The Emerging Uniparty

Posted on November 16, 2023 by thezman

Note: I contracted German Ebola on my trip to the Fatherland so in addition to having a rocket high fever, I have also lost my voice. I may post something tomorrow, but it is not looking good right now.

The concept of the uniparty has been around a long time, long before political hucksters started using it as catchphrase. The fear of the major parties conspiring with one another to shortcut the will of the people goes back to the 19th century. On the one hand, the two parties should compromise, but on the other hand they should be competing for the approval of the voters. The line between cooperation and conspiracy is not easy to define, but it is assumed to exist.

In the modern age, the uniparty idea has mostly circulated on the Right, because conservatives keep voting harder but always get more of the same. When the Republicans win, they immediately fink on their voters. When they are in the minority, they bend over backwards to help the Democrats. The uniparty in this context is a way of saying that both parties serve the same master. The master can be whatever you like, but it is not the American people.

The truth is the uniparty has been in control since the end of the Second World War when America emerged as a global empire. The “Cold War consensus” was an agreed upon moral framework in which both parties operated. They could tolerate the eccentric oddball here and there for color, but the two parties made sure the people in important position were fully onboard with the consensus. The disputes within the consensus were about how to reach the shared goals.

This is why Ronald Reagan was so worrisome at first. The consensus on the Soviets had evolved to be a choice between detente and appeasement. Reagan and his team were looking to go back to the hawkish approach of the Kennedy years. It was not just foreign policy that worried Washington. Reagan and his team were full of big talk about rolling back the welfare state. In the end, Reagan and the conservatives agreed to operate within the consensus on everything.

That was not the same thing as the uniparty though. Today it feels like the parties not only collude with one another, but they laugh about it. The new tough talking Speaker of the House just pushed through a continuing resolution to keep funding government at current rates with the help of the Democrats. In fact, more Democrats voted for the bill than Republicans. The GOP went through all that drama about picking a Speaker only to get one who prefers working with the other party.

This is becoming more common. It is not just that the Republicans fink on their conservative voters and the Democrats fink on their crazies. It is that they collude with one another in the finking and do so in the open. Twenty years ago, they put on a big show about this stuff, but now it is as if they are tired of pretending. In a world where incumbents win 95% of the time, why bother with the show? We may be about to see Washington embrace the uniparty concept.

Look at what the neocons are plotting on the Republican side. They are positioning Nikki Haley as the last shrew standing, so that when Trump is disqualified from the ballot, she will be the party nominee. Haley would fit much better in the other party as she agrees with them on the important issues. The only difference between Haley and Biden is Haley is shriller. The Republican Party is plotting to run an orange version of Hillary Clinton and no one in the party thinks this is weird.

Of course, the reason this will happen is both parties locked shields after the 2016 election to block Trump. If the Republicans had provided Trump with the support he needed to get his agenda passed, it would have been a mostly normal presidency and he probably would have won in 2020. Instead, both parties went berserk and what followed was four years of mayhem and now four years of a doddering old simpleton that routinely makes a fool of himself in public.

What we are about to see is the uniparty emerge in full to both end the Biden madness and wall off politics from the bulk of the voters. Both parties will celebrate the election of the first hostile alien as president. Meanwhile, most voters want something entirely different, but that will never be on offer, so you can vote for any candidate you like as long as she is approved by the uniparty. If you complain then War Karen will have the tech companies hand your name to the usual suspects.

The next step from here is to just get rid of the party labels entirely. Not too long ago they meant something, but that is no longer the case. It is not just the disgruntled who think this but the parties themselves. Again, with the system rigged so it is close to impossible to get voted out of office, why would the parties need to keep up this charade of the two-party system? When you think about it, it is insulting. Not insulting to you but to them. No one cares about you.

One party states are common, so a one-party country is not a stretch. Most Latin American countries are one party systems. There are opposition parties, but they rarely win power and when they do, they are soon deposed. France has become a one-party system along with Germany. They have multiple parties, but the main parties all collude with one another to keep power to themselves. For America to follow the same path, but more explicitly, is not hard to imagine.

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Germany & Iceland

Posted on November 15, 2023 by thezman

Iceland is famous for its weirdness, which it embraces not just as a marketing campaign for tourism but as a way of living. Unlike the other countries of Europe, it has a well-defined beginning. A Norwegian chieftain named Ingólfur Arnarson and his wife, Hallveig Fróðadóttir settled on the island in the ninth century. Others followed and slowly the population built over time. Like early America, it is a deliberate society created by a founding population.

No other country can tell an origin story like that. This had another benefit in the weirdness department. This isolated population on a volcanic island in the North Atlantic has been a treasure for geneticists. The entire population has been tested and their DNA is in the national database. We know more about the population of Iceland than any population on the planet. This has allowed researchers to confirm much of the origin story, except for the outlandish bits.

Speak with Icelanders and you find out that they are very familiar with their story, but they do not spend a lot of time thinking about it. They know the rest of the world finds this tiny island to be a great curiosity. The tourism rackets now bring millions of people to Iceland every year to gaze upon the weirdness. On the other hand, Iceland has avoided the modern bug. They do not hate themselves. Instead, they have a strong sense of identity but they do not think too much about it.

Contrast this with the Germans. Unlike tiny Iceland, the Germans have a long history, but their origin story is not so clear. Like the rest of the continent, the German people are a blend of many tribes that pushed onto Europe. There is no Ingólfur Arnarson in the story of modern Germany. In fact, Germany is the result of the transition from medieval to modern, as what we think of as the modern state is a collection of states that were at times independent and other times part of an empire.

Of course, a big part of the German identity is the events of the last century, but everyone would just as soon forget about them. Modern Germany is, in part, a giant outdoor museum populated by amnesiacs. Everywhere you look there are reminders of the pre-20th century past. Castles, amazing old villages, cathedrals, and reminders of the cultural achievements of the German people. On the other hand, it is hard to find any reminders of the 20th century.

One result of this is the German people have a strong identity, but they have a difficult relationship with that identity. The laws against mentioning you know who are not so much about you know who coming back in vogue but as a way to anathematize any discussion of that period. This is not a top-down thing. The average German would just as soon forget about the past and embrace the present. In this regard, the Germans are the most modern people in all of Europe.

This is not a terrible thing. Germany is in many ways the model European country in that it strives to have a strong economy and a peaceful society. Even after the waves of migrants were brought in by Merkel, it remains a high trust society. It is not Japan, but it is not France or Italy. Walk around a German city and you feel safe. You know where to go and where not to go, but even where not to go is nothing like you see in France or especially the United States.

In a way, Iceland and Germany are great examples of the modern. One has become a fully modern society without going to war with itself, while the other remains at war with itself as it embraces the modern. Both societies are fully modern, materially, and spiritually, but they got there by different routes. As a result, they both face the same problems that now define the modern age. Those are collapsing TFR and an unwillingness to honestly face up to the problem.

Whenever national leaders talk about fertility, they lay the blame on their favorite bogeyman, rather than the real causes. This post from Iceland University is a great example of blame shifting. They blame the socialist bogeymen of the past, materialism, and individualism, then throw in a new one, climate change. These are people who have lived on a volcano since they were a people. If climate change were a big fear, they would have died off long ago.

Germans just lie about the topic. They have one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe, but they pretend it is getting better. This post from the pandemic years is a good example of the self-delusion. This was a popular narrative in Europe. They were sure lockdowns would result in a baby boom, but when that did not happen, they went about pretending that it happened anyway. Of course, none of these countries report TFR by ethnicity as that would give the game away.

What all this suggests is that it is not the past that haunts the modern West, but the present that is the source of the crisis. Iceland embraces its past and has a collapsing TFR just like Germany, which tries to ignore its past. It should be noted that both societies are extremely feminized. They reek of estrogen. Where that fits on the causal chain is hard to say. What is not hard to figure is that in societies where girls pretend to be boys, the girls do not grow up to be mothers.

Travelogue: Germany

Posted on November 14, 2023 by thezman

I have been to the Frankfurt airport a number of times, but I have never done any adventurizing in the city itself. It is not a German city high on the tourist list because it was pretty much leveled in the war. When it was rebuilt, it was supposed to be a modern city and the financial hub of the country. Instead of restored old buildings it has all the modern things we expect to see in a modern city. As a result, it has little in the way of tourism, relative to other German cities.

That is not all bad. It is a very convenient city. The train system is efficient and logical, along with being exceptionally clean. I saw one bum in the train station. There are no maniacs pushing people off platforms while the cops look on and laugh. If you drive, parking is a bit of a pain, but that is true in all cities. Street parking is an adventure, but there are plenty of public parking garages. Getting around is not much different from driving in other cities, except the signs are different.

The one big difference from driving in America is petrol is $10/gallon, after you convert from euros to dollars. That was for the cheapest level, which was too good for the Opel that the knock-off car rental place gave us. There is simply no way America could survive fuel prices at those levels. Germans tolerate it, because they are German, and they have no other option. Their political class is as moronic as ours, which means there is no way to vote down gas prices…

I saw fewer mask people in Germany than Iceland. The mask people in Iceland, however, were foreigners, so maybe it evens out. Judging by the airports, the Europeans have fewer mask lunatics than America. It must not have caught on as a subculture with them like it has in America. The good thing about the maskers is that come the revolution, we can find them quickly and send them off to the camps. There is something creepy and weird about people wearing masks in public…

The migrant population in Frankfurt is not what I expected. At the hotel it was all Brazilians working the front desk. The taxi drivers were Poles or Ukrainians, with a smattering of Pakistanis. My guess is the city is built for finance, so the services are for finance people, which makes certain migrants less desirable. Maybe it is just that the guys from MENA and Africa looked at the travel sites and saw that Frankfurt was not a highly rated city, so they went elsewhere.

The presence of Poles and Ukrainians in service sector jobs means service is worse that you find in other European cities. They act like they are doing you a favor and are often deliberately hostile to patrons. The German service workers are the opposite, as they are efficient and polite. They do not have a strong tipping culture in Europe, so that changes the relationship between server and patron. Those who understand Americans, will go the extra mile for you…

Perhaps it was the part of the city, but I did not see a lot of young people out and about in the evening. It was an older crowd. Europeans do tend to go out later and end later than we do in America, even older people. Even so, I did not see any young people anywhere, other than people with small children. There were a lot of people pushing strollers, which is not something you see in American cities. You raise kids in the suburbs in order to get them into better schools…

It was a bit cool one evening so we ducked into a small Christmas market. It is too early for the bigger markets, but there are some small ones. These are open areas ringed by stalls selling food and drink, with lots of Christmas trees. They sell something they call Glühwein, which is what the English call mulled wine. The word means “glow wine” because of how it makes you feel. I am not a wine drinker, and the stuff is as sweet as candy, but it really does hit the spot on a cold night…

The point of being in Frankfurt was to attend the NFL game. Old friends I have not seen in too long converged on the city for the game. I have no interest in the NFL, but it was a good excuse to get together. The city has embraced the NFL for some reason, so it is a good place for the league to hold games. There are social clubs all over for the different teams. We saw one guy who had bought a pickup truck and decorated it with the colors of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

It is not just a novelty for them. They have taken the time to learn the rules of the game and they now have youth leagues for football. Colleges now come to Germany to scout for players, mostly linemen. Germans are big people, and they are smart people, so if you need offensive linemen, it is a good place to look. Germans feel a strong connection to the United States. There are a lot of Americans in Germany, so it makes sense that the biggest American sport would take root.

The game was a great time. You take a train to the stadium and along the walk to the facility from the train stop are stands selling beer and food. There is a strong party atmosphere, despite the lack of tailgating. The pre-game had a local hero, Sebastian Vollmer, who played for the Patriots. Then they brought out the cheerleaders, which the Germans girls seem to lover. I saw a lot of pretty German girls dressed as cheerleaders in the game, which is a great idea for obvious reasons.

Just before the game, they played the American anthem. A female soldier performed it and by the time she was finished it was clear she was getting chocked up. That was because the crowd was singing louder than her. It was one of those times when you are reminded that Americans are great people, even if our leaders are the worst people who regularly turn the virtue of patriotism into a vice. Patriotism is a virtue, and your fellow citizens, by and large, are good people.

After the American anthem, they played the German anthem, which surprised me as this is not common custom around the world. The Germans fans seem to have embraced this like they have embraced the NFL. They were loud and enthusiastic for the anthem of their people. It was a good reminder that underneath the silly bubble coats they love wearing, there are the same people who gave the world Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe, and Karl Marx…

At one point during the game, they played what has become the anthem of West Virginia, John Denver’s, Country Roads. I have no idea why they played this song, as one team was from Boston and the other from Indianapolis. The game was being played in a cosmopolitan city in the heart of Europe. The whole crowd erupted and sang it all the way through to the end, even though the game started. I took that as a sign from God that everything is going to be okay…

Travelogue: Iceland

Posted on November 13, 2023 by thezman

An interesting clash of cultures can be observed when you travel from Lagos to Reykjavik on Iceland Air. Baltimore-Washington airport is an interesting scene from an anthropological perspective on a normal day. If you want a glimpse of the future, spend time at the Iceland Air terminal. You will see the highly complex social machine that is a modern airport operated by people who are not very complex.

This was my first time on Iceland Air, at least I think so, but after a while these airlines are seem the same. Prior trips to Iceland were on WoW, the now defunct airline that put the weird into air travel. The other carrier that I have used to Iceland is Aer Lingus, which used to have Reykjavik as a hub. Maybe Iceland Air is a spinoff of that operation as I did not see any Aer Lingus flights to Reykjavik.

Anyway, the line to check in was not too bad, but it still took forty minutes to check my bag and get a boarding pass. They do not have the kiosks like other airlines, but they have lots of diversity. That created trouble at the gate as many people were allowed to take large carry-on bags with them, which the airline prohibits. There were lots of tense conversations at the gate as people were forced to check bags.

I was in line behind to enormous black women. They had with them suitcases the size of my closet, which made some sense, given their size. Those suitcases were in a neon leopard print, which matched their outfits. When they reached the counter, the clerk gushed over their matching outfits and luggage. I could not help but laugh thinking of the reaction on the other end when they arrived in Iceland…

There is a strange aloofness to Icelandic women. They are stunningly beautiful in a Tolkien sort of way. It is the fashion here for women to use makeup to highlight their eyes, which come in a stunning variety of colors. They put on a happy face when talking with you but you get the sense that there is not a lot going on behind those beautiful eyes and exotic looks. The lights are on but no one is home.

I experienced this in Sweden. I drove around the country and saw so many stereotypical Swedish blonds it got a bit boring. The thing that I started to notice was a weird dullness to them. I do not think it is stupidity, but some sort of cultural thing that we do not have in America. I got the sense that Swedish women think men are all slightly ridiculous, so the dull facade is concealing laughter…

Iceland is one of the places I recommend to people looking for their first trip abroad, just behind Ireland. Travel is always stressful, but travel to a foreign land can be intimidating until you get the hang of it. Ireland is the best first trip for Americans because it is the most familiar to them. Everyone speaks English, they understand Americans and they genuinely like American tourists.

Iceland is a good second choice. Everyone speaks English, even if it is with an amusing accent, and they are efficient. Reykjavik airport is great because it is logical and clearly marked and everything works as expected. The rest of the country is the same, so a first-time traveler will not be intimidated. That and the stunning natural weirdness of the place makes for a great first experience abroad…

Iceland is a great test case for the HBD people. They used to write about it a lot because it is a proof of concept. Take a group of people and plop them down on a remote island and let nature take its course. Icelanders are the most studied people on the planet, as their entire population has been DNA tested. In a way, this volcanic island in the North Atlantic is one big science experiment.

You can see this in the language. The people who settled the island spoke Old Norse primarily, but some other people were in the mix. The language then evolved into its current form, mostly due to the people meeting at the Althing, which was something like a primitive parliament. This allowed the language to evolve quickly, becoming distinct from other Scandic languages, but also become the official language of the island.

There is no point in you learning Icelandic, so if you decide to make the trip here just learn how to say “thank you” and “pardon me.” Learning how to say “thank you” in the local tongue solves most problems. The rest can be solved by learning how to say “pardon me” so you can ask for help. It shows the proper respect without annoying the locals with your terrible version of their language…

It has been months since I have had a beer and I do not miss it. The blood pressure is now stead at 100/70, so that is good. I did miss beer on the flight. In the past, I would have a couple beers prior to boarding the plane, so then I would sleep the whole way over the Atlantic. Overnight planes are weird places when you are awake to see what your fellow passengers are doing…

The blackwashing of ads we see in America has become a joke, but you really noticed the absurdity of it abroad. At the airport I saw an ad posted featuring a black guy and a Swedish looking woman. Iceland is a tiny island filled with white people, but they have to do this stuff anyway. You can be sure there are Icelandic women who think that the real strength of Iceland is its diversity…

I was chatting with someone along the way who is a work at home person now, so he is a work from the road person. There is a fair bit of that now. In every airport you can hear people doing regular work sitting on the floor of the terminal. I bring all of my work stuff with me when I travel. A world run by rootless people doing their work over the internet from wherever they happen to be at the time is going to have an impact…

Christian Ethnonationalism

Posted on November 10, 2023 by thezman

The topic of the show this week is something I touch on from time to time in writing but only rarely in the podcast. That is the dilemma Christians face when engaging in dissident politics or politics in general. They have been boxed in to a great degree by the egalitarians on the issue of nationalism. It is hard to be a nationalist of any sort if you start from the premise that all men are equal before God.

Many anti-Christians in dissident politics, and there are many of them, zero in on this issue as a disqualifier. They point to the many Christian pastors who promote multiracial and multicultural themes. These holy men turn Christianity into a weapon in service of nation wrecking liberal projects. From an outsider’s perspective, it does seem like Christianity is another tentacle of the liberal kraken.

It does not have to be that way. Through the 18th century, Christians were quite chauvinistic about their national identity. It was also assumed that the people who lived outside of Christendom should remain outside of Christendom, even if missionaries managed to convert them. Even Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionists were skeptical about the races getting along in one society.

That is the show this week. Not my best effort as I had no prep time because I am traveling this week. I did not like how the show came out, but I had no time to redo it so I will come back to this at another time. It also touches in other philosophical topics that I plan to write about in the future. As I note in the show, a lot of important things were forgotten in the 19th century.

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Christian Dissidents
Equality
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Maker’s Knowledge
God’s Property

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Trust The Unhappiness

Posted on November 9, 2023 by thezman

One of the few things most everyone can agree upon is that things are not good, and everyone seems to be unhappy about something. Conversations in real life or online revolve around this general sense of unhappiness. In fact, it is fair to say that online life is just one long airing of grievances. Often, people are primarily unhappy with the unhappiness of some group that is using their unhappiness to make demands on everyone else, which makes everyone unhappy.

This is not just a case of the internet skewing perception. Polling on the issue says that people think we are headed down a bad road. Three quarters of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. As you can see in that poll, the last time a majority thought the country was on the right track was right after the January 6 protests, suggesting the people wanted to see a genuine insurrection. Since then dissatisfaction with the direction of the country has climbed steadily.

The funny thing is that most people would not be surprised to learn that record numbers of people are unhappy with the current state of affairs. If anything, they would be stunned to learn that thirty percent are content. How is it possible for these people to exist in the same reality as the rest? If the split were fifty-fifty, it would make sense as it would simply reflect the party divide. When it is seventy-thirty it means something is going on with that thirty percent.

Putting that aside, the question that naturally arises is what is it that is making people unhappy with the direction of the country? Again, polling provides a clue. The number one issue for people is inflation. The thing is the government tells us that inflation is slowly ticking down. It was 8.7% last year and is 3.7% now. If anything, people should be thrilled with the direction of inflation. In fact, they should be cheering the people who control the economy for their great work on inflation.

There is a another small clue. According to official figures, everyone who wants a job can have a job and the economy is humming along. Inflation was a problem, but it is going away, so the economy is officially in great shape. People seem to agree as unemployment is way down the list of concerns. Not only that but consumers keep spending and people keep buying houses. Despite the rise in mortgage rates, the housing market remains strong all over the country.

In other words, the economy is not a particularly good measure of happiness. Another big clue is that the one thing everyone agrees upon is the political situation in Washington is a problem, the main problem in politics. Large majorities of both parties think the endless drama in Washington is a problem. It is just behind health care, which is a serious problem with practical consequences that no one discusses. Health insurance costs continue to rise at multiples of inflation.

The thing is though, politics in a democracy is not supposed to be a polite and cooperative affair. It is supposed to be an ugly food fight. For the most part, it has always been an ugly food fight. Even in times of relative peace and tranquility the two sides torment one another. In the Reagan years, when the quality of life was near a peak, the Democrats tried to impeach Reagan. Under Clinton, when conservative actually got things they wanted, they hated Bill Clinton.

Another clue here is that there are things on the list that are complete nonsense, but they vex people to some degree. A good example is climate change, a thing that does not exist, but it worries 64% of democrats. At the same time, terrorism is not a real concern for most people, but Washington cannot shut up about it. Now they are claiming Hamas is under your bed. Last week it was racists. According to Washington, the next terroristic bogeyman is antisemites.

Put it all together and maybe the reason that the lack of cooperation is number three on the list, just below things that should matter to people, is that the people never see anyone in Washington talking about those things that matter. Not a single candidate has anything useful to say about inflation or health care costs. They have nothing to say about the drug problem or the growing crime problem. It is not that the parties do not get along. It is that they agree to ignore the important issues.

Even so, if things are good in the economy, despite some concerns over things like health care and inflation, people should be mostly content. Not only are people not happy, but there is also a sense of looming disaster in the air. The reason for that is something that is not captured in basic economic data. Things are slowly eroding for the white middle-class and that is what is causing the anxiety. A little here, a little there, middle-class white people are getting poorer.

This coincides with two other things. Once is the browning of American, which everyone sees everywhere they look. When the military put white guys back in their ads recently, everyone started laughing about it. It was assumed they did this because they are plotting a big war and will need competent soldiers. This is one of those data points that does not show up in economic data or polling. People sense the lights going out on their culture and they see signs of it in the household budgets.

Of course, they are not allowed to speak of it. That is the other side of this general unhappiness that does not turn up in polling. The ways you are allowed to express yourself have been reduced to generic economic questions or silly things like how the parties get along on your television. Not only do the people on television avoid talking about what matters to you, you are not allowed to talk about what matters to you and this is extremely frustrating for a growing number of people.

The way to think of it is the public square has fallen victim to the same forces that wrecked internet forums. The point was to create a place for vigorous debate, but certain people did not like the direction of the debate, so they found ways to shut down the debate, which crashed public trust in the system. It turns out you need high trust to maintain a vigorous public debate. With trust at all-time lows, everyone is going to be unhappy, not matter how good things are on paper.

Sailing The Three C’s

Posted on November 8, 2023 by thezman

There are three aspects to problem solving that seem obvious when stated but are not always obvious to philosophers of problem solving. One is that you have to identify that there is a problem, as in an unwanted result. The next step is to then narrow in on the possible causes of the problem. The final step is to then produce a list of possible corrections to these complaints and causes. In the world of problem solving, this is known as Complaint, Cause and Correction.

If you are a working man who does productive things for a living, this is something with which you are familiar. If you fix big scary trucks for a living, every day someone points at a big scary truck, hands you a list of complaints and you then set about finding the causes of those complaints and their corresponding corrections. If you are a philosopher of big scary trucks, then this is a bit of a mystery. You wonder how any of this fits in with your particular school’s philosophy or ideology.

This disconnect is obvious in politics. The Republicans have been vexed by one primary complaint for close to a decade. The people they want to swindle into voting for them do not like them very much. In fact, they went so far as to vote for the one guy the party said was off-limits in 2016, Donald Trump. Despite the party’s best efforts to rid themselves of this troublesome man, the rank-and-file voters still prefer him over whatever the party offers as an alternative.

In other words, the party’s complaint is that the voters refuse to support the blocks of wood the party is selling and they support the guy they hate. This turned up in the local elections yesterday, where the Republican Party underperformed again. They even put up a based black guy in the Kentucky governor’s race, but the Democrat still won, in a state that is reliably Republican. In Virginia, the party failed to win the state house, despite their claims about the governor’s popularity.

Going back to the big scary truck idea, the complaint is that it is the wrong sort of big scary truck, and the driver wants his old truck back. You, the big scary truck fixer guy can certainly figure out the cause of the complaints. The company bought the wrong truck, or the driver is a knucklehead. The trouble is you have no correction for these causes, so the complaint must remain unaddressed. That is the problem for the Republican Party as it sinks into irrelevance.

The philosophers of political problem solving, like the philosophers of big scary trucks, will immediately point to their favorite correction. No matter the complaint, no matter the cause, they will argue that the correction is to do whatever it is they are paid to promote or what their ideological school promotes. They will skip that middle part, the cause, and maybe even recast the complaint to their liking. This is why politic punditry is endless rounds of more of the same.

There will be some who pretend to be smart by focusing on the cause. They will roll out some polls claiming that the party does not appeal to this group of new people or this other newly labeled identity group. They will argue, for example, the GOP lost support among young female Tinder users in Ohio. They failed to capture the one-legged lesbian Elvis impersonator vote in the Northern Virginia suburbs. The point of this analysis is to avoid looking too closely at the complaints and the causes.

The place to start for this result and what will be a similar result in the 2024 election is the complaint portion of the work order. If you asked white people to list their top-5 complaints with the party, none of them can be found in the op-ed section of major news sites or in the talking points of candidates. For close to a decade now these voters have been pilloried by the diversity rackets. The party’s corrective to this in Kentucky, a very white state, was to offer up Jeb Bush in blackface.

That is the problem of the party in a nutshell. It no longer pretends to care about the complaints of its voters. They refuse to even discuss most of them. The reason Youngkin won the governorship is because outside groups and grassroots volunteers were outraged at the diversity stuff in the schools. As soon as Youngkin won, he fell silent on all of this stuff and began dreaming of bigger things. Why would those voters come out and support his party in the next election?

It would be one thing if the party spent time properly discussing the complaints of their voters but failed to arrive at suitable corrections. The voters could at least kid themselves into thinking these guys will eventually land on the right correction, even if it is by blind luck. Here is the campaign website of Nikki Haley, who is the preferred option by the party for 2024. Note there is nothing on site to indicate why she is running or why it should matter to you. It is just stock phrases and photos.

Here is the website of Ron DeSantis, who thinks he is Trump-lite. Like Haley, there is nothing on the site but gibberish. At the top is what looks like a campaign slogan. “I am running for President of the United States because I want to lead our Great American Comeback. Our country is going in the wrong direction. We see it with our eyes and we feel it in our bones…” Lead to where? Back from what? Which direction is it headed and what is the right direction? Who knows?

To shift gears slightly, the salesman for the big scary truck repair facility has a job similar to a politician. He tries to convince people to use his service. As a salesman, he has been trained to rely on logos, ethos, and pathos. That is, he combines logical arguments in favor of his service, with his and his firm’s reputation, along with emotional arguments to close the sale. “You know we can do a good job for you, and you will sleep better knowing you signed with us.”

If the Republican Party were operating the big scary truck shop, the salesmen would be festooned in the flags of foreign countries and showing the prospects pictures of the one black guy they have working in their shop. Meanwhile, the mechanics would be spending their days driving penis pictures on the work orders. No one would do business with them because no one would understand the point of their business or know why they should do business with them.

In fairness, the party leaders probably know this at some level. They are smart and clever in the rat-like way that is common in politics. They surely see that they are running a generational bust out. The demographic that makes the Republican Party possible is sinking into permanent minority status. The goal here is to keep them from noticing while the party squeezes the last drops from the racket. The big scary truck shop will then be set on fire for the insurance money.

A Warning From The Past

Posted on November 7, 2023 by thezman

On August 30, 1918, Vladimir Lenin had just given a speech at the Hammer and Sickle arms manufacturing facility in Moscow. As he was leaving, a woman called out his name and he stopped to see who was calling to him. Why he would have done this is unclear, as by this point Lenin was the most important man in Russia. He had lots of people who wanted a minute of his time. Nonetheless, he stopped to address the woman, who produced a pistol and shot Lenin three times.

The woman was not just any woman. She was Fanny Kaplan, who had been involved in radical politics since she was a teenager. She was a member of the SR’s, a very radical group that had been aligned with the Bolsheviks at times. She had spent time in a Siberian labor camp for having taken part in terrorist bombing attacks in Kiev, as well as other activities. She had been released by the Bolsheviks after the February revolution and gone right back to radical politics.

Lenin survived the assassination attempt, although he was never quite the same physically or psychologically. This was terrifying to Lenin and his inner circle not just due to the attack itself, but what it represented. The Bolsheviks were no longer the revolutionary force from the left, but the established order that had to contend with threats from all corners of the political space. The Bolsheviks had real power so that meant wielding that power to maintain that power.

There was also the issue of how Kaplan was able to get so close to Lenin in order to take a shot at him. Lenin had security, but it became clear that the SR radicals had friends and sympathizers in the security apparatus. The Cheka was filled with people who were not entirely loyal to the Bolsheviks. Many had been aligned with coalition partners, like the SR’s. If revolution was going to stay alive, it meant the system had to be purged and that meant unleashing political terror.

This was an important step, especially given the fact that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were students of the French Revolution. They knew how the terror worked out for the Jacobins and they were determined to avoid the same fate. Yet from the perspective of Lenin lying in a bed with a hole in his neck and a bullet in his shoulder, the only logical path forward was to unleash the forces of political terror. The same logic would eventually motivate Stalin to follow the same course.

The reason this matters at all to those living in this spot on the space-time continuum is that the people in charge of the empire are facing similar choices. In fact, they have been in this spot since the 2020 coup. In the fullness of time, that election will probably be looked at the same way as other radical coups in revolutionary times. Maybe Trump is actually our version of Kerensky, the radical liberal reformer who tried to head off the radical socialists but was eventually defeated by them.

Putting that aside, what mattered to Lenin as doctors patched him up was his perspective on the situation. The same can be said of the regime in the aftermath of the January 6th protests. Like Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the people who engineered Biden into the White House suffered from a similar lack of confidence. They had pulled off the great coup, but they were still unsure of their position. People climbing barricades brought to mind people more radical than themselves.

In other words, the people now in charge of the system see themselves as radicals, facing threats from all sides as they seek to consolidate power. This may sound a bit nuts but radicalism is powered by strong belief. Even when they have total control of the state, radicals will believe themselves to be the underdog, fighting a much more powerful enemy. You see that in this advertisement by a former J6 prosecutor, who seems to think he is David facing the Goliath of MAGA.

Mr. Rollins sounds deranged and delusional, but he believes what he is saying not because the facts support those beliefs. He believes because there are no better beliefs for him to hold at the moment. That is one of those things about political believers that normal people struggle to grasp. These people genuinely believe what they say, and they will not drop those beliefs when you present facts and reason. They will only abandon those beliefs in favor of better beliefs.

This is why it is foolish to think that the people we call the Left are running out of juice or having second thoughts. This is not how the revolutionary mind works. Those polls we now see showing Biden losing to Trump in the key states are not intended to boost your spirits, but to terrify the radicals. It is a reminder that there is always a Kerensky, or a Trump in this case. More importantly, there is always a Fanny Kaplan, so the radicals better not lose focus or let down their guard.

This is why they continue to persecute the J6 people. Almost three years on and they are still hunting for new victims. It is why there will be renewed efforts to eliminate Trump from the ballot. The bizarreness of the New York court case against Trump should be a reminder that that the radicals will never let something as petty as facts or the law get in the way of their efforts. Every setback is a reminder that they must renew their efforts to complete the revolution.

The regime is Lenin, lying on a couch with two holes put there by someone with help from the inside. The reality of that thinking is not important. What matters is the belief that the revolution is in mortal danger. Our revolutionaries are just as aware of the past as the prior revolutionaries, but they are just as trapped by the dynamics of revolution, so they will be compelled to follow the same path. What lies ahead is not a break from the madness, but a renewed assault by the radicals.

The Emotive State

Posted on November 6, 2023 by thezman

Note #1: A young fellow I met at a secret handshake meeting has published his first novel and I would like you to buy many copies and recommend it to everyone. If you are a fan of the fantasy genre, then give it a try and let me know your thoughts. Supporting the people on our side, especially in the arts is the best political thing you can do.

Note #2: Behind the green door I have a post about house hunting, a post about the robot art critics of our future and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

If you look back at the government propaganda of the Second World War, you will see that it was rather generic in how it framed the enemy. The propaganda about the Germans was not much different from what was used in the prior war, except this time the Nazis were often portrayed as stupid. The Japanese were portrayed as absurdly Asian looking and monstrously cruel. Both were described as villainous aggressors who had no reason to launch their war on the world.

In other words, there was nothing special about the bad guys relative to prior bad guys, other than some superficial differences. There has always been a circular logic to wartime propaganda, going back to the Greeks. The bad guys are bad because they are the enemy, and they are the enemy because they are bad. What makes them bad, of course, is they do things we would never do, and they never do the things that we know good people are supposed to do.

Fast forward to the present and villains are either Hitler or Bull Connor, who have morphed into a Janus like creature that haunts every conflict. The foreign villains are always going to be Hitler, while domestic villains are the generic racist. Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were Hitler, despite the obvious differences, while every white conservative is a fledgling Bull Connor. Donald Trump managed to be both, despite his Zionism and love of black people.

The language of public discourse now sounds like wartime propaganda because we now live in the age of emotivism. The term “emotivism” comes from an early 20th century school of ethics that claimed all ethical sentences are actually expressions of emotional attitude, as in positive or negative. When a speaker says something is good or bad, he is not stating an objective fact, but merely expressing his own emotional attitude toward the object in question.

Like a lot of 19th and early 20th century ideas around ethics and philosophy, this one fell out of favor due to its lack of utility. You cannot build a grand moral theory if morality is a subjective construct that arises from tradition or superstition, so there must be some universal and objective morality. Similarly, you cannot make a career in ethics if ethics are nothing more than conditioned responses. There must be some universal ethical code buried in the desert that must be found.

That does not mean the emotivists were correct when they made their sweeping claim about ethical statements. Just because the war propagandists say the bad guys are bad as a way to generate support for the cause, does not mean everyone who says the bad guys are bad is merely acting on their conditioning. Nor does it mean that everyone saying the bad guys are bad is a propagandist. It is possible to think the bad guys are objectively bad and do so without emotion.

Even so, it is a useful concept when thinking about how modern humans interact with one another in the public space. America is an empire built by war, so it is built for war, and therefore it is always on the hunt for war. As a result, generations of Americans have grown up in a wartime culture, which means the public square has been flooded with what amounts to wartime propaganda. There is always a war, which means there is always an enemy that demands you jeer at it.

Public discourse in this age is not about presenting facts or contesting various claims, but about displaying your allegiance to a perceived moral divide. The white people installing the “Hate has no place here” signs on their lawn would never live within a bus ride of black people, but they feel they must show the world that they are on one side of the racism line, the good side. The yawning gap between their emotive gestures and their lived experience does not register with them.

This is why the people we call the Left love the word extremism. The word is meaningless but in the mouth of a Cloud Person it is ridiculous. They accuse normal people living normal lives of extremism, because those normal people do not want to dress their son as a girl. Logically, it is nonsense, but emotively it is highly appealing as it not only expresses the users state of mind toward the bad people, it amplifies the distance between the speaker and object.

Of course, this is why everyone is Hitler now. It is not that Hitler is the evilest person in history or that he is an outlier in political villainy. Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and many others were much bloodier and villainous. Unlike those other baddies from history, Hitler lets the speaker express a clear emotional state. That emotional state, of course, indicates your emotional commitment to a collection of people and ideas. Calling someone Hitler is like violently crying at a North Korean state funeral.

That is the way to think about public discourse in the emotive state. The ambitious and self-conscious are always looking around for a way express their “boo/hooray” instincts to the crowd. When the pro-Israel people rushed to their nearest platform to claim Hamas is Hitler, they were letting the world know their emotional state on this issue, not expressing an ethical or moral position. That is why the language spiraled into the absurd as they competed with one another.

That last part also helps explain the weirdness of public discourse. Since every issue is instinctively understood to be an opportunity to express an emotion, there is a natural competition to see who can be the most emotional. Piety in the emotive state is no longer about adherence to a set of ethical rules, but a consistency in showing the popular emotional response to issues. Instead of sacrificing a bull to the gods, the great and the good have a good cry at a candlelight vigil.

A biproduct of this emotionalism is that politics are purely performative. There is no practical point to any of it, as the primary motivation is to be seen expressing the best emotions at the time. While the mob sorts through their own emotional response to the emotive performances, the people with real power go about exercising that power to maintain and enhance their power. Politics has become the feelies from the novel Brave New World, rather than a marketplace of ideas.

While this is useful to the people with power, it may be short lived. There is a limit to how much raw emotion one can tolerate. Every day there is some new thing that everyone must emote about in public. Just as drug takers find they need increasingly powerful doses to get the desired effect, the emotive need increasingly stronger emotional responses. Like the drug taker, the end of this road is the inability to feel anything other than the lack of agony.

All human societies are moral societies. The rules governing virtue provide meaning and purpose to individual lives. The emotive state, in contrast, channels the natural desire to do the right thing, however society defines it, into the onanistic act of crying in public over violation of the right thing. As a result, the good life has no point, other than an endless crying jag. There is no point to this way of living, which may explain the catastrophic social measures of modernity.

The Way It Works

Posted on November 3, 2023 by thezman

The selection of a complete nobody to be the Speaker of the House is a good way to understand how things actually work in our system. Most people still think their vote matters in terms of who occupies elected office and how they go about their jobs, but the rise of Mike Johnson shows that to be false. You voting has little bearing on the way the pollical system functions.

Look at Johnson’s career and you see how the system selects for and against types of people at the lowest levels of politics. If one day you want to be in Congress, it means starting in politics at a young age and subjecting yourself to a lengthy filtering process to make sure you are going to fit and support the system. Our democracy selects for conformity and strongly selects against curiosity.

This also explains why the political class has such a strong contempt for the people the system is supposed to represent. As a practical matter, only about ten percent of elected officials are subject to the voters. The rest occupy safe seats that are controlled by the party. That means your success as an office holder depends on making the party and its underwriters happy. The voters are an annoying distraction.

Elected officials and the vast army of supporting players feel compelled to play along with the charade of democracy, but at some level even the dullest of the bunch understand it is all a pointless performance. It is that conflict between the reality of politics and the need to pretend otherwise that leads to frustration. If the voters would just agree with everything, life would be so simple in Washington.

That is why a guy like Mike Johnson gets selected. So far, he has demonstrated an ability to convince the rubes back home that the system works. He also brings the multi-billion-dollar Christian Inc. operation with him, which will make sure to bribe any potential detractors in the caucus. That way the system can go back to doing what it is designed to do, which is to serve the interests of the economic elites.