead end as a ruling class religion. The people in charge have run out of ways to hide this truth and now the long overdue hell is going to be paid.

Gaming Iowa

Posted on by

The final Des Moines Register poll has been released and there’s both joy and consternation across the land. The anti-Trump folks are going one of two ways on it. Some have resigned themselves to the inevitable and are exploring various forms of suicide. Others are denying physical reality and following in the steps of Dorothy Martin and her UFO cult. Back in 2012 we saw the same thing in the week prior to the general election.

The Trump supporters are a bit sanguine about it. They are happy to see their man pulling into the lead, but they fear it is a false dawn. After all, all of the experts have said that this is an impossibility. So conditioned to accept expert opinion, they cannot believe that the unicorn they are seeing is real. I can’t blame them for it. I’ve seen a lot of weird stuff in my life and this is pretty weird. I still can’t get over Jerry Falwell endorsing Trump.

When gaming these things out, it is important to remember that Iowa is the not always a good barometer. Of the last seven contested GOP campaigns, Iowa picked correctly three of seven times. The Democrats are not much better. Iowa has picked correctly five of the last nine contested Democrat races. I’m just looking at the Wiki page going back to the 70’s, which is a good enough sample to see that it is a coin flip as to whether Iowa matters.

If the polls and prognostications are correct and Trump wins Iowa, he goes into New Hampshire with a massive (edit: I have a poor sense of direction) tailwind and a good shot at running the table. He’s already a big favorite in New Hampshire and he leads in the later events. Iowa was thought to be his weakest state for him, so a win and he probably sees his numbers jump everywhere.

The question is how the rest of the field will respond. There’s clearly a good portion of the GOP electorate who has been trained to hate Trump by their keepers in the Conservative Industrial Complex. Will we see the rest of the field lock shields, pick a champion and launch an anti-Trump counterattack? That’s a good possibility, but history says these efforts fizzle due to the fact the factions hate one another as much as they hate the bogeyman they share.

So, we have one possible outcome. Trump wins and we quickly see some sort of stop Trump effort coalescing around a single candidate. The betting now has Trump as a 49% chance of winning so let’s give this scenario the same chance. Next week we have a Trump victory and the beginnings of a CIC organized stop Trump campaign around one of the losers.

The next most likely outcome in Iowa, according to the numbers, is a Cruz win in Iowa. Barring something close to an asteroid strike, it would also mean Trump comes in second and Rubio third. Cruz has the best “ground game” in the state and we’re told that means a lot, but the data suggests maybe not all that much after all. Thirty years ago the number of volunteers and endorsements was a proxy for voter sympathies, but that’s not true today. Otherwise, Trump would not exist.

A Cruz win means he goes into New Hampshire with some momentum, but he is not very popular there and the rebel vote is solidly behind Trump. How much of a dent it puts in Trump’s support is unknown, but his vote is not going to the party men so in this scenario, not much changes for Trump.  On the other hand, it makes mounting an anti-Trump campaign impossible. The party hates Cruz too. That makes this scenario the nightmare scenario for the CIC.

We have a 49% chance of a Trump win and a 40% chance of a Cruz win, both are bad news for the CIC. Reading the propaganda organs, their hope is Rubio wins, thus launching both a javelin at the heart of the rebels and launching a new crusade for the men in modestly priced suits who make up the Conservative Industrial Complex.

Having a bisexual Cuban amnesty fanatic knock off the evil ones would be for them what Obama was for the other side of the managerial elite. Wednesday in Washington would be an unofficial holiday as the locals partied into the wee hours.

Once sober, they would pull the plug on the rest of the field, train their guns on Trump and we would get a replay of 1992 where a wall of sound would hit the public, declaring Trump out of bounds. Trump’s support would collapse down to the core 25% and he would look for a way to exit the scene.

Finally, there’s the man from nowhere scenario. Rick Santorum won last time, even though no one gave him much thought. The reason he won, the reason the CIC refused to acknowledge at the time, was that Romney was terrible. Santorum was the “none of the above” option. The only guy who could plausibly play that role this time in Ben Carson and he is not looking too good. I’d give this a one percent chance of happening.

There we have it. There’s a 49% chance Trump wins and sets off a real old fashioned civil war in the party. There’s a 40% chance Cruz wins and delays the civil war or even prevents it. A lot will depend on how New Hampshire goes in this scenario. Then there is a 10% chance the CIC destroys the rebel alliance and reasserts its control of the process. Finally, we have a 1% chance of something crazy happening that tells us nothing.

The New Normal

Posted on by

In 1992 I was watching television at friend’s house and Bill Clinton was on denying something about his draft dodging. I forget the details of what he was saying, but I recall being a bit flabbergasted at the answer. Everyone knew he gamed the system to avoid service. Lots of ambitious young men thought that was the way to go. They thought, in addition to being dangerous, the draft was a bad career move. Given what was happening in the country, that was not an unreasonable assumption.

I really could not see how being honest about avoiding the draft was going to be a terrible setback to his campaign. A big chunk of the voters were in his age group so they knew perfectly well what he did as many of them faced the same choices. Plenty of Republicans had done the same thing. More important, most of the press at the time was his age and they too had gamed the system to avoid the draft. Even so, he chose to lie and lie poorly.

Sitting there with my friend watching it, I said something along the lines like, “I just can’t see why he chooses to lie when the truth would be better for him. I can’t believe people will vote for a guy who is such an obvious liar and so bad at it.” We both agreed that there was no way Clinton would win the nomination or beat Bush in the general. That’s not the first time I was wrong about politics, but the first time I was that wrong.

What I did not see back then was that the world was changing quickly. There was a demographic change as the Boomers took over the country. There was also the end of the Cold War. Like everyone at the time, I had grown up with normal being the US and Russia, armed to the teeth, wrestling for control of the world. Frivolous men like Bill Clinton had no place in national politics, because no one would risk it.

The point here is that even when logic and history are on your side, you can believe things that turn out to be totally wrong. In retrospect, Clinton winning in 1992 makes sense, but at the time a lot of people, not just me, thought it was preposterous. On the other hand, a lot of people were sure Clinton would win, once he was the nominee. They turned out to be right, even though their arguments at the time were mostly wishful thinking.

That’s why I have never discounted the Trump phenomenon or the Sanders campaign. Things are the way they are until they are not and you never really know change is happening until it is on top of you. That and a country that would elect and re-elect a ridiculous person like Barak Obama simply because he is black and has a funny name is capable of anything.

Looking at the GOP race heading into Iowa next week, everyone seems to be certain, but no one agrees on who will win and what it will mean. Nate Silver has been calling the GOP side for Cruz, but he has been wrong a lot lately. Silver missed the Trump phenomenon so badly, it is not unreasonable to think it is due to animus. I don’t follow him enough to know, as I find him to be an obnoxious twerp, who needs to be punched in the face – a lot.

The professional anti-Trump faction is sure Trump will lose in Iowa and they are carrying on like it is a certainty. You can be sure the chattering skulls are ready to race off to the nearest TV station to shout, “I told you so!” The National Review special “Trump Lost!” edition is already in the can. Jim Geraghty has been out talking about how the polls must be wrong because Trump is going to lose. As to who will win, they are all over the map.

The thing is, when nothing goes to form, it’s a good idea to start contemplating the unthinkable. Jerry Falwell just endorsed Trump. That’s on par with the Koch brothers endorsing Bernie Sanders. It’s not just a one-off either. Polls show that Trump is doing very well with Evangelicals so I guess the better analogy is the Libertarian Party putting Bernie Sanders up as their nominee.

That’s the other lesson of the 1992 election. When things change in the culture, everything is up for grabs in politics. The other way to look at it is when the politics are suddenly a scramble, it means the culture is undergoing a structural change. After ’92, we saw the rise of global finance, mass migration and a communications revolution. If Trump wins Iowa, it’s time to start thinking about what the new normal is going to be like.

Jocks & Nerds

Posted on by

Years ago I had a conversation with a young attorney about a business issue. The topic was about a company relying on vendors, marking up those vendor invoices and then billing their clients. The attorney was shocked by it and thought it was probably going to be a problem for his client in the case. I had to explain to him that it was normal practice because that’s how a business makes money.

In this case, the company used a combination of contractors, vendors and their own employees to deliver a service. All of it was billed under a standard rate contractually set between the company and the customers. The customer never saw who was doing the work and they probably did not care. The attorney could not understand why they would charge more to the customer than the vendor was charging them.

I did my best to explain it, but I suspect he was never fully convinced. Even when I carefully explained it using his billing hours as an example, he looked skeptical. He was not a dumb guy. He just did not know about business. Like most lawyers, he was sure he knew everything about everything. You can’t blame him for that. Up to that point, he was probably sure he was the smartest guy in the room most of the time.

I thought about that reading this excellent column by Roger Simon, regarding the National Review meltdown. I’m still chewing over this bit:

Ideology should function as a guide, not a faith, because in the real world you may have to violate it, when the rubber meets the road, as they say.  For those of us in the punditocracy, the rubber rarely if ever meets the road.  All we have is our theories. They are the road for us.  If we’re lucky, we’re paid for them.  In that case, we hardly ever vary them. It would be bad for business.

Trump’s perspective was the reverse.  The rubber was constantly meeting the road.  In fact, it rarely did anything else.  He always had to change and adjust.  Ideological principles were just background noise, barely audible sounds above the jack hammers.

When National Review takes up arms against Trump, it is men and women of theory against a man of action.  The public, if we are to believe the polls, prefers the action.  It’s not hard to see why.  The theory has failed and become increasingly disconnected from the people.  It doesn’t go anywhere and hasn’t for years. I’m guilty of it too. (Our current president is 150% a man of theory.) Too many people — left and right — are drunk on ideology.

There’s a lot to agree with there, but I come up short with the “man of action” line as it strikes me as a veiled reference to fascism, or at least what the commentariat has come to think of as fascism. The argument about Hitler was he did not offer a coherent vision, but he was seen as a man of action, willing to break a few heads to get things done.

Maybe I’m imagining things, maybe not, but I think he is correct in thinking his fellow chattering class members are seeing it that way. Bill Kristol has a hissy-fit posted over at NR today that sounds like the nerdy kid telling the jocks to stop picking on him. That’s where Simon has it right, I think. His people are offended by Trump coming into their safe place. Trump is micro-aggressing the bleep out of them right now.

That explains one part of this, but what about Trump supporters? I was in New England last summer when Trump was just starting to campaign. I was in a bar in a nice, generally liberal town and was struck by how captivated people were by Trump giving a speech somewhere that was being shown on the bar televisions. Something was going on.

Similarly, in the first debate, the snarling bimbo went after Trump about giving money to Democrats and he responded by pointing out that he had to do business in New York and that meant greasing the pols of both parties. I was struck by the look on the faces of the moderators. They were as baffled as that young lawyer I described at the start of this post. Trump may as well have been talking about attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

Here’s the thing, most everyone watching that answer from Trump understood what he was saying. Anyone who owns a business knows the drill. Those who are in decision making positions for a company know the drill. In the real world, you do what you need to do to push the rock up the hill. Trump’s honesty about that was refreshing, thus making the contrast between him and the rest even more stark.

Mark Steyn has it right, I think.

The movement conservatives at National Review make a pretty nice living out of “ideas, ideology, philosophy, policy, and so forth”. The voters can’t afford that luxury: They live in a world where, in large part due to the incompetence of the national Republican Party post-Reagan, Democrat ideas are in the ascendant. And they feel that this is maybe the last chance to change that.

Go back to that line “When Reagan first ran for governor of California…” Gosh, those were the days, weren’t they? But Reagan couldn’t get elected Governor of California now, could he? Because the Golden State has been demographically transformed.

The public is looking for the candidate that can fix the issues of greatest concern to them. They look around and feel like guests in their own country. The two parties want to spend all of their time debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, while millions of foreigners pour over the border. I suspect most Trump supporters would like a better candidate, but they will go with Trump if that means addressing their top concerns.

Reading the comments on Trump stories, I see two camps. In one camp are those having fun watching their guy give wedgies to the nerds. For the first time in a long time, they feel like the guy running for office knows something about their life. The other camp is in shock, believing that if they just huddle closer together, the storm will pass. They appear to be heading for a Dorothy Martin moment.

Hail Caesar!

Posted on by

Political parties seem like a permanent feature of modern Western societies, but there’s no reason to think they are permanent. At the founding of America, parties were looked down upon as a potential problem for a self-governing republic. In Federalist 9 and 10 Madison argued that the proposed constitution would guard against factionalism and was essential to preventing partisan government.

In the 19th century, political parties made a lot of sense simply for organizational reasons. The only way you can stuff the ballot boxes and intimidate voters is with a well-organized ground game. No matter how rich the candidate, he could never overcome the army of poll workers, ward healers and bagmen that the party could deploy in every election. If you wanted to run for office, you had to do so as a party man.

That reality has been with us for a long time, so it is proper to think it is just the way it has to be. Independent runs for president have all ended in tears, mostly because the parties own the system. Attempts at creating third parties in America have failed because the resources involved in pulling it off are just too great. Ross Perot probably came the closest to pulling it off. Maybe the Green Party. Both efforts failed when their famous leader left the stage.

I wonder if what the Trump phenomenon really portends is an end of national parties or at least the decline of the parties as king makers at the national level. Trump is a surprisingly capable politician, but his success is remarkable given that his party and its media operation is blasting him relentlessly. The coordinated assault against him this week is a curious thing in that it looks like they are pushing all of their chips into the middle of the table.

They may be doing exactly that. Trump is spending his own money on local political operators in Iowa and New Hampshire so he can compete at the street level, but without the massive overhang of the consultancy and their party patrons. If Trump manages to win the nomination, and it is looking like a certainty right now, a lot of other rich guys are going to wonder if they could do the same.

One of those is the filthy rich former mayor of New York City, who is thinking about an independent run. Unlike Trump, Bloomy would run as a third party option, but he has a ton of cash and a lot of connections in Progressive circles. It’s not unreasonable to think he could siphon off a lot of the Democrat Party organization for his effort. Given the options on the Democrat side, it’s not unreasonable to think he could do well.

As an aside, how unreasonable is it to think that National Review and The Weekly Standard would come out and support Bloomberg over Trump and Sanders? They agree with him on more issues than they disagree and he would be down with the invade the world/invite the world paradigm. More important, he’s their sort of people.

Anyway, we have billionaires launching rockets into space, planning a Mars voyage and creating robots that promise to become aware and unleash terminators on humanity. That’s all cool stuff but being in charge of the Imperial Army as the temporary Emperor is way cooler. You can be sure they are looking at what Trump is doing and thinking they could do the same thing.

In the past, what has kept rich guys from running for office is the hassle of dealing with party politics. In order to get in the game, you had to suck up to a lot of twerps and losers who have burrowed into the system like weevils. If you can blow past that and assemble your own temporary campaign machine that does all the stuff the party does, but without all the party nonsense, why not do it?

Of course, this is a form of Caesarism, but updated to the modern mass media world. Instead of a cult of personality and bully-boy tactics, it will be mass media strategies and the bribing of interest groups. Americans are used to experiencing elections in the same way they consume talent shows. Having a bunch of rich guys staging these things without the hassle of political parties is not a great leap.

That’s certainly part of what is unnerving Conservative Inc about the Trump campaign. If this crude rich guy can buy his way into the game and then shove aside the commentariat on his way to the nomination, why will anyone bother catering to them in the future? While I think most of the tantrums, we’re seeing are just a way to get attention, some of them are smart enough to see the threat.

The parties will still have a role as the legislative bodies are regulated to the benefit of political parties. As dangerous as Caesarism sounds, the American system allows for the legislature to claw back its authority in hurry if it cares to do it. Maybe the specter of billionaires buying the White House is what’s needed to slap the political parties to their senses and maybe is what’s needed for the Congress to reassert its role in government.

Or maybe we’re doomed.