Trump’s Foreign Policy Problem

Posted on October 30, 2024 by thezman

One of the problems the world faces is that the dominant power on the planet has entered a period of incoherence. Joe Biden has come to symbolize the country he allegedly leads in that he is old, frail and not always understandable. This is how much of the world now sees the United States. What they see from Washington are people either trapped in a bygone era or divorced from present reality. It is as if the last several decades never happened.

You see this in this Financial Times post about what foreign policy could be like under a second Trump presidency. Keep in mind that the Financial Times is often used by the intelligence community to plant stories it wants to launder. The audience is not just the English-speaking world, but also Europe. The people quoted are all said to be associates of the Trump team. Their views may or may not reflect the thinking of Trump’s inner circle.

That aside, the first thing to note is that there is no acknowledgement of present reality in the story. For example, Congressman Michael Waltz is quoted often about how to resolve the Ukraine war. He says, “Trump could threaten to crash Russia’s economy by lowering the price of oil and gas.” According to Waltz, this will force the Russians to beg for peace negotiations. This policy makes sense if it is 1985 and Russia is still the Soviet Union with a brittle command economy.

For starters, the president cannot willy-nilly change oil prices. No amount of American production can drive down prices to a level where it would have an impact on the Russian economy. The “break even” point of Russian crude is well below that of the cheapest American production. Then you have the fact that it will take a decade to bring American crude production to the levels needed to crash prices. There is also the fact that Biden emptied the strategic oil reserve.

In other words, the big idea from the foreign policy experts is something they read about from the Reagan years that has no chance of working now. It is as if they are unaware of the sanctions war they launched two years ago that not only failed to crater the Russian economy but boomeranged back on them. The German economy is in in free fall because they no longer have access to cheap Russian gas. Meanwhile, the Russian economy is booming.

Of course, there is the fact that these people can only think in terms of threats when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world. Congressman Michael Waltz is a neocon sock puppet who was an early cheerleader for Project Ukraine. He was also wrong about every aspect of it. In any other profession, being as wrong as Mike Waltz would be disqualifying, but here he is being quoted as an authority on Russia. This is what happens when there are no consequences to failure.

Elsewhere in the article, they quote Fred Fleitz, a former John Bolton staffer and current foreign policy adviser at the America First Policy Institute, which promotes itself as helping shape Trump policy. With regards to Iran, Fleitz argues “The objective should be to bankrupt Iran again and to reinstitute maximum pressure.” Again? Has he not noticed that Iran survived sanctions for three decades? Is he not aware that Iran now has the support of China and Russia?

With regards to settling the war in the Ukraine, Fleitz says, “We freeze the conflict, Ukraine does not cede any territory, they don’t give up their territorial claims, and we have negotiations with the understanding there probably won’t be a final agreement until Putin leaves the stage.” Unlike Waltz, Fleitz has no clue as to why the Russians would entertain such a silly offer. Note that this idea was first floated by the neocons when the Ukrainian counter-offensive failed.

The jaw droppingly ignorant part of that post is the use of the term “Minsk-3” to describe the Trump strategy. The Russians correctly view the Minsk agreements as a Western ploy to buy time to arm Ukraine. The reason they think this is Angela Merkel said this in an interview last year. Naming the Trump strategy after two prior efforts to trick the Russians is just a way to make sure there can be no negotiations between the Trump people and the Russians.

This is probably why this story was planted in the Financial Times. The hope is to poison the well, so to speak, for the next administration with regards to negotiating with the Russians. They may not be able to control what Trump does, but they can give the Russians many reasons to not trust any overtures. After all, Trump will be gone in four years, so if they can freeze the Russia situation, they have a chance to get back in power and resume their efforts to start a war with Russia.

What becomes clear in that Financial Times story is that the American foreign policy establishment does not have a clue as to how to address the many problems the next president will face. The main reason for their incoherence is they seem to be unaware that these problems were caused by them. Compounding it is the toxic ideology of neoconservatism that has poisoned the foreign policy community. It is a cancer in the bowels of America’s most important institution.

It is what makes prospects for a sober minded and realistic approach to foreign policy under Trump unlikely. Trump’s instincts are good, as are those with many of the people around him, including JD Vance, but he will inherit a foreign policy establishment that is both stuck in the past and corrupted by a worldview that is inconsistent with the world as it is today and with the needs of the country. Fixing this problem without the use of extrajudicial means may not be possible.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack 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 through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

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.

A New American Identity

Posted on October 29, 2024 by thezman

Note: If you are interested in an hour of precise predictions about the upcoming election, then you are in luck. I was on the Coffee and a Mike show and you can listen to the recording of it here.

The American civil war created an intellectual problem for both sides that was far more important than the issue of slavery. The 19th century was the age of nationalism and national liberation in Europe. These ideas made their way to America and fit in neatly with the American sense of self. After all, the United States was the result of a revolt against an empire in the name of national liberation. The war between the North and South, therefore, was also a war over nationalism.

By default, the South had the better claim. It was the South, after all, seeking to secede from the Union to create a new nation that would better serve the interests of the people of the South. The North was trying to prevent this from happening and willing to conquer the people of the South to do it. From a nationalist perspective, the South was the sympathetic side, even though they were also fighting for the right to maintain the institution of slavery.

A solution to this problem that evolved in the North was the argument that true nationalism was comprehensive. That is the nationalist loved all of his country and all of his people, so a nationalist government must serve and protect everyone. Since the South was not a different people and the Union was not abandoning them in the way the crown had abandoned the colonies in the runup to the Revolution, it was the South that was in violation of the nationalist ideal

Further, the evolving sense of Northern nationalism claimed that the national purpose of America from the start was to spread liberty around the world. America was the city on the hill, so to speak, that stood as an example of freedom craving nationalists around the world, so what the South was doing was a threat to that project and therefore a threat to the national purpose. American nationalism, unlike that of Europe, was a revolutionary nationalism to free all of mankind.

In fairness, these debates about the nature of American nationalism were not at the center of the dispute, but they played a role in shaping how the new intellectual class would define American identity after the war. Those arguing in favor of the war being a new founding are not entirely wrong. The country that emerged after the war was completely different from what existed prior to the war. It was not just free of slaves, but full of a sense of national purpose.

In his book After Nationalism, Samuel Goldman describes the three forms of national identity that have prevailed in America. Goldman comes up with three national identities he calls the Covenant, the Crucible, and the Creed. The Covenant is the sense of national purpose. The Crucible is the old melting pot story popular in the 20th century after the war. The Creed is the idea of America being a set of ideas, rather than a physical place or people.

It is a good book that offers a useful way of framing the main ways in which Americans have tried to create a unitary identity. Goldman does observe that it is the covenantal aspect of American identity that has been the most powerful, but he does not get into how this Puritan sensibility evolved in the 19th century during the Civil War to become a civic religion for the ruling elite. He does not mention how the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam blended into this as Jews took up posts in the elite.

This understanding of American identity, or the best effort at forging one, is essential to understanding the current crisis. For over a century, since Woodrow Wilson, America has been on a mission to heal the world. The ruling class has asked, often demanded, that the people put aside their regional and local concerns for the good of one great cause after another. It has become so ingrained in ruling class thinking that they seem incapable to thinking about the state of the country.

Strip away the panic, the hysteria and the outlandish claims and the coming election is about whether we care more about the fate of Mongolian transgender lesbians or the fentanyl epidemic in Appalachia. Do we care more about the abstract concept of climate change or addressing the slow collapse of our infrastructure? What counts for more as an American? The health of your neighbors or the plight of migrants? Will we sacrifice everything in a vain attempt to save the world?

All these questions stem from a growing doubt in this sense of American identity that has been with us since Gettysburg. Americans are increasingly wondering not only if the cost of saving the world is worth the effort, but if it makes any sense at all for us to stand astride the world, balances in our hand. Maybe the people who demand we do this do not have the right to judge the world. Maybe these people lack the moral standing to stand in judgement over us as well.

Fundamentally, the current crisis is about the covenant. If our national purpose is to be the city on the hill, then we must ensure that the city is not full of vagrants and racked with crime and corruption. If our national purpose is to heal the world, then we must first heal ourselves. On the other hand, maybe our national purpose was to avoid falling for these claims and instead focusing on creating a society in the wilderness, away from the entanglements of the old world.

No matter how one seeks to frame it, the struggle today is over our national purpose, a struggle between those who stubbornly cling to the last century and those looking ahead to the next century. The question is whether America will collapse in a heap, exhausted from trying to save the world or will we pull up, realize our folly and return to a sense of purpose rooted in simply being an example to the world? Will we attempt to heal ourselves with the same zeal with tried to heal the world?

It could also be that all these efforts at national identity have failed and what comes next is the great disaggregation. Perhaps it was always impossible to forge an American identity that could permanently hold the people together. Maybe in the end, we learn that the true American identity is no identity at all. We are simply a diverse collection of people who agree to cooperate, when necessary, but otherwise we prefer to leave the world alone and be left alone.

Interesting Times

Posted on October 28, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the latest drama in the latest version of the new right, a post about how the Battle of Agincourt helps explain why politician die in office and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

We are eight days from the most important election ever, which is what they say about every presidential election. This one could actually turnout to be pivotal as part of the collection of presidential elections that define the Trump era. The results next week, or the following week if we get more shenanigans, will determine which way the political process goes the next decade. Like him or hate him, Trump is the most consequential political figure of this century so far.

The next week could be wild, if the past week is an indication. Trump is scheduled to do a rally in New Mexico and in Virginia, two states no one thought would be in play a month ago, but now may be up for grabs. Harris is coming off one of the worst weeks in politics, but her campaign keeps finding new ways to stumble, so this week could bring fresh idiocy to the race. Over the weekend she was booed at an event in Philadelphia, a thing that is becoming a thing for her.

The handicappers, even those who want Harris to win, are slowly lining up behind the idea of a Trump victory. Everything seems to be breaking his way right now, while everything is going wrong for Harris. Poll after poll in key states move in Trump’s direction and now, we have three new states in the toss-up column. New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia are now in the gray zone. Whether Trump wins any of them is still in doubt, but it is the movement that matters.

Of course, all of this is against the backdrop of 2020, where a tidal wave of fraud made it the least trusted result since 1960. Even if you reject the fraud claims, it was an election that featured many never-before-seen anomalies. For example, Arizona, another swing state, saw a 38% increase in voter turnout. In 2016, Trump won 1,252,401 votes and in 2020 he got 1,661,686 but still lost. Overall, the 2020 election saw the biggest spike in turnout ever and no one asks why.

We are already seeing signs of shenanigans aimed at adding enough new ballots to the Harris pile to overcome the Trump increase. Authorities in Lancaster County Pennsylvania unearthed a vote fraud scheme. Ballot harvesting is a form of fraud in which runners are given pre-filled out ballots and walking around money to then get signatures by registered voters in ghetto areas. It starts with first getting a voter registered, whether the voter exists or not.

What we saw in 2020 is not just about that election and the claims surrounding it, but about understanding subsequent elections. Polling, for example, depends on models of the electorate, which are created using past election data. If the 2020 data is riddled with unexplained and potentially unexplainable anomalies, how can a polling company build a reliable model of the electorate? The answer is you cannot, and they have no way to poll the fraud shops producing fake ballots either.

That means there are two angles to the polling. The one angle is figuring the margin of fraud in each of these states, then adjusting the polls accordingly. In Pennsylvania, Trump needs a two- or three-point margin to cover the fraud. In Wisconsin, the margin of fraud is about one point. The other angle is the polls themselves may have to be adjusted to account for the fraud they are including in their models. Trump consistently outperforms the polling. How much will he outperform this time?

This is the high cost of official corruption. When it is people trying to undermine the rules and the authorities working to stop them, the general public can trust the results, even accepting some problems. When it is the authorities subverting the rules for their own gain, then no one can trust anything. This is because you have no basis of comparison, as the base condition is assumed to be corrupt. We may never trust our elections again due to the 2020 shenanigans.

All of that aside, you would want to be Donald Trump right now, as far as the election, rather than Kamala Harris. An honest look at the polls, adjusting for shenanigans, puts Trump at 262 electoral college votes and Harris at 209. The states that are too close to call as of this writing are WI, MI, PA, VA and NV. If New Hampshire and New Mexico are in play, then it is worse for Harris. That means Trump needs one win to regain the presidency, and Harris needs to run the table.

Then there is the energy. The Trump campaign is resembling the 2016 election with Trump barnstorming the country drawing massive crowds. He was just in New York City doing an event at a sold-out Madison Square Garden. Harris is forced to announce fake concerts to trick people into showing up at her events. She got booed vigorously at that Houston event as a result. The energy around the Harris campaign is all negative energy, which is never a good thing.

There is a strong Howard Dean vibe to the Harris campaign. She has never won a competitive race. She was handed the senate seat by the Democratic Party machine in California because she was highly controllable. Of course, she famously flamed out in the 2020 presidential primary. She was handed the nomination this time when they pushed Biden over the edge. Her entire existence as a political figure rests on a mass media operation to conceal the reality of her support.

Of course, there is the other shenanigans. States like Michigan and Pennsylvania rely on the party machine to “get out the vote” for the Democrat. Both states have Democrat governors with eyes on the 2028 nomination. If Harris wins the election, then the political career of Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro come to an end. They will be too old and too forgotten in 2032. There are also forces in Washington who would like to be rid of Harris and her people too.

That is why Trump is the bettering favorite right now. The betting markets have Trump with a 62% chance of winning. All the things people look at to determine the shape of the race favor Trump, other than the shenanigans. This may be why the billionaire owners of the LA Times and Washington Post told their editorial staff to cancel the Harris endorsements. Maybe the oligarchs are sending a message to the political class that they want to see Trump win.

The English-speaking world is sure the Chinese have a curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.” The Chinese have no such curse, but we assume they should, so we insist on it anyway. Regardless, we live in an interesting time and the next two weeks, assuming more election shenanigans, promises to be very interesting. In the fullness of time, we may look back and say this was the most consequential election in history or the last election in our history.

The Racial Binary Test

Posted on October 23, 2024 by thezman

There are issues that turn out to be litmus tests which tell us something about how certain people truly think about their politics. Covid, for example, revealed that many people who sounded like skeptics of the current regime were still willing to accept without question the claims of the regime. The war in Ukraine is another example where people who were media skeptics fell in line with the media narrative. Covid and Ukraine were tests of trust in the institutions.

These types of litmus test issues tell us where someone is mentally on that line that runs between those who trust the system and its institutions and those who no longer trust the system and its institutions. Those who wore masks and Ukraine lapel pins are at the pro-regime end of the scale, while those who rejected and criticized this stuff are on the other end of the scale. In both cases, we learned that some people were not that far along the path from the pro-regime pole.

There are other issues that are larger and more enduring that also work as a sorting mechanism in the churn of politics. In the mass media age, it is much easier for someone to pose as something, but not really be that something. Profilicity is not simply about creating a profile you present to parts of the world, but also the ability to quickly take down and respawn that profile with modifications. There are certain topics, however, that get to the nature of the person playing the character.

One of those issues is race, specifically racism. Unlike those prior litmus test issues, this is not one that exists on a scale. It is a binary issue. You either accept or reject the normative and positive claims baked into the word racism. There are those who think it is immoral to make decisions based on race and those who reject the idea that this behavior is immoral. There are those who reject the objective reality of race and those who accept what the human sciences tell us.

There is no middle ground on the race issue, even though lots of people seek to profit by occupying what they think is a middle ground. An example is this Compact Magazine post by Christopher Rufo. He is getting rich being a non-woke liberal or anti-woke civic nationalist, depending upon your label preference. The key to this character is the sort of triangulation Bill Clinton made famous. You see, he not only rejects left-wing racism, but he also rejects right-wing racism!

There is nothing new about this position. It was a popular in the 1980’s when it seemed like the culture was moving beyond race as a political weapon. The good people treated everyone as an individual. The bad people judged people on generalities. That meant the race hustlers like Jesse Jackson were just as bad as the old white racists from the civil rights narrative. They were judging people collectively. Like everything in this age, the new right and its new characters are just reboots of old material.

That aside, what you see with Rufo is that he does not understand the material and he embraces the morality of the people he claims to oppose. He opposes critical race theory not because it is nonsense, but because they acknowledge the centrality of race in American society. Rufo is an anti-racist, which means he thinks it is immoral to acknowledge the reality of race and especially immoral to act on it. In this regard, he agrees with Ibram X. Kendi, but only differs in presentation.

Further, Rufo does not seem to understand how we reached the point in American society where whites are under constant assault through these corporate and government diversity programs. He seems to think that the reason these programs exist is the people behind them are dumb or craven. Somehow, they tricked the leaders of the most powerful intuitions to embrace a form of racism. He may as well claim that these people are witches, who cast a spell over the institutions.

The fact is, these antiwhite pogroms, whatever you want to call them, are the logical outcome of generations of jurisprudence. The “Brown Test”, named for the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, implemented a set of racial and cultural standards that effectively eliminated free association and made openness the standard against which everything is measured. In effect, it made anything that results in racial inequality both illegal and immoral.

That means it is impossible to have a color-blind society under the Brown doctrine because it would lead to racial inequality. The underlying assumption of Brown and the entire moral edifice that sprang from it is that any racial inequality, not matter how trivial, must be the result of discrimination by whites. Therefore, a colorblind society that has racial inequality will mean that color blindness is the cause. It is why people like Ibram X. Kendi can reasonably say color blindness is racism.

This is what makes race a binary issue. You either understand the moral reasoning that lies behind the novelty of the word “racism” or you do not and simply accept it as part of your ethics. You either understand and accept the reality of race as a biological matter or you reject it and embrace the blank slate ideology. There is no middle position and no way to pick a few things from one column and a few from the other to create yourself a bespoke racial awareness.

In fairness, Rufo probably understands this, but the money in seeming to not understand it is too good to turn down. Even though the logic of the open society has led America down a dangerous moral and social cul-de-sac, the economic and managerial elites continue to cling to the moral framing of it. Cultural inertia is a real thing that drags along even the most powerful people and institutions. When there is no profit in opposition, there is no opposition.

The opposition we see among some elites to DEI and critical race theory rests in their own racial awareness. Jewish donors to elite colleges have grown concerned that they are now treated as white and therefore targets for the diversity rackets. Asians resent the racial spoils system that limits their access to elite institutions. The fact that whites may benefit from this opposition is incidental. Once again, we see that in politics, racial or otherwise, it is about who shall overcome whom.

Regardless of motivations, the people promoting the concept of a colorblind society are unwilling to address the root causes. Further, they fail to see that they are advocating a far more radical version of what Brown demands. To achieve the colorblind society, it means either eradicating those who see race or so terrorizing them that they pretend not to see race. The colorblind dogma makes anti-racism sound reasonable and its implementation would make the Khmer Rouge seem tame.

The Lives Of Others

Posted on October 22, 2024 by thezman

Since most anyone reading this has been alive, there has been a debate in what is called the right in America, about what to do about the right. Going back to the middle of the last century, the debate is about replacing the opposition to the ruling progressives with something new or reforming the current opposition. Once side thinks the current opposition is too corrupt to be reformed while the other camp thinks a startup has little chance to succeed, so reform is the best course.

If you go back to the early days of the Buckley movement, you find the same sort of debates going on among those members of the “new right.” The Buckley people did not have much of an “old right” to worry about, as it had collapsed in the FDR years, but they had the issue of the existing institutions. Should conservatives seek to create their own institutions or seek to take over existing ones? In the end, it was a mix of both choices that resulted in what is called Conservative Inc.

It is also why there is another debate about what to do with the old right among people trying to form up a new right. The complete failure of conservatism was made clear in the Bush and Obama years to everyone not getting a paycheck from one of the many conservative think tanks and institutions. Paul Gottfried coined the term “alternative right” in this period while commenting on the failure of movement conservatism to conserve anything more than their positions.

Everyone knows what happened to the alternative right, but the sense that something must rise up to replace Conservative Inc is still with us. People like Christopher Rufo, Matt Walsh and Michael Anton, all see themselves in the process of creating a new right for the current age. Amusingly, all of them are linked to nodes of the old right, places like Claremont, Hillsdale and others. Like Dionysus, they hope the new right will be born from the thigh of the old right.

This gets to the impossibility of either approach to creating a new right. On the one hand, you need money to hire writers, thinkers and activists. Raising that money one small donor at a time is hard and unpleasant, at least from the perspective of people who imagine themselves leading the new right. That means going to the people who have lots of cash to spare. Those are the people who fund the old right, which means making an accommodation with the old right.

Of course, if the old right saw a need to reform itself, it would do it, so the reformers coming in to fix things run into a wall of resistance. The donors like the institutions as they are, but they would like a little youthful energy to spruce things up, which is why they invite in the reformers. Like men who spend a long time in prison, the reformers are eventually institutionalized by the entities they seek to reform. Before long they are leading the charge to purge a heretic.

This has been the cycle since the full flowering of the Global American Empire after the Second World War. The opposition to the prevailing progressive orthodoxy, on the one hand, maintains a wall between the establishment and the public, while on the other hand, selectively recruiting some reformers to provide energy and the facade of opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy. Notice how all the members of the current new right sound like exhibits in the Reagan Museum.

It has always been assumed that what makes this system possible and so durable is the money supply. The golden rule says that the men with the gold make the rules, so if the donor class exists as it is, both the progressive orthodoxy and what is allowed to officially oppose it will not change. There is some truth to it, but there is more to it than just money. Even the money men find themselves constrained by a system that they supposedly control.

What has kept this system going is the social aspect of the commentariat. It operates as a subculture, separate from the larger culture. People have noted that Washington operates like a small town, and this is obvious in the commentariat. The people inside depend entirely on the system for their money, reputation, and friendships. It is a lot like how one percent biker clubs operate. You are either completely inside or completely outside the ecosystem. There is no middle ground.

This is why when it comes time to exile a heretic, all of his friends rush forth to condemn the man, often claiming to have never trusted him. On the one hand, they fear being associated with the heretic, but on the other it provides an opportunity to display their fidelity to the subculture. Like Brutus stoically standing by as his sons are executed for their participation in the Tarquinian conspiracy, members of the commentariat heap recriminations on former friends sent into exile.

As a result, everyone is always looking around for cues about what is currently acceptable within the system. When your livelihood depends on toeing the line at the office, you can think about getting a new job. When your social standing, friendships and family relations depend upon toeing the line within the political ecosystem of the commentariat, you can think of nothing but toeing the line. Everyone inside the system, even the donors, are terrified of being exiled.

This helps explain why our commentariat sounds so weird and alien. Our chattering classes are like the courtiers who live their lives walled up inside the king’s palace, talking amongst themselves. Everyone they know thinks the same things, says the same things and cares about the same things. Most important, they fear the same thing, which is the outer dark of exile. The result is a political commentariat that is isolated from the reality of the general public.

This model of the chattering class applies to the regime media, which is itself a subculture cut off from the general public. This model also applies to the managerial class, which now functions as a separate society, with its own economics, culture and morality, sitting atop the larger society. The thread that runs through all these subcultures among the Cloud People is fear of being expelled and having to live with John the Savage and the rest of the Dirt People.

Dreams Of Purges Past

Posted on October 17, 2024 by thezman

Yesterday, internet activist Christopher Rufo posted on Twitter a long post denouncing, disavowing and anathematizing someone named Chris Brunet. Apparently, Brunet used to work for Rufo or maybe they were friends, but Rufo now finds that old association inconvenient to his current relationships and career choices, so he decided to do the predictable thing and denounce Brunet. It is a weird form of public piety that the conservatives inherited from communism.

For those of a certain age, this is familiar stuff. While the format is different from the old days of conservatism, the act is the same. That post reads like a Twitter version of Bill Buckley’s denunciation of Pat Buchanan thirty years ago. Interestingly, that famous essay is nowhere to be found online, but the book version is still available. Imagine someone writing a forty-thousand-word essay denouncing someone then being so proud of it that he turned it into a book.

That is the first notable thing about this bit of drama. Those familiar with the history of conservatism recognize this performance. The person putting on the show is doing it for an audience that is never named, but always assumed. The stated audience is either credulous, incredulous or confused by the performance. Everything about this age is a reboot, especially the stuff that emanates from the political class, so the “new right” is just a low-budget reboot of the old right.

There is a Little Rascals quality to all of it. They put on the costumes of the past and reenact events as they think they happened, but in a high school musical sort of way, which makes it feel small and petty. Thirty years ago, Buchanan and Buckley were towering figures fighting for the right to define a sociopolitical movement they helped create, while Rufo and Burnet are two guys on the internet. To his credit, Burnett seems to appreciate the absurdity of it.

The resulting drama brings up another notable aspect. Then as now, the people doing the denouncing always couch their denunciations in moral terms, when it is obvious that they are motivated by money. Buckley knew there were loads of cash waiting for him if he denounced the paleocons. The neocons, Zionists and the Israel lobby were as flush with cash thirty years ago as they are now. They hated the critics of these things as much as they hate them today.

There is nothing wrong with currying favor with rich people. The “American experiment” is pretty much an institutionalized version of this habit. The market economy, after all, is nothing more than people with something to sell chasing after and flattering people who have money to spend. Democratic politics is the art of flattering wealthy interests so they will back your candidacy. There is a reason that one of the highest paid people at every Washington think tank is the fundraiser.

In theory, the one group most comfortable with this reality should be the conservatives, as they boast of being the most free-market of the bunch. Yet, they are the ones most ashamed of being men for hire. They cast all their actions in moral terms, often making it seem like they are engaged in the greatest of moral struggles. David French has made a career of nailing himself to the cross. So much so, in fact, that he has attained what all conservatives seek, a place at the New York Times!

It is a strange quirk of conservatism. Read the comments of that Rufo post and you see the phrase “moral clarity” turn up often. It is as if these people have a strange form of Tourette’s that only comes out when they are finking on one another. It brings to mind the famous quote from Emerson, “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” Whenever a conservative begins speaking of moral clarity, get ready for a load of arrows in your back.

The reason for this is the central contradiction of conservatism. They start by agreeing with the central premise of progressivism, which is that all people are equal and infinitely malleable. Hierarchy is therefore a construct. You cannot oppose an egalitarian ideology like progressivism by first agreeing with its central claim, so conservatives can never admit that they are simply doing the bidding of their patrons. That means they must invent other reasons which they call principles.

That aside, the sense that this is just recycled drama from a bygone age is due to progressivism becoming a backward-looking phenomenon. It evolved to its logical endpoint only to find nothing there. The modern progressive must content himself with refighting old fights with old enemies reimagined for this time. The new Nazi is the guy opposed to Israel carpet bombing civilians. The new Bull Connor is the guy wondering why the FBI is faking crime stats.

The new right is now following suit. They search around for someone to play the Pat Buchanan role or the Joe Sobran role. It will not be long before these guys pick a fight with the Birchers, which is still around, amazingly enough. Conservatism has always been the slow version of progressivism, so as progressives become a strange sort of antiquarian society, conservatives will slowly join them in the project. The left-right debate is about who hates the past the most.

Of course, what they truly hate is the future. Both progressivism and conservatism are artifacts of a bygone age. They reached their peak in the twentieth century at the zenith of the Global American Empire. That was an empire built for a world that not only does not exist, but the memory of which is fading into the past. Imagine conservatism and progressivism as two old ships engaged in battle as they slowly slip over the horizon, and you have a good sense of it.

In the meantime, they will continue to engage in their mock battles with each other and with themselves, pretending to believe that things have not changed and will never change, while terrified by the sense that they are changing. Like science, politics advances one funeral at a time. As the codgers of the old politics march off to the cemetery, they will be replaced first by their imitators and then by their replacements, who will create a new politics for their age and challenges.

Democratic Theocracy

Posted on October 15, 2024 by thezman

Iran has been in the news lately and one of the interesting things about the coverage is Western media rarely talks about the president of Iran. In fact, almost all Iran stories skip the president entirely. This is highly unusual as Western media is conditioned to personify countries that are out of favor. The bad country becomes the ruler of that country and that ruler is always some form of Hitler. The closest they get with Iran is using a picture of the supreme leader in the copy.

One reason for this is Iran is a complicated place and Western media struggles with anything more complicated than the good guys versus bad guys narrative. Despite what most think, Iranian politics has factions and parties, with the winners being picked by the voters at fairly normal elections. Those factions and parties argue about all the usual things, including foreign policy. The current president ran on a platform of improving relations with the rest of the world.

The funny thing about Iran is that it has avoided what has happened with all prior revolutionary societies. They did not have rounds of purges or a great terror in which a strongman consolidated power. There is no cult of personality in the way most communist societies evolved. They are not dogmatically attached to a narrow set of economic policies. Instead, Iran has evolved into the world’s first explicitly democratic theocracy based in its form of Islam.

At the top of Iranian society is the Supreme Leader. He is appointed by the Assembly of Experts, who are elected to their positions. The Guardian Council approves all candidates for elected office, including those nominated to the Assembly of Experts, so the gatekeepers of politics are the religious authorities. The result is a political system that can debate and argue over public policy, but within the broad religious framing of the Islamic authorities.

This is why the West often talks about Iran as if it is a medieval society. In medieval Europe, the Church set the boundaries for secular government. The King had to be in good standing with the Church, but the Church needed to be in good standing with the king as he provided security. From the perspective of “secular” societies in the West, the Iranians have recreated a throne and altar society, something the West abandoned in favor of reason and democracy.

The interesting thing about the criticism is it comes with some envy. The managerial class of the West, especially in America, would probably prefer the explicit relationship between the moral and the practical. In Iran, if Islam forbids it, it is simply forbidden and that is the end of it. In America, banning the discussion of crime stats is forbidden for an extensive list of contradictory reasons sprinkled with magical thinking about the reality of the human condition.

This may be why Iran avoided the cycle of violence and authoritarianism that we expect to see with revolutionary societies. From the start, the morality of the revolution had been resolved. The main task was to first remove the prior regime and the Western influences that emanated from it. Once the old regime was gone, there was no void where the old morality existed, so there was no battle for who would decide how to fill the void and with what to fill it.

This may explain some of the convulsions of the West. Christianity and the carryover from it provided the moral center of the progressive ideology. That slowly gave way to opposition to communism in the Cold War. Once the great struggle had been won, there was no longer a moral purpose to the progressive ideology. What flowed into it was whatever was kicking around the institutions. Fringe lunacies suddenly had a clear path to the center of the progressive moral universe.

Once again, we see that Marx was right about politics. At the highest level, it is about the battle over moral questions. Once the moral questions are answered, there is no need for this sort of politics. Instead, politics is reduced to debates about how to address the mundane practical issues of governance. For thirty years Iran has only had to worry about defending itself from the West, while for the last thirty years the West has been searching for a new god to replace the old one.

What you see in Iran is something the West cannot reconcile and that is the limit of reason, which is the moral. The ideology of the West rests on the assumption that all moral questions have a reasonable answer, so all moral limits that cannot hold up to reason must be invalid. Iran does not struggle with this dilemma, because the moral limits are beyond question and they are right there in the Koran, as interpreted by the religious authorities.

Put another way, what Iran has in excess is the answer to the two most important questions for any society and they are “who says?” and “why not?” The answer to both questions is well known to everyone in Iranian society and therefore the questions never need to be asked. In the West, there are no answers to those questions, so the closest we get to an answer is the jungle of rules against discussing anything that challenges the sensibilities of the managerial class.

What we see with the contrast between Iran and the West, particularly America, is a contrast in two forms of democratic theocracy. Iran starts with the issue of morality as a settled matter and implements democracy as a means to sort practical ends. In the West, democracy is a moral end in itself, but the result is endless debates over what will be temporarily viewed as timeless truths. Iran is the mirror of American in terms of the relationship between the moral and the political.

There are other reasons why Iran is what it is, not the least of which is that it is full of Iranians who can date their society back to the ancients. Islam also has a vastly different view of the natural world than what evolved out of Christianity. Even so, the fact that Iran has survived as a democratic theocracy provides a clue for how American progressivism could survive as well. Otherwise, it shakes itself to pieces searching for something to fill the void that lies at the center of it.

Generations

Posted on October 3, 2024 by thezman

Lost in the commentary about the vice-presidential debate is the looming generational issue haunting the political system. On the stage that night was a member of Generation X and a Millennial. J.D. Vance is not the first Millennial to enter politics, but he is the first one to enter the main stage. At forty years old, he would be the third youngest vice president ever, if Trump wins in November. Walz would become the first member of Gen-X to accomplish anything in politics.

Walz and Vance are good examples of their generation. Gen-X was known as the slacker generation, mostly because they were not politicized like the two waves of Baby Boomers that preceded them. They just wanted to do what they needed to do in order to get a decent job and enjoy their life. With the massive boomer generation ahead of them, ambition was pointless, beyond the personal. That is pretty much how it has played out for this relatively small cohort.

Tim Walz fits this profile. He kicked around in his youth, unsure what he wanted to do with himself as an adult. After a while he went back to college. He joined the National Guard because his father told him to join. He then got a job teaching because that was available and required the least effort. Serendipity got him into politics where good timing seemed to be his best asset. Like his generation, Tim Walz is a guy to whom life has happened, rather than a guy who attacked life.

In contrast, the life of J.D. Vance is like a well-executed battle plan. Millennials are strivers and box tickers. Encouraged from the womb by their mostly Baby Boomer parents and teachers to attack life with a detailed plan, this is a generation that started building a resume in kindergarten. Everything about their primary schooling was aimed at getting into a good college. College was about landing in the right career and their careers have been the accumulation of credentials.

That describes the life of J.D. Vance. One path out of poverty was the military, so he went into the military. That opened the path to college, so he went to the best college he could and got the best credentials he could get. Those credentials opened the door to a career in the swankiest of careers in venture capital. Unlike Walz, nothing about the life of J.D. Vance is due to chance other than his current position. One does not have much control over the choices made by Donald Trump.

The result of this generation gap was evident on stage. Walz probably would have arrived in his Elmer Fudd costume if they let him, for no other reason that it is more comfortable than a suit. He probably watched sports instead of prepping for the biggest moment of his life. Vance, on the other hand, was a machine. He crammed for the test because it is what he has done his whole life. He went to the debate to ace the exam and that is exactly what we saw.

You can expand this out to the top of the ticket. It is both symbolic and ironic that the race is between an old white guy who speaks for the America that is slowly slipping away and diverse girl boss who exists only in the imagination of the bitter, angry managerial class. Trump is not technically a Baby Boomer, but he is a man with the Baby Boomer sensibilities. He is a guy who thinks the economy is the country, so a good economy means everything is fine.

Harris is a ~~Baby Boomer~~ X’er, but her alien existence places her outside of what most people would understand by the term. She was born and raised outside of the country by parents who were not Americans. If a writing team from Hollywood took a break from ruining classic movies and were tasked with creating a story involving politics, they would make the star a diverse girl boss like Harris. She would be smart and sober-minded, however, miraculously always coming out on top.

The Harris as diverse girl boss from the movies can be taken further by the fact that she has never earned anything in her life. This is the way it works in film. Diverse girl boss never has to struggle and doubt like the traditional white lead. She is just given everything she needs by the writers. That is Kamala Harris. The biggest challenge of her life has simply been showing up without her dress on backwards. Now she expects to be handed the presidency.

The one thing missing from the picture is the hysterical female Millennial. Another feature of that generation is that strivers like J.D. Vance have had to navigate the hysterical female Millennial with a head full of feminist nonsense. Female Millennial hysteria as escapism is probably worth a book treatment. Much of the lunacy of the last twenty years has been driven by childish girls who became girl bosses rather than wives and mothers with a stake in their community.

The absence of this character from the current drama is probably the biggest white pill of this election cycle. Even in the unserious world of modern politics, the hysterical female Millennial is shunted over to the side when the adults are talking. In this regard, the rise of J.D. Vance could be signaling a return to normalcy once the Baby Boomers shuffle off to the shuffleboard courts. Perhaps the answer to the harpy all along was to simply ignore her while getting the job done.

One final angle here. J.D. Vance is the full expression of managerial man. The fact that he walked away from that system into the populist revolt against it suggest that managerialism lacks the cultural fulfillment to sustain itself. One reason the media has been told to hate him is that he is seen as a traitor. This is the main reason the system hates Trump; he betrayed his class. This suggests that the new left and right in our politics are managerialism versus culturalism.

The main take away from this election cycle for Baby Boomers and Generation-X should be that your time is done. The people who will be running things starting now are the people in their thirties and forties. That means our politics and culture will reflect the sensibilities of this generation. The least ethically centered generation in American history will be defining the nation. Millennials are an end-justifies-the-means generation and maybe that is what will be required going forward.

Normal Versus Crazy

Posted on October 2, 2024 by thezman

Political debates in America are rarely worth the effort to watch mostly because they are not genuine debates. Instead, they are something like a joint press conference where the candidates also get to shout at one another. In a general election, the candidate of the stupid party always agrees to allow the candidate of the evil party to invite his friends to be the moderators. The resulting show, and it is mostly just a show, is about the stupid party candidate fending off the others.

There are exceptions to this farcical aspect of our elections. Once in a while something will happen in the show to address a lingering concern of the public or maybe bring out something about one of the candidates that people have suspected. The most obvious example is the Trump – Biden debate in the summer. People suspected that Joe Biden was a vegetable, and this was confirmed in the debate. The subsequent response from regime media led to his ouster.

There was some of this in the vice-presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz last night. Unless you live in Minnesota or Ohio, you had no reason to know these guys until now. Vance was a rising star in the GOP, so he is a bit better known than Walz, but hardly a household name. Before winning the VP lottery, Walz was an unknown governor from flyover country. The debate was a chance for both men to introduce themselves to a national audience.

In the case of Vance, the regime media has been attacking him daily. They started with the “weird” campaign in the summer and then moved onto a narrative that says he is dragging down the Trump campaign. They even floated stories about Trump dropping him, which were all nonsense. His performance in the debate show put to rest any concerns the media campaign may have planted in the minds of voters. He was sharp, prepared and dominated the evening.

What normie got to see in Vance is a guy who is extremely smart and confident, but also extremely normal. He wove in his backstory when required, which is highly relatable, but he did not wave his bio around like a bloody shirt, which is something modern politicians do constantly. They have to be the hero of their story. Vance came across as down to earth, despite owning the room quite easily. Even the regime media had to admit that he dominated the show.

Walz on the other hand came across as a strange combination of Uncle Fester from the Addams Family and a highly caffeinated Mr. Magoo. Most of the night he was maniacally scribbling things on a pad he brought with him. One got the sense that he was taking notes so he could tattle on Vance to the teacher. Obviously, someone told him that smart people take notes in these things, so he practiced doing what he thought smart people do when taking notes.

Of course, the main takeaway from the night for Tim Walz was his comically weird facial expressions when staring into the camera. You half expected him to put a lightbulb in his mouth. It was the sort of behavior that crystallizes a suspicion of him in the minds of the typical voters. This is a very strange man. His overly-caffeinated Elmer Fudd routine might be fine for the folks back home, but for the rest of the country it suggests there is something disturbing about his private life.

Normally this would not matter, as people do not think too much about the vice-presidential candidates. At most they suggest something about the presidential candidate’s strengths or weaknesses. In this case, it matters a lot because there are questions about both party candidates. This election is not just about Trump versus the Blob, but about the future of Republican Party, on the one hand, and the trust in the regime candidate on the other.

What Harris needed in her running mate was someone who could reassure the white population that they could trust a boozy bimbo. Harris may be a simpleton, but the people around her are competent. The narrative they were going for was what they thought worked in 2008 with Obama. The young diverse hero supported by the old white establishment man. This story would be diverse girl boss supported by middle America white dudes in the person of Tim Walz.

Instead of salt of the earth middle-aged white guy, the Harris campaign got wacky old guy who gives people the creeps. The debate simply underscored the fact that the regime candidate is a ham-and-egger thrown in at the last minute. On the other hand, Vance looked like the guy who would take over the populist movement after Trump retires and actually have the skill to implement the agenda. Last night highlighted the fact that this election is a choice between normal and crazy.

Of course, the specter haunting this election is the rigging. Will we see waves of phony ballots mysteriously turning up in the dead of night again? It is hard to rig two elections in a row and always a bad idea to try it. That is the main reason to think they will try to rig this election. The regime is in the phase where they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. If rigging this election is the worst thing they can do, you can be sure they are thinking about it.

That aside, if Trump does win the election, one reason will be that he picked the right sidekick this time. It shows he learned from the last time and that he is thinking beyond the mere vanity of his politics. He will also have been blessed with an opponent that reminds people of their last trip to get their license renewed. Her choice of Uncle Fester as a running mate confirmed that she has no business make lunch decisions, much less making important decisions in the Oval Office.

The Port Strike

Posted on October 1, 2024 by thezman

The International Longshoremen’s Association went on strike as of midnight in the first major port strike in the United States in decades. Twenty years ago, dock workers on the West Coast struck for eleven days. The ILA has not gone on a strike since 1977, so this is a historic event for that reason alone. If the strike lasts more than a few weeks, then it will be much more than a historical event. About half of the cargo that goes in and out of the country flows through the affected ports.

The bankers estimate that the strike will cost the economy five billion per day, but that is a number plucked from the air. What we learned from the Covid fiasco is that American supply chains are extremely fragile, so any interruption will have unpredictable long-term consequences to the economy. This is also when consumer goods for the Christmas season begin flowing into the country, so delays will result in shortages which will disrupt the biggest retail period of the year.

One of the first things that will happen is conservatives will be told by conservative media to blame the dock workers. The reason for this is conservatives are idiots who do what they are told by the people they claim to oppose. The regime would like to turn this into a problem for Trump if possible, so they are busy filling the teleprompters of Fox News with squirrely rants about the greedy union guys. The vegetables that consume that slop will then regurgitate it on social media.

The fact of the matter is there are no good guys or bad guys when it comes to the strike itself, but the port system is an indictment of the economy. There is no reason for one company to control ports up and down the coast. Ports should be controlled by the states and encouraged to compete with one another for cargo. This makes for better port operations and eliminates the prospect of a crippling port strike. It also encourages modernization and efficiency at the ports.

The reason this is not the case is our ports are primarily skimming operations, rather than a part of a manufacturing and export base. What America primarily exports does not require seagoing vessels. Transgenderism, homosexual pride parades and cultural subversion are shipped around the world on the back of the dollar. What comes back are container ships full of consumer goods. A collection of people then skim a little from each container that reaches an American port.

This gets to why the dock workers are striking. They want protection from automation that will eliminate jobs. This will strike most people as nuts as they have been conditioned to think automation is a good thing, because that is what the television has told them, but in reality, most automation is about socializing the costs of business and privatizing the profits. Automating the ports will not result in lower consumer prices, but it will make the port operators richer.

If the point of the American economy were to make things and then sell them around the world, the ports could never be allowed to function as they do today because it would interfere with selling things around the world. That is not the point of the American economy, so the main function of ports is to skim from imports. This is why one main operator controls the East Coast ports. Consolidation makes it easier to institutionalize the skim.

None of this is to suggest that the dock workers are victims. Senior members of the ILA make four and five times what the typical American earns. Most of the guys on strike make six figures plus very generous benefit programs. The reason it is impossible to get a job at the ports is they control the labor force, which means they only allow friends and family to get jobs when they come open. The docks are pretty much a government created medieval guild system.

That is the other thing about the ports. The labor situation is a creation of the federal government over the last half century. In the middle of the last century, the mafia got control of the union pensions and immediately looted them. This brought in the feds who eventually restructured the union, so it was free of gangsters in track suits, but was filled with gangsters from the government. Both sides of the current contract dispute are the result of decades of government management.

Of course, there is a political angle to this. The Biden admin has done nothing to prevent the strike, which is interesting as they moved heaven and earth to head off the rail strike last year. That was when Biden thought he was going to be allowed to run for a second term. Now that he is drifting off into retirement, no one in the admin can be bothered to work on anything other than Ukraine and Israel. Kamala will be left to deal with the politics of a port strike.

This is where things get interesting. Pennsylvania and Michigan are union states, so the white remnant will be watching this strike. These are people who have always voted Democrat for economic reasons but detest the other stuff from the party. They like Trump, but wisely distrust Republicans. There is an opening for Trump the deal maker to take the union side without pandering. Harris, on the other hand, does not have any good options on this one.

In a way, the ports are a good model for our ruling class. Everyone involved in the ports is doing well, better than they should expect, but everyone involved in the ports is sure the system is screwing him. That is because the ports exist in isolation from the rest of the economy. It is a world unto itself that only interfaces with the rest of society, rather than operate within the economy. It is how high-earning people on both sides of this strike can think they are the little guy.

Another reason for this is the bottleneck mentality. Ports are a bottleneck and everything that passes through is taxed. In this way, the ports are just like our banking system or the information system. That means the real competition is over how much you get to tax what passes through the bottleneck. To the people inside a bottleneck system, it always feels like it is a zero-sum game, and their slice of the overall pie is never the biggest slice of that pie.

In the end, the union will get what they want as there is no real reason to not give them what they want. Their cost just gets tacked onto the cost of goods that flow through the port to your local Walmart of Amazon distribution center. Just like those Walmart’s and Amazons, the cost of the ports are socialized. With no fear of competition, there is no concern for the profit margin. You get to pay more for stuff, so the dock worker and his manager get to go boat shopping this spring.

The Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff

Category Archives: Politics