Then, Now and Tomorrow

Posted on February 7, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Taki post is up and related to the today’s post. The ongoing debate about the future of conservatism is interesting to me. It is good that such a thing is happening, but so far it reveals that we are a long way from having a sensible debate. The participants are still locked into an antiquated mode of thought. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door for subscribers as well.

Recently there has been a slow rolling debate among right-wing intellectuals about the state of conservatism and what comes after conservatism. The New Criterion held a symposium on “common good conservatism.” The James Wilson Institute has been debating originalism and legal conservatism (here, here, here and here). Josh Hammer from Yoram Hazony’s group has also been writing about that topic. This debate has also spilled into the foreign policy realm.

There are plenty of others chiming on the topic, but the starting point, even if it is not acknowledged, is that conservatism is done. Whatever comes next may carry the name, but it cannot be the same thing. Interestingly, the old Buckley crowd is not a part of this debate, nor are the neocons. They are too busy hanging onto their sinecures to think much about what comes next. The paleocons have also been left out of the debate, which is ironic given that they were right all along.

As is to be expected with people who view themselves as political theorists, the back and forth is not always accessible. This is especially true with regards to the debate around conservative jurisprudence. It is in that debate, however, where we see the first little green shoots of realism. In this essay the writer points out that there will never be a great rollback of the school prayer decisions. The main reason is no judge or lawyer would ever think such a thing is proper.

The great transition from the original constitutional order to what we have today did not happen in a vacuum. The people have changed, the institutions have changed and the people running the institutions have changed. The writer points out toward the end that the truth is the original social order that is so popular with “constitutional conservatives” no longer exists. America, from top to bottom, is a different world from the one that produced the Constitution.

This is the problem with the current debate about the state of the nation and especially the state of conservatism. The starting point is always the belief that things can be rolled back or reset to a prior order. It is a political revanchism where the plotters seek to reestablish the old order, but this time the people in charge of that order will not be so willing to change it. The proposed alternatives to conservatism promise a return to the past, without regard for how we got to the present.

If there is going to be a New Right in America then the starting point must be a discussion about how we went from the 18th century liberal political system to the present custodial state. In other words, it means retracing our steps in order to find the point at which America went off the course charted by the Founders and instead embarked on a new path for the country. It is in the essay about school prayer that the original sin begins to come into focus.

The writer points out that those school prayer decisions were the result of the consolidation of judicial power under the incorporation doctrine, which is the doctrine by which portions of the Bill of Rights have been applied to the states. In the case of school prayer, the courts extended the prohibition on the federal government regarding official religion to the states. Later courts extended the definition of “official religion” to include any reference to religion.

Clearly, the Founders never intended the establishment clause to apply to the states, as it was never applied to the states until the 20th century. The question is why did the court suddenly decide to apply parts of the Bill of Right to the states and by what authority did they do this? The answer is the 14th Amendment, passed as part of the constitutional reforms following the Civil War. Of course, the reforms were imposed by the victors as part of the spoils of war.

The Civil War did not happen in a vacuum. The roots of that conflict go back to the English Civil War and the founding of the first colonies. Note that the victors of the American Civil War were not the primary hand drafting the Constitution. It was men of the South, with their roots in the cavalier side of the English Civil war, who carried the day on important debates forming the new Constitution. It was the losers of those debates who carried the day seventy years later.

Another way of framing this is that the constitutional order so beloved by originalists did not hold up very well to challenge. It collapsed in the 19th century and since then the victors of the long running debate dating back to the English Civil war have been trying to refashion a new order and a new society. If conservatives are going to find a new path forward, they must come to grips with the present. That means reexamining the past in order to understand why their preferred model failed.

This is why the current debate over conservatism is sterile. No one in that debate is willing to reconsider the 19th century and the events that transformed the country from that which the Founders designed to what emerged in the 20th century. The events of the 19th century are now holy writ. The second founding doctrine is just as entrenched with conservatives as it is on the Left. In fact, both sides compete for who best can achieve the perfect equality promised by the doctrine.

The starting place for a new conservatism is the acknowledgement that the founding creation failed the test of reality. That naturally leads to a debate as to why it failed, which is a debate about the 19th century. That, in turns, means a rethinking of the 20th century in order to gain a clear understanding of the present. Once a new historical framework is in place, then a New Right can begin to chart a new course for itself and the society in which it operates.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb. Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Wide Right

Posted on February 1, 2022 by thezman

In January, The New Criterion organized a symposium around the topic of the changes in the conservative movement. They invited several writers to respond to the main essay written by Kim R. Holmes, the former Executive Vice President of The Heritage Foundation and former Assistant Secretary of State in the G. W. Bush Administration. The respondents are Ryan T. Anderson, Josh Hammer, Charles R. Kesler, Daniel J. Mahoney, James Piereson, Robert R. Reilly, and R. R. Reno.

Now, if this were a boxing match, it would have been called in the second response to Holmes, written by Josh Hammer, a member of Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism movement. Hammer offers a lengthy critique of conservatism but the subtext is a bit of inescapable reality. The conservative movement, whatever its intensions, was a complete failure. It conserved nothing. In fact, it may be the biggest failure in the history of political movements.

Conservatives often respond to this with the claim that it was conservative foreign policy that defeated communism in the last century. That is true, but the point of defeating communism was to preserve American’s way of life and protect the ancient liberties of Western people. Winning the Cold War was supposed to be a means to an end, not an end in itself. Instead, the peace dividend has been spent up-armoring the administrative class and the increasingly tyrannical security regime.

One reason conservatism is in a crisis is the defenders of the movement refuse to acknowledge this reality, which calls into question their sincerity. The Holmes essay does not mention this fact and instead offers a long critique of the critics. In so doing he inadvertently reveals the source of the crisis within conservatism and the cause of its failure. His defense of John Locke displays an ignorance of why Locke mattered to the Founders and why he matters today.

Locke is considered the father of liberalism because he solved an important problem. Upon what authority should political philosophy rest its claims about politics and human society? If it is not the king and the social order that was passed down to the 17^th century, then what should it be? If it is God, then it logically must be Scripture, but the Gospels are not much help when it comes to creating a political structure to govern society. Jesus had no opinion on parliamentary order.

Locke was a Christian who accepted that God created the world. Since God must be rational, it follows that his creation is rational. Further, it follows that he knew what he was making when he created the world. He would have no need to change those rules, as God does not make mistakes, so it follows that the rules of nature are fixed. Mankind lives in a world of fixed and discoverable rules, which means we can discover the rules that should govern human society.

Simply put, Locke removed religion and Scripture from the equation so that a moral philosophy could rest upon the authority of nature. It is not an accident that the Founders used the phrase, “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence. They were not basing their claims against the King on the words of their favorite philosopher. They were basing their claims on the same authority as their favorite philosopher.

Unlike the Founders, modern conservatives are not interested in the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and instead rest their authority on their favorite historical figures. They are fond of quoting Locke, Jefferson, or Lincoln, especially Lincoln, but these are just men. They can only offer a path to an authority upon which to build a political philosophy. Otherwise, they are as flawed as every man. Locke, for example, believed in the blank slate, which is complete nonsense.

This is why conservatism has been a failure. Without some authority to base their political claims, their opponents are free to dismiss them as mere tactics. From the perspective of the Left, the Founders were just men. On the other hand, the historical process is science and the foundation on which they make their moral claims. Legal and economic arguments are no use against moral arguments, which is why the Left has swept conservatism from the field.

To his credit, Holmes is correct to point out that the National Conservatives are terrified of being associated with identity politics. The trouble is, there is no way to have nationalism without national identity, even if you try to hide that identity behind talk of customs and traditions. Those customs and traditions did not fall from the sky. They are the product of a people defined by the mating decisions of their ancestors and the location of those decisions.

Holmes is also correct to point out that the National Conservatives are wrong about Burke’s influence on the thinking of the Founders. This is an attempt on their part to replace one favorite philosopher with another in order to claim the high ground against establishment conservatives. Further, to pretend that Burke was not well aware of what it meant to be British, to have a British identity, when he was defending the traditions and customs of the empire is to exempt oneself from reality.

The most curious response to Holmes on behalf of the “common good conservatism” side is from Ryan T. Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The group describes itself as “dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy”. He correctly points out the fatal flaw in social contract theory, which is the bedrock of the conservative movement. There is nothing in nature or in Locke’s writing that requires a social contract that only guarantees rights.

The proto-society that is coming together could plausibly agree to sacrifice their rights entirely in order to preserve the commonly held property of the members. The human sciences tell us that this is probably the basis of the first human settlements. Kin groups collaborated with related kin groups to maintain hunting grounds and water supplies. Similarly, they could have come together to protect some natural curiosity with which they held a shared spiritual meaning.

The archeological record suggests that what first brought disparate kin groups together was not an agreement to respect each other’s rights. Instead, it was common spiritual belief. Göbekli Tepe, in what is now Turkey, is known as humanity’s first temple. It was constructed by pastoral people as some a shared religious site. It is assumed that agriculture caused people to settle down, but this site offers another plausible reason to settle and cooperate, shared belief in a common set of gods.

That has always been the trouble with social contract theory. It is a thing that exists as a logical construct to solve the problem of natural rights theory. That is, lacking an authority on which to base natural rights, this imaginary contract between people is conjured from thin air to be that foundation stone for the theory. Natural rights theory assumes an axiom for which there is no evidence in history. Further, if such a contract existed, it probably had nothing to do with rights.

An interesting observation by Robert R. Reilly in his critique of the integralists is that “They wish to find themselves in a pre-Reformation Christendom.” Integralism is revanchism, which has run through the conservative movement since the 1960’s. The integralists may dream of returning to Camelot, but the current conservatives dream of returning to 1980. The neoconservatives dream of returning to 1950’s Brooklyn. Conservatism is the promise of a “do-over” where this time the good guys win.

Reilly also offers up this strange argument against the common good. “A love of one’s own can only take one so far. One naturally loves one’s own, but is one’s own always deserving of love? If this love lacks grounding beyond a bare attachment to one’s own, how is it different from others’ preference for their own? Strict nationalism fails to the extent that it does not take into account natural law and natural rights, which together condemn the universal state and expose its inherently tyrannical nature.”

Conservatives used to condemn this sort of universalism to the woolly-headed intellectuals who spent too much time reading Marx. Conservatism simply assumed that custom and convention are what allowed people to live peaceably. Civil society was the product of generations of trial and error, the result being a collection of compromises we call culture. There could never be a universal state, as there can never be a universal culture, because there is no such thing as universal man.

Like all modern conservatives, Reilly is terrified of what naturally flows from putting the interests of your own ahead of strangers. Conservatives have accepted the left-wing claim that anything exclusionary is exploitive and immoral. Loving your child more than the child of the stranger inevitably leads to fascism, according to the theology of the modern Left. Whether it is out of fear, cowardice or stupidity, contemporary conservatives have accepted the morality of the open society.

As a result, they have no choice but to reject that the common good can even exist and they busy themselves making the conservative case for the open society. In fairness, the common good conservatives suffer from this same affliction. Yoram Hazony’s book, The Virtue of Nationalism, tries to make the case for nationalism, but is repeatedly poleaxed by the fact that nationalism can only be rooted in biology, history and location. It also must be exclusive.

This is the problem faced by all of the common good conservatives. Unless they are prepared to make the case that their program includes all of humanity, they must define the who and whom of this new utilitarian conservatism. Who is inside the domain covered by the common good and who lies outside of that domain? More important, who decides? Further, upon what authority will this person be selected and what is the authority upon which they will rely to draw the boundaries?

The common good conservatives are silent on this, even though they privately will confess that their concept of a nation is the same one anathematized by the Left. The Finns should decide what is best for the Finns, even if that means excluding non-Finns from their lands. By nature of the mating decisions of their ancestors in their ancestral lands, they have the sole authority over what it means to be Finnish and what is in the best interests of the Finnish people.

Again, the common good conservatives understand this reality, but they also know that they will be hurled into the void if they acknowledge the obvious. To their credit, the neoconservatives have always understood this and limited their scope to foreign affairs. Their social criticism was always just window dressing that never dared question the morality of the open society. Kim Homes, someone who has traveled in neoconservative circles his whole life, certainly gets this.

Taken as a whole this debate bumps into the question of whether or not it is possible to have conservatism in a democratic society. As Russell Kirk pointed out, the first principle of conservatism is the belief that there exists an enduring moral order. In a political system where the truth, including moral truth, is decided by 50% plus one, there is no room for an enduring moral order. The evidence of this is all around us as men put on sundresses and declare themselves women.

The Founders understood the danger of democracy. This is why they explicitly said the new constitution provided checks against it. The democratic elements included in the new political order were bounded by limits on the state. Modern conservatives reject this and instead think they can achieve conservative ends by convincing 50% plus one to support their claims. They excitedly talk about democracy, because they are operating under the belief they can win over the fickle mobs.

This is because modern conservatism has abandoned that first principle of conservatism. The libertarians, the neoconservatives and the civic nationalists find the idea of an enduring moral order as horrifying as their supposed enemies on the Left. Like the modern Progressive, the modern conservative has made the shifting will of the people the sole authority. In such a world there can be no permanence, no tradition and no appeal to custom. Therefore, there can be no conservatism.

Whether it is the revanchism of the integralists or the sterile nationalism of Hazony’s brand of conservatism, they fail for the same reason mainstream conservatism has failed. Without a moral foundation upon which to make political claims, conservatism is nothing more than a negotiating position within the democratic system. It is why today’s Progressive fad turns into tomorrow’s conservative principle. The modern conservative always starts from the last Progressive victory.

That is the crisis in modern conservatism. For there to be a legitimate conservative movement, it must first come to terms with what it is it seeks to defend. Then it must answer why this must be preserved. These are moral questions that Locke answered by looking at the natural world as an orderly place that operates by fixed rules. As such, human happiness lies in the orderly society that operates under a rational and persistent set of rules.

This naturally means a rejection of the Hegelian theory of history that is the moral basis of both the Left and the prevailing moral order. The hand of history is not carrying mankind to some promised land where all moral questions are answered. A genuine alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy is not a debate about its factual inaccuracies, but a rejection of it on moral grounds. That requires a courage that modern conservatism and common good conservatism are unable to muster.

Many Realties

Posted on January 31, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. After sending it off I thought about the idea of world building, so I addressed than a bit today. The Sunday podcast is up behind the green door and it is mostly about the usual stuff.

The old paleo-conservative gag about the demand for Nazis exceeding the available supply has become something of an iron law of the universe. Each generation discovers that the American Left is obsessed with fascists, white supremacists, the Klan and so on, despite these things no longer being real. Other than some cartoonish play-acting by those desperate for attention, these things are no longer real. They certainly play no role in politics or the general culture.

The lack of supply, however, has been no deterrence, especially now that the internet allows people to create these reality from thin air. The intensively on-line far-left invests all of its time finding someone they can label as the bogeyman or one the many members of the bogeyman army. The Antifa subculture, for example, is organized around the hunt for fascists and white supremacists. They spend all day looking for new baddies and obsessing over the prior baddies.

This being America, this means there is a subgenre of fringe-left media that caters to this subculture with ghost stories about Nazis. Hoffer said that all mass movements in America become a corporation, a racket or a business. The world of on-line hate-hunters is a racket that supplies world building materials to the intensively on-line Left so they can maintain their fantasy space. The witch hunters need witches, so there are people supplying them with witches.

This obsession with imaginary fascists is written off as the work of the mentally unstable, which is true, but it is more than that. What these people are doing is world-building within the alternative reality of their own creation. They live in a reality that says they are the guardians of the future utopia, keeping the world safe from its enemies, which come in many styles and guises. In order to keep this fantasy going, they have to find characters that fit the role of the villain.

In a way, this subculture has become something like the massive on-line role playing games that sprang up a dozen years ago. People can join, but they have to assume a character and then join a band on-line. This band is a set of social media accounts that support one another in their imaginary struggle. Doxing is both a weapon and a world building tool. The revelation of someone in league with the Dark One helps perpetuate the fantasy by supplying social proof to the members.

This is why these people look so outlandishly weird when they turn up in public to riot with other fantasy groups or hold what amounts to a street convention. They take their on-line character out into the real world, but the real world does not have these sorts of people or the bogeymen they are chasing. Antifa, BLM, furries, cosplayers, the alt-right and so on are normal in the alternative reality of their subculture, because the rules of that subculture have been created to normalize this stuff.

That is how to view the now defunct alt-right. Like the intensely on-line far-left, the alt-right formed up on-line as a form of escapism. They quickly became a foil for the intensely on-line far-left, because the interaction with that subculture shaped them into the much needed opponent. The intensely on-line libertarians became intensely on-line fascists because that gave them an enemy, the intensely on-line antifascists, who were happy to have the new villain in their version of reality.

It is not just the intensely on-line far-left that lives in an alternative reality. The anti-Trump movement quickly evolved into an alternative reality. Of course, its was the existing alternative realties of neoconservatives, the intensely on-line far-left and others that coalesced around this new boss introduced to the game. Trump allowed these alternative realties to align against a commonly imagined enemy. It is why they cannot stop talking about him, even after he has been defeated.

Eric Hoffer famously said that mass movements can survive without a god but they must always have a devil. This seems to be true of these alternative realities that are shaping the reality of the modern age. The inherent conflict with reality is masked by the obsession with imaginary adversaries. This has now become a form of world building where the players invest their time inventing new bosses to fight, always based on the general archetype required of their alternative reality.

While this phenomenon is mostly a product of the internet, it is jumping from the virtual into the physical world. The ridiculous Spotify story is a good example. The people running this company are responding to a fictional controversy, when they could easily ignore it. This is because many of the people who work at the firm are also deep into one of these alternative realities where Joe Rogan is the devil. In other words, the alterative realty is spilling into the reality of the CEO.

Of course, the people occupying the C-suites at these companies are not exactly living in reality either. Theirs is a world that is as alien to the daily reality of normal people as the reality of the intensely on-line far-left. In their world, the gesture counts for more than an action. If the Spotify CEO were to tell these loons to bleep-off, that would be viewed as a bad gesture in his reality. It would suggest he is not sensitive to their perspectives and in that reality, insensitivity is a mortal sin.

Much like the intensely on-line far-left, our ruling class is now increasingly occupied with world building in order to make their reality more realistic. The Covid panic is a great example, where a whole industry grew up to feed materials to the world builders of this fantasy game of pandemic. A bizarre aspect of the mass media age is that the ruling class now has an unquenchable thirst for crises. In the absence of real problems, they busy themselves creating them.

Of course, there are real problems, but those problems are boring. Like the kid who has played the game so many times he no longer finds it interesting, the ruling elite no longer has an interest in fixing roads or addressing the issues of society. As Pete Buttigieg made clear the other day, fixing potholes is boring. Instead, he will focus on make traffic fatalities more equitable. This new quest will allow him to have much more fun and feel much more important.

Diverging realities is not exactly new. The French Revolution featured at least two alternative realities. There was the reality of the Old Regime that had lost contact with reality in the late middle-ages. Then there was the new reality of the radicals, forming up in salons and public houses. When the reality of the Old Regime was no longer sustainable in the face of reality, it collapsed. Into the void rushed the new false reality of the Jacobins, which soon foundered on reality.

What is unique about this age is both the novelty of these alternative realities and the proliferation of them on-line. America is becoming a balkanized collection of alternative realties increasingly disconnected from actual reality. The tech giants are now promising to strap VR goggles on every face, which will only accelerate this phenomenon. Instead of people taking soma and living in a dream state, the drug of this brave new world will be the virtual reality and the world building it requires.

Legal Insurrection

Posted on January 27, 2022 by thezman

One of the features of every societal crisis is that the elites of the society stop enforcing the rules of society, especially on themselves. Prior to the collapse of the Roman Republic, the elites started making exceptions to the rules. In the short term they seemed practical, but in the long term these exceptions undermined the moral logic of the rules entirely. Before long, a man in Gaul could decide that the rules no longer applied and he was free to do as he pleased.

This is at the core of the current crisis in the American empire. The rules have become arbitrary with regards to the elite. In turn the elites no longer enforce basic principles that are the foundation of the country. One of the principles is property. It used to be understood that you own the produce of your labor. That was the default and infringement on your ownership had to clear a high bar. Today, the powerful can steal your property without consequence.

This collapse of property rights is at the core of this story out of Florida about a law banning theft of private images. A local politician says nude photos of her were stolen and distributed on-line without her consent. She is leading the charge to change the law regarding ownership of your image. She is also doing the rounds to draw attention to herself, but also raise awareness of the issue. She thinks there should be federal law to protect ownership of your image.

In truth, it used to be understood that you own you and therefore you own whatever you produce, including your image. Forty years ago, a television show maker would have to get a signed release to use footage of you walking down a city street. They did not have to pay you, but you did not have to grant them permission. Today, your image can be freely distributed on-line and you have no recourse. Similarly, your activity on-line can be used by others and you can do nothing about it.

Reasserting property rights to include things like your image, your internet activity, your resume and other non-tangible products of your labor would go a long way to restoring order to society. One reason for that is it would torpedo the business model of the tech monopolies, who rely on your free labor to make a profit. What Facebook calls ad revenue is actually the sale of user activity and content. They sell this data in bulk to marketers, government and corporate interests.

If Facebook had to get a signed release from you every time they sell your data their business model would collapse in a month. Their margins would collapse even if their user were okay with being exploited this way, because the cost of this model would be shifted back onto their balance sheet. The same is true of the other big socials. All of them would have to rethink their business model. This would most likely take place in bankruptcy court as there is no easy answer for them.

Of course, for this to work it would require the return of the old model for enforcing contracts, especially contracts of adhesion or one-way contracts. That is what the terms of service is called in the law. It is a take it leave it offer. These sorts of contracts used to come under careful scrutiny by the courts. The reason is they saw a powerful interest issuing terms to weak interests, so the way to level the playing field was the court would act on behalf of the weak interest.

The reason that the back of car rental contracts all look the same is they went through the legal process over many years. That standard language has been approved by the courts and will therefore be enforced by the courts. That means the car rental firm does not willy-nilly change the language during your rental. The same process has been applied to residential leases and utility contracts. The same legal standards should be applied to terms of service agreements.

A world where the big social media players have to get permission to alter their terms of service and those terms have to be legally clear and concise, is a world where they cannot abuse their authority. They go back to being passive service providers, rather than arbiters of truth. In a world where they have to respect your property rights, they revert back to a traditional business that offers a service in exchange for a fee, rather than a monopoly with socialized costs.

Of course, to return to a rule-based world requires Congress and the courts to rediscover the rule of law and the advantages of an orderly society. That would require them to suddenly get the courage and morality to turn down the massive bribes that flow into Washington from the tech firms. The great lesson Silicon Valley learned during the Microsoft antitrust case is that everyone in Washington comes with a price tag and there is always a sale going on in Washington.

An old adage about money is that if you need hard money to control your corrupt elites, your corrupt elites will find a way around hard money. This axiom of history applies to the law as well. if you need to codify the basics of a civilized society in order to control your elites, those elites will get around the laws of civilized society. That is the fundamental problem in America. Unless and until the elites are replaced with and by a moral people, the chaos will continue until collapse.

The Last Stop

Posted on January 20, 2022 by thezman

Way back in the 1980’s, it was popular for members of the conservative movement to claim that the Left had run out of ideas. It was true to the extent that the Left had run out of policy ideas, having used them up in the preceding four decades. Conservatives were brimming with ideas on how to fix those policies. The big talk of rolling them back was really just a politically astute way of making reform look radical. The Right was always about fixing what the Left had broken.

The truth is though, those old progressive ideas from the early part of the century had run their course, but a new set of ideas were percolating in the academy. What we think of today as cultural Marxism and “wokeness” was coming together in the flophouses and brothels of left-wing politics. After the Cold War ended, these ideas started to take over the Left until we reached the present crisis. This crisis, however, seems to be the end of the line for radical thinking.

You see it with the obsession with Trump. Stable minded people with an agenda, even a nutty agenda, would have erased their old foe from the history books after dispatching him in the 2020 election. Instead, they cannot stop thinking about him and the army of imaginary bogeymen they think he leads. The Democrats have now hatched a plot to charge him with sedition so he cannot run for office in 2024. In reality, it is just a way to keep him alive as an adversary.

To normal people, this looks like madness. The truth is, Trump is old news and by the time 2024 rolls around he will probably not be a lock to win the nomination. This Ann Coulter column is a good indication that many of the people who supported Trump in 2016 are ready for someone new. Coulter’s judgement on these things is not always the best, she was a fan of Mitt Romney, but she speaks for Populist Inc. They are ready to move on and the Democrats would be wise to let them.

That said, Trump is a master marketer and he could very well retool his act as a revenge tour in 2024. Given the state of things right now and the chaos that looms on the horizon, the public could be ready to burn it all down. The GOP will surely win both house this fall then set about finking on their voters. The next presidential election could be a battle to win over factions in a purple-faced rage at the politicians. In that environment, Trump could look like the sober choice.

Still, the Left won the revolution and should be busy enjoying the fruits of victory but instead they long to return to the battle. The reason is the ideology that fueled the revolution is turning out to be nothing but clever words with no truth content. There is no end of history, no promised land of equality. Rather than being a strength, diversity has turned out to be a clever marketing scheme by corporate communists who live like white nationalist while lecturing everyone about race.

What the Left has quickly become is a glaring example of negative identity. They are not for anything that exists. Instead, they are a laundry list of things they oppose, with the claim that these things stand in the way of paradise. The fact that many of the things they rage against do not, in fact, exist, makes the agony all the more severe. It turns out that bellowing about white supremacy, something that does not exist, is not as fulfilling as screaming in the face of someone wearing a red hat.

In the movie Conspiracy about the 1942 Wannsee Conference, one of the actors tells another a story about a man who hated his father and loved his mother. When his mother died, he did not weep at her grave. When his father died, he was inconsolable, crying like a baby. The lesson of the story was that the man had defined his life by his hatred of his father. When his father was gone, he lost that which gave meaning and purpose to his life. That was why he was crying.

The American Left and their political party are now that man weeping at the grave of Donald Trump’s presidential career. This is, in part, why they cannot let go of the Covid madness, despite their party’s efforts. The mask is a reminder of better times when they had a reason to get up every morning. It is why their party is putting on the insurrection show for them. It is a bit of nostalgia for better times. It is why they hope to reanimate the Trump movement with an indictment.

That is the trouble with negative identity. A political movement organized around it can only end in sorrow. If it wins, it loses the reason to exist. If it fails, it runs the risk of retribution from the people it assaulted and it runs the risk of internal dissention over not having defeated the enemy. Negative identity becomes a self-made Alamo, a desperate last stand by people afraid of the future. It is why these movements attract so many weirdos and degenerates.

Unlike in the 1980’s, the sputtering of the prevailing radicalism is unlikely to give way to a new radicalism, at least not from the Left. Cultural Marxism was a reaction to the failing of economic Marxism. There is no next step in the underlying theory of history that animated both ideologies. This really is the end of the road for the theoretical framework that gave birth to Utopian radicalism. What comes next will probably be outside the old model of Left and Right.

The Crisis Of Doubt

Posted on January 19, 2022 by thezman

A basic requirement of every human society is that it must have a set of rules that define the society and the people in it. It is this shared understanding of what defines the society that keeps the thing together. “Who we are” is defined by “what we do” and it is the commonsense of the people. People living in a monarchy take the king and the nobility for granted. To question the legitimacy of the king is to question the very nature of society and the rules that define it.

In modern America, the experts who run the country have become one of these fixed things that everyone accepts. For example, the head of the Federal Reserve runs the banking system and controls the money supply. Since Alan Greenspan made the job famous, Americans have just accepted that the person in this job is responsible for keeping the economy from danger. He does not set taxes or control spending, but he makes sure the economy avoids catastrophe.

This general assumption is not without merit. It was the Federal Reserve that pulled the country out of stagflation in the 1980’s. They kept the Savings & Loan crisis from creating a bank run. In the 1990’s, they organized the bailout of Long Term Capital Management and then navigated the Dot-Com bust. They came to the rescue of the global economy in the mortgage crisis. So far, they have managed to prevent the Covid panic from cratering the economy.

There is a lot one can quibble with in that list and many will say that those crises were the fault of the bankers, including the Fed. To most people though, the mysterious group of people who run the economy are one thing you can trust. Even though trust in government at all levels has declined sharply over the last few decades, the Federal Reserve remains the most trusted institution. Most years, the Fed chairman has better approval than the president.

In a world where people assume there is an answer to every problem and an expert able to find the answer, there is an assumption that whatever problems crop up, the people in charge will find the solution. This is what makes managerialism both possible and tolerable. If the experts keep getting things wrong, what is the point of having a society run by experts? People put up with the metastasizing set of rules because there is a general trust that there is logic behind them.

This trust in experts is not new. It has been a defining characteristic of American society since at least the 19th century. Taylorism was the attempt to use science to improve management of companies in the 1880’s. That gave birth to the Efficiency Movement, which sought to apply engineering principles to social policy. What we think of as the Left in America grew out of this belief that social reform could be achieved by experts changing the rules of society to achieve the desired outcome.

The fact is the strength of the American system over the last century has been this faith in the experts to find the right answer. When things go wrong, the current experts are fired and new experts are brought in to solve the problem. Elections have been an indirect review of the experts class. If the people are not happy, they vote for the other party who come in with new experts. If things go well, then the party is rewarded with a good election the next time.

That is what makes the current crisis so serious. Most people think the experts badly bungled the Covid problem. The experts said we had two weeks to bend the curve and two years into it the curve is not bent. The vaccine was supposed to be the great triumph of science and technology and it is looking like it is not only not working but possibly a billion dollar boondoggle. The last two years have been a massive blow to the credibility of science in modern America.

Then you have the economic troubles. Most people assumed there would be some trouble from the Covid panic. You cannot close down the economy for months and not have consequences. Unlike those prior economic crises, the Fed is not skillfully navigating this one. Empty shelves and spirally prices are not what people expect from the expert class. Things that could be acquired in days now take months because the supply chain is a chaotic mess.

The deeper problem is the old habit of just voting for the out-party when things are not doing well has not been working either. People voted for Obama to close the books on the history of race. Instead, race relations got sharply worse. Obama was supposed to end the forever wars and he expanded them. Trump was the shot across the bow by the people and the system responded with a four year tantrum. Biden was supposed to be the return to normal and we have chaos instead.

This is why 70% of Americans think the country is in a serious crisis. They are not puzzling it out like this, but they just sense that the system has broken and there is no one around with an understanding of how to fix it. One of the paradoxes of the current age is the people in charge say we are in the middle of a crisis, but then wage jihad against anyone proposing a way out of the crisis. Their solution to “save democracy” is to eliminate any trace of it from society.

The core of the current crisis is that no one can honestly answer the question that is the basis of all human organization, who are we? It is no longer easy to say what it means to be an American. The commonsense that are the rules of society are no longer making sense, which calls into question the basics of society. We used to be a people who assumed the experts would eventually get it right. Now we are a people wondering if there is such a thing as experts at all.

Little Revolutions

Posted on January 18, 2022 by thezman

Revolutions come when people suddenly realize that everyone else is privately thinking the same things about the current arrangements. Most people tend to keep their grievances private. Complaining is boring and considered bad form even in the worst of times, so people tend to keep their grievances to themselves. It is when they begin to notice that everyone else has similar complaints that the cascading effect turns complaints into demands and then into rebellion.

It is why the corporate communists who dominate the official social media platforms like Twitter are more deluded than they seem. Their entire public life is nothing but a litany of complaints, shared with other miserable wrecks on-line. They literally know everyone who shares their grievances, as they are all in the same groups. The only awakening that will happen from their endless griping is that the rest of society will realize that these people are nuts and need to be pushed back to the fringe.

A version of that took place a couple of weeks ago when Douglas Murray was assigned the task of purging Pedro Gonzalez. Murray took issue with Gonzalez making sport of various internationalist types on Twitter. Gonzalez was doing the “physiognomy is real” thing where he posted pics of the people he was mocking. Murray responded with, “Mr. Gonzalez spent his holiday weekend bringing what many have worked hard to relegate to the gutter into respectable conservative circles.”

This is an old stand-by for the neocons. Starting in the 1980’s they have slandered anyone who opposed their sociopathic agenda as anti-Semites or racists. The fact that the favorite tool of neoconservatism has always been the favorite tool of the far-left is not an accident. Despite their claims, the neocons were never conservative. Theirs is an ideology of the Left. They imagine a new world order where they sit atop as the moral arbiters, using extreme force to impose their will.

That incident was not all that interesting, but what is interesting is that few people bother to notice and those who did mocked Douglas Murray. His own comment section reads like satire cooked up by the anti-Semites. Many had to be trolls having a laugh at the expense of the geezers. On Twitter, Murray was mocked as a relic from an age in which people were still fooled by neoconservatives. Gonzalez just laughed the whole thing off as the rantings of an old man.

While a tempest in a teapot, there was a time when a bigfoot chattering skull like Murray could have someone thrown into the void this way. Bill Buckley was used this way back in the 1990’s when Bill Kristol forced him to denounce Buchanan. This trick worked thirty years ago but today it gets little more than a shrug. What people did notice is that it did not work. The ad hominem and guilt by association stuff is no longer the super weapon it was thirty years ago. The world has changed.

It is not just that these tactics do not work it is that they increasingly sound like the rantings of old people complaining about the world changing. This column from George Will before Christmas is a good example. His quill pen act was effective into the Bush years, but now it seems anachronistic and a bit ridiculous, like a man wearing a denim jacket with “disco forever” spelled out in rhinestones on the back. It reads like something that should have been written 40 years ago.

The tattered look of these old tactics also reveals the general shabbiness of the arguments behind the name calling. Will’s claims about individualism are pure nonsense and his claim that nationalism is collectivism is ridiculous. How did this man get through high school with such nonsense in his head? In other words, the datedness makes it easier to see that these people were never smart. Neoconservatism, like so-called conservatism, was a tactic, not a set of ideas.

It is not just among the chattering skulls that we are seeing a change. All of sudden, without anyone noticing, Gab is no longer the bogeyman. Hundreds of right-wing pols have joined and legitimate political players like Rasmussen have joined because they see that is where the crowd is going, the crowd they need to survive. People have noticed that the biggest players on the planet tried to destroy Torba and his company, but he simply refused to buckle to them.

Of course, this change in attitudes reflects the growing divide in society. Half of the people who voted for Joe Biden support internment camps for dissidents and house arrest for the non-complaint. Behind every double mask is someone who would volunteer to be a camp guard. One of the causes of revolution is that there is always some portion of society willing to support the regime. Disordered minds seek the order of the bloody fist imposing its will on society.

Those people, the fringe crazies who have been allowed to run free in the public square, are a fixture in human society. A central part of every human society is maintaining the rules that define the society. This means keeping the crazies under control and away from the levers of power. That is, perhaps, what we are beginning to see with these recent events. People are rejecting the moral claims of these people and living their lives in spite of them.

There is a great scene in the movie Braveheart in which the main character captures the leader of the kings guard. He looks down at first, as was required when addressing a superior man, but then he looks up into the man’s eyes as an equal. It is a great scene, because it reflects how control is exercised and broken. It seems that many are now willing to look moral scoundrels like Murray in the eyes and give them the treatment they so richly deserve.

The Myth Of Meritocracy

Posted on January 17, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. Not related to the topic of the day, but a topic that is becoming more important every day. The Sunday podcast is up behind the green door and it is mostly about the struggles of Mumbly Joe and his crew.

Marilyn Mosby has been the State’s Attorney for Baltimore since 2015, despite the fact she has been under federal investigation for years. A federal grand jury indicted her last week on two counts of perjury and two counts of making false statements on loan applications for two Florida vacation homes. Mosby applied for loans against her retirement account, exploiting a CARES Act provision for those hurt financially by the Covid-19 panic, despite never having been affected.

These may seem like petty charges, but as is often the case with public corruption investigations, this is the opening gambit in a broader investigation. Mosby’s husband has also been living under a dark cloud for years. He is the current President of the Baltimore City Council. The two of them owe the IRS over $45,000 in back taxes, despite making close to half a million a year from the city. Their lifestyle does not comport with what their financials indicate.

For her part, Mosby is promising to fight. She claims the charges are a plot by her political opponents and, of course, the invisible army of white supremacists that secretly control this racist society. The fact that Baltimore is 70% black and the political establishment in the city is 100% black does not matter. Mosby has been doing the rounds, claiming she is innocent and playing the race card. It is the usual theater of the absurd that has come to define city politics.

Public corruption is part of politics and it seems to be much more common in democratic politics. The salary for elected officials is low relative to the people who underwrite their political careers. Unlike all the other entertainment businesses, the stars of politics do not make the majority of the box office. It is the wealthy donors and lobbyists who benefit the most, so there is a natural resentment and a temptation to take a little more than what is allowed.

Compounding this arrangement is the fact that corruption is often permitted, if you are in the right part of the business. The Congressman who represents Mosby in Washington is allowed to trade on insider information, for example. He can take information known only to members of Congress, use it to front run the stock market. From the perspective of local politicians, this must seem terribly unfair, which only adds to the culture of corruption and the temptation to steal.

All that aside, Mosby is a good example of how the concept of a meritocracy does not hold up in a multicultural society. She is not in the job because of her sterling legal career or because she has done important things for the community. She was placed in the job because it looked good for her benefactors. In fact, this is the story of her life from grammar school to now. Mosby has been pushed along by the desire for salivation by members of the managerial elite.

Mosby was born and raised in Boston. Both of her parents were police officers and her grandfather was a policeman. He was one of the first black cops in the city, part of a program to boost the fortunes of black people in the city. She was sent to nice public schools as part of a program to boost the fortunes of black students. The METCO program is designed to get black students into college by placing them in predominantly white high schools outside the city.

Even though Boston has many colleges that love METCO students and New England is full of well-regarded liberal arts colleges, Mosby wound up at Tuskegee, a private historically black college in Alabama. Then by some miracle she wound up at Boston College Law. Despite graduating from one of the better law schools in the country, she could not find a paid position. Then by another miracle, she hooked on as Assistant State’s Attorney for Baltimore, a city with which she has no connections.

Mosby’s tenure as State’s Attorney for Baltimore, a position she has held since 2015, is charitably described as amusingly inept. During the Freddy Gray crisis, she often appeared disoriented at press conferences. She then declared jihad against the police department and over-charged the cops involved. The police department stopped arresting bad guys, crime shot up and the case against the cops collapsed. In time it may be seen as the peak of her political career.

The fact is Mosby should never have been put in this position. She is not qualified for the job and has no connection to the city. She was placed here because her sponsors thought she ticked certain boxes and she did not ask too many questions. Like Mortimer and Randolph from Trading Places, they thought they could make her a national political figure for reasons that had nothing to do with the public good. Merit had nothing to do with her getting placed in this position.

Defenders of this system will say that lots of white males benefit from connections and favors in their career. Private colleges, for example, give special consideration to legacy applicants, which is often affirmative for rich white people. Politics has always been a game of connections. You make the right friends who then help you along the way on the promise you will help them when the time comes. Mosby, some would argue, is just what is to be expected in a diverse democracy.

While true, it is not a defense of meritocracy or even diversity. In fact, it acknowledges that objective merit has no role in a liberal democracy. Instead, it is about the spring of democracy, which is morality. Those who champion the prevailing orthodoxy are rewarded while those who do not are excluded from the halls of power. Mosby was good for the new religion of diversity and inclusion, so she was handed the winning lottery ticket in the game of life.

In fairness, the ruling class of America does concede this. They are always going on about how success is the result of privilege. If you are born with the right characteristics, you get opportunities denied to others. The problem, of course, is this puts the lie to the foundation of managerialism. Rule by expert does not make any sense if the experts are just the product of random chance. If Mosby is the legal expert for the city, then what is the point of having rule by expert?

Mosby is just a minor figure in the provinces, but the entire political structure is built on this feeder system. Managerialism is supposed to select for and promote the very best, but instead it selects and promotes the most fashionable at the moment. Such a system cannot survive contact with reality for very long. When rule by expert becomes rule by bourgeoise social fashion, disaster is waiting to happen. It is why the future of managerialism is a city like Baltimore.

The Praetorian Psyop

Posted on January 13, 2022 by thezman

The Pentagon announced that it will be conducting guerilla warfare training in North Carolina in the coming weeks. The point of the exercise is to train American soldiers to battle “seasoned freedom fighters”, according to the Army. They say they made the announcement so that the public would not be shocked by the sound of weapons or the sight of the soldiers conducting war games. The exercises are going to be conducted on private lands in the western part of the state

This announcement coincides with the Department of Justice announcing the formation of a specialized unit focused on domestic terrorism. According to the DOJ, “We have seen a growing threat from those who are motivated by racial animus, as well as those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies.” What they are saying is the hysterical reaction to the January 6 protests is entirely justified as there is an invisible army out there making bombs.

Many assume this is about the ongoing shift toward treating all opposition to the regime as domestic terrorism. The color revolution they orchestrated against Trump will become a full-time revolution. Politicians will go on about the threat to our democracy while agents of the secret police drag people off for made up crimes. Liberal democracy is in its terror phase. The gross violation of rights is justified by the perpetual state of emergency over the alleged threat to the system.

There is some of that, for sure, but the FBI has been framing people as domestic terrorists for generations. They used to work with organized crime to frame people for murders committed by gangsters. That made the FBI look good and they did not have to do any real work. They orchestrated antiwar protests in the 1960’s and racial crimes in the South during the civil rights era. They framed too many people to count during the Bush years in the name of fighting Islamic terrorism.

In other words, the FBI and the rest of the intelligence agencies have never needed a reason to abuse the rights of Americans. The reason these organizations came into existence at the same time the American empire went global is every empire needs a secret police to prevent domestic enemies. Empires do not treat the core population very well, so they have to worry that the core population will get tired of sharing the wealth and revolt against their rulers.

There is another reason for these announcements. The intelligence agencies have broken free of civilian oversight. We saw this in the Trump years when they spied on his campaign and tried to frame any number of people in order to perpetuate the cover-up now known as the Russian collusion hoax. Chuck Schumer told Trump in public that he better not take on these agencies as they have a six million ways to get him. The politicians fear the intelligence community.

A big part of their power is the ability of these agencies to perpetuate fear among the people in the political class. It is why they tried to frame Congressman Matt Gaetz for sex trafficking early last year. Every member of Congress looked at what was happening and thought about their younger days. If they could ring up a sitting member of Congress for being a party boy in his youth, they will do anything. Also note how the media did not report on the disposition of the case.

That is what is going on with these ostentatious displays over the alleged domestic terrorism threat. The FBI and DOJ looked at the way the political class reacted to the January 6 protests and realized they could use their fear as a tool of control. A few times a year they will arrest some patsies for trying to attack a politician and then use these as examples at public hearings. The FBI will never have to answer another difficult question from Congress.

This is also a nice bit of insurance in case the people screw up again and vote Trump back into office. The FBI and DOJ assume that Trump will do what they would do if the roles were reversed and that is seek revenge. Any digging around in the FBI or DOJ will be met with howling about Trump’s links to domestic terrorism. The Russian collusion hoax will be replaced by the insurrection hoax. The media, of course, already knows the drill so they will be all over this too.

There is another aspect to this. Orwell noted how authoritarian regimes needed an enemy to rally the people against. He was a socialist so he naturally thought a traitor to the cause made for the best villain. Emmanuel Goldstein from 1984 and Snowball from Animal Farm were both modeled after Trotsky. Liberal democracy, on the other hand, just needs non-democratic enemies. They do not have to be from the ruling class to be a useful villain to rally support.

In the last thirty years, the empire has had many types of Muslim baddies to use as the designated threat to democracy. The American police state was built as a defense against this alleged threat. Russia has been conjured into a global threat to democracy for the same reason. Now they are manufacturing all sorts of domestic baddies to be the great threat to the system. The intelligence agencies are always right there to confirm the regimes worst fears.

It is not that people are sitting around saying, “We’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen.” This fear of what lies outside the snow globe that is imperial politics just comes naturally to people who have to no real purpose. Politics in a managerial state is ceremonial, having no real impact on life. Despite their lofty titles, the people in the political system feel utterly helpless. Fear and paranoia are the natural consequences of their impotence.

In the end, nothing much will change for the Dirt People. When the FBI needs some trophies to display to Congress, they will round up the usual suspects. Sure, many now wriggle through the net as even the dumbest have caught on to how this works, but there is always at least one idiot willing to play along. Otherwise, the domestic terrorism unit will be creating security theater for the political class. They will be the narrator telling them to fear what lies outside the Capital Beltway.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

The Crisis of Gerontocracy

Posted on January 12, 2022 by thezman

Anyone who has had to plan for the departure of a long time employee or co-worker knows that it is more than just replacing their work product. People who have been in an organization for a long time have a gravity to them. Their personal style, their way of going about their business, changes the work habits of those around them, so when they leave lots of things will change. There are unknown unknowns that you can never account for, but you can anticipate to some degree.

This is something indirectly raised in this Wall Street Journal story about the possible return of Hillary Clinton. The authors are long-serving political operatives tied to the Clinton political machine, so it is not unreasonable to assume they were instructed to write this and get it posted in regime media. They picked the Wall Street Journal because it speaks to the right-wing of the political elite. The idea is to position Hillary Clinton, of all people, as a unifier of sorts.

There is a bit of the old Clinton triangulation going on here. The way this works is the left-side of the political class led the charge to get rid of Trump, but they are fumbling badly and upsetting the right side of the political class. The threat of Trump running in 2024 rustles them even more than a demented Biden staggering on for another term, but it is a close call. The answer, so the theory goes, is the old familiar Hillary Clinton, who will play ball with both sides.

The problem, of course, is Clinton is 74, which may be the springtime of youth compared to the rest of the political elite, but it is still old. People forget that Clinton was in rough shape when she ran in 2016. She mysteriously disappeared from the public eye for a while and had the incident where she collapsed on the street. She was also wearing some sort of contraption that was never explained. Time heals all wounds, but only in the emotional sense, not the physical sense.

In fairness, Donald Trump is 75, so he is not exactly the youthful alternative to the gerontocracy that currently runs the country. The thing is though, he is a vigorous man for his age and has shown no signs of slowing down. One thing that went unnoticed is unlike other presidents, Trump did not suddenly get old while in office. He seemed to grow stronger off the endless battling. His father was supposedly quite vigorous into his 90’s and Trump appears to have inherited those genes.

Again, the authors of that post are attached to the Clinton machine so they did not just dream that up for the fun of it. They make clear that Clinton is beginning the process of mounting a campaign. It could mean running against Biden in the primary, which would not go over well with the Obama wing or the Sanders wing, so they are beginning the process of normalizing the idea so it is not an issue. Clinton will position herself as the moderate trying to save the party from Biden.

Of course, this is another example of how the political class is unwilling to look forward so it instead tries to reboot old ideas. They Republicans plan to run their midterm campaign as a reboot of the Newt Gingrich show from the 1990’s and now Hillary Clinton is imagining herself as Ted Kennedy in 1980. Forty years ago, the left-wing of the party was sure that the reason Reagan won in 1980 is the old guard of the party refused to jettison Carter in favor of Kennedy.

It speaks to the bankruptcy of the political class that they keep indulging in these weird walks down memory lane. Within living memory politicians would run on specific agendas, tied closely to things that were important to people. Biden ran on not being Trump and now Hillary plans to run on not being Trump or Biden. Elections have always been beauty contents, but now they have been stripped of their talent portion, leaving us with the terrifying image of geezers in swimsuits.

The actuarial tables are immutable. Whoever is calling the shots in both parties will eventually have to move on from the geezers. If Trump runs and wins in 2024, he serves one term. Who is the next man up? If Hillary runs and wins, she could serve two terms, but that means living to 84. It also means not getting the Joe Biden treatment after one term. Who is being prepared on the Democrat side to take over for the collection of geezers now in charge?

The fact is the empire is facing the same problem the Soviets faced in the mid-70’s when Brezhnev’s health rapidly deteriorated. The party knew he was not long for the world, but there was no clear plan to replace him. When he died in 1982, the 70-year-old Andropov served for two years then died. He was followed by the 73-year-old Chernenko who promptly died. Gorbachev was next in line and he proved to be incapable of maintaining the empire.

The reason the Soviets did not have a competent new generation of leaders ready to supplant the Brezhnev crew is they had never been developed. We see the same thing with the current generation in Washington. The next generation does not exist as they have been boiled off for fear they would be too ambitious. What is left is a collection of dull-witted time servers and youthful morons like Sandy Cortez. No wonder no one wants to see the geezers carried off the political stage.

Getting back to where we started, it is prudent to think about the knock-on effects of the current generation of political leaders shedding this mortal coil. The political system has been warped by their long time in office and that will change as well. The old Soviet system had evolved for men like Brezhnev and his henchmen. Our political system has evolved for this long serving generation of politicians. When they are gone, the system around them will change radically and perhaps violently.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount if you use this link. Types in HAPPY ZALENTINES DAY at check out to get free shipping through Valentine’s Day. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb. Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff

Category Archives: Politics