Old Think New Think

Posted on February 20, 2025 by thezman

One of the new features of life since Trump came back to town is that things move quickly and if you are not careful, they will move without you. Ten thousand USAID employees learned this in week one. One day they were organizing the resistance and then the next day they were setting up a LinkedIn account. The first month of the Trump presidency has been a whirlwind of change. This is creating two classes of people, one who keep pace and one who are left behind.

One of those being left behind is Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He now finds himself on the wrong side of the Trump’s friend-enemy distinction. He made the mistake of thinking the new boss was the old boss and his tricks would keep working. When those tricks did not work, he made the very big mistake of saying the new boss was misinformed. Now the new boss is making it clear that Zelensky will not be part of the future. Just like that, Zelensky is being reassigned to the dustbin of history.

The reason that Zelensky has so quickly gone from being the indispensable man to the guest who refuses to leave is that long before he was told about any of this, decisions were made about his future. For months prior to the election Trump would say he had a plan to end the war in Ukraine, but he refused to elaborate on the grounds that it was not prudent to talk about it publicly. The only clue he provided was that the war would never have happened if he had been president.

People dismissed this as hubris, but it was an important clue. If Trump had been president, he would have demanded to talk with the Russians and he would never have elevated Zelensky to the status of indispensable man. Project Ukraine was only possible by first anathematizing Russia and then turning Zelensky into a heroic figure at the point of the spear resisting the evil Russians. Remove that friend-enemy set up and the war never gets started.

Once you look at the war the way Trump has been looking at the war since it started, his approach makes perfect sense. He is doing now what he would have done if he were in the White House for a second term. He opened a dialogue with the Russians, and he minimized Zelensky. The reason for that is this war is not about Ukraine or some abstract concepts from the past century. It is about how conflicts between the great powers will be settled in the future.

Here is where you see the two class of people. Zelensky is operating from the old model where moralizing about world affairs was the rule. It was about those old 20th century ideas of good guys and bad guys. Trump is operating from the new model where everything is about business. Project Ukraine is bad business, so it must end and there is nothing more to say about it. Zelensky is the project manager who thinks the project is about something other than business.

Zelensky is not alone in this. His friends in Europe are also trapped in the past, thinking that they are skillfully playing the old game, when in reality they are soon to join Zelensky in the room of formerly relevant figures. The British figurehead Keir Starmer is coming to Washington next week thinking he is going to explain things to President Trump with regards to Zelensky. In reality he is going to be sat down by Trump subordinates and told he has been demoted.

Trump signaled as much when a reporter asked him about Starmer announcing his trip to Washington last week. Trump casually said that Starmer wanted to visit, but he was unsure of when he was coming. He treated it like the pool guy called and said he had to do something about the algae. That should have been a signal to the Brits that Starmer will not be welcomed as an equal, but like everyone else in Europe, they are struggling to come to terms with the new world order.

The same thing is happening locally. Scan many conservative sites or their accounts on Twitter and they are carrying on like it is 1985. Granted, this has been their act since 1985, but it is clearly not 1985 now. They are still doing the “If we use our power then the we are no better than the Democrats” act. The dumbest ones are still singing from the neocon hymn book. Dissidents have often joked that conservativism is a museum to the Reagan years, but now it is painfully true.

In fairness, the dancing partner of the conservatives are struggling as well. This tweet from a progressive chattering skull is emblematic. He is working from the old playbook that says the “left” calls out the “right” about not following the rules and the “right” then uses that to fink on their voters. The people operating in the new way of things just shrug at this stuff. The whole point of the present moment is to flip over the tables in the temple of politics and usher in a new age.

This is not just a struggle for the establishment. Old think is a problem for people who claimed to be dissidents. The people called “right-wing influencers” are struggling to maintain an audience because their act is suddenly irrelevant. Many are now becoming Trump critics because it is the only way to get attention. It turns out that they were never for anything, just against things. Remove those things they oppose, and they are left with a gaping hole in their act.

Where all this leaves us is we have two classes of people now. There are those who are embracing the new way of doing things, even if how it all works is not all that clear, and then there are those who wish to remain in the past century. Perhaps this will be the new political spectrum. The left will be the dead-enders who continue to look backward, and the right will be those facing the future. Regardless of the labels, the future will belong to those who embrace it, leaving the past in the past.

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!

The New Deal Bookend

Posted on February 19, 2025 by thezman

The assault on the Blob has taken up most of the attention in Washington, along with the reproachment with Russia, but the biggest item on the Trump agenda is the restructuring of the American economy. If you listen to what Trump says when asked about what has been happening thus far, it often circles back to the economy and how he imagines it to be after his changes. The thing is no one in the media follows up on it so Trump is never asked about that end goal.

There were some hints in the Russia coverage. One of the participants from the Russian side was the head of their sovereign wealth fund. This is something Trump has said he wants to create for the American government. A sovereign investment fund is a state-owned investment fund that does the same things a private investment fund, except it also has an eye on policy. A sovereign wealth fund acts as an additional level in both foreign and domestic policy.

This is not a thing you typically see in the West, as the Western economic model is built on the assumption that the government should not meddle in markets. This is a big lie, of course, as Western governments regulate everything. The thing is the regulations are dictated by the market makers through the miracle of regulatory capture, so the political class has limited control of the regulations. A sovereign wealth fund would put the political class on an even footing with the market makers.

That brings us back to the administrative state and the Blob that has consumed it over the last thirty years. In theory it regulates the economy in the interests of the people, but in reality, it has been a conduit so that the parasites within the blob can suck the blood, as in money, from the system. That money is used to maintain control of the host and launch projects abroad. Trillions are sent into the system, but what comes out does not make any sense to anyone, even the people inside it.

Take the Department of Education, for example. It was organized under Jimmy Carter for the purpose of housing all educational programs under one agency. Today it has a quarter trillion-dollar budget and employs 3900 people. Now, that does not mean those employees have a sixty-million-dollar salary. Most of the money gets sent to the states via grants and subsidies. Put another way, a tiny number of people in Washington dictate education policy to the country through this agency.

Trump has ordered its dismantling, but it is not about the money. Pell Grants, for example, are not going away yet. They would be shifted to another agency and eventually either automated or killed off by Congress. The reality is things like Pell Grants are a subsidy to colleges and universities, not students. All government subsidies end up in the pockets of the industry getting the subsidy. If you create grants for buying BMW’s, then BMW raises its prices by the amount of the grant.

From the Trump perspective, the federal government meddles in the economy far too much, but even worse, it meddles in the wrong things, while at the same time it ignores the big things that it should be managing. The federal government spends hundreds of billions subsidizing colleges and universities but ignores the bizarre trade relations we have with Canada and Mexico. In other words, Trump-o-nomics is not rebranded conservatism or libertarianism. It is a radical reordering of priorities.

One way to think of what Trump has in mind is the corporate model, but the start-up variety rather than the late stage decline model. American Inc. is an aging company like IBM that is bogged down in old rules and old thinking. It survives, not on making new and better products, but on the proceeds of past success. If you were to revitalize IBM, you would strip out the good stuff into a new company and hand it to smart people and leave the old stuff to the investors.

That is the goal of the Trump program. The new model for American Inc. is to be like a startup where the people running it, the Executive branch, set the general goals and the broad operational outlines, but the people inside of it, the states, business, and the people, are left to figure out the rest. Things like tariffs, global trade deals and the sovereign wealth fund are tools for setting the broad agenda and correcting imbalances that arise inside the economy.

Anyone familiar with startups or growth companies knows that the enemy of growth and innovation is management. In the 1990’s, for example, ambitious people would see the hiring of human resources people as a sign to move onto the next startup, because they understood that human resources were the death of innovation. The assault on the Blob, therefore, is like the termination of the human resources, diversity, and training departments of a struggling corporation.

There is much more to this, but the thing to take away is that what is happening is just the small setup parts for a larger reshaping of the economic order. Those meetings with the Russians are more about economics than war. In fact, you already hear the change in language regarding Ukraine away from ideology and to economics. For Trump and America Inc., Ukraine is a bad business deal. The goal now is to bring it to a quick close and claw back some of the money.

In this regard, the Trump era may one day be seen as the bookend to the New Deal era that gave rise to the managerial state. It has been lost to the need to recast the New Deal to fit modern narratives, but the FDR people were inspired by what was happening in Europe at the time. This is what gave Burnham the inspiration to write the book, The Managerial Revolution. The irony of the man they swear is Hitler bringing to an end a system partially inspired by Hitler should not go unnoticed.

The Post Of Judgement

Posted on February 18, 2025 by thezman

For a long time now, there have been people on this side of the great divide arguing that the real source of power in American society is the media. The media has power because they control the moral framework and the discourse within it. If the media declares a set of facts unacceptable, then no one talks about them, unless they have a desire to be hurled into the void. The media controls what is allowed to be said, so they control how things are done and by whom.

On the surface, this was true, and it was always true to some degree. A popular political quip from the analog days was that “You should never pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel.” If the New York Times decided to declare a fatwah on you, there was a very good chance you were going to lose. This was why so-called conservatives and Republicans would crawl on their bellies to talk with the press, even though the media treated them as the official punching bag.

The model for this was Watergate. If not for media pressure, the political class would not have done anything about Nixon. The reason for that is they had no reason to hate Nixon, even if they disagreed with him. It was the media that made Nixon into a villain and then demanded the political class do something. Congress did not force Nixon out of office because they hated him or they believed he violated the rules of politics, but because they feared the media.

Ever since, the name of the game in politics has been to make sure you manage the media, which meant hiring an army of media consultants. Often, these people came out of the media. Of course, the media was an extension of the managerial class, so this new relationship created good jobs at good wages for people long on credentials and short on practical talent. This peaked under Obama when hundreds of media members got jobs in his administration.

This is why politics shifted from backrooms and onto the pages of the media, where narratives, narrative management and narrative collapse became the defining features of the public debate. The point of politics was to create a story, in which the hero defeated the villain and everyone clapped. This was to herd the managerial class into the hero side and paint the enemies of the managerial class as the villain. Politics was all about good guys and bad guys, as determined by the media.

In the end, American politics was like a Greek drama. The players on the stage were cast in their roles not by their actions, but by the commentary provided by the chorus, which was the media. It reached the point where in the Obama years, people truly thought “healthcare” was a thing that existed in unlimited quantities, but needed to be freed from the grasp of the monster called the insurance companies. Healthcare reform was a bizarre pantomime for the entertainment of Washington.

In the digital age, it went beyond the parlor games of the political class so that media power became the tip of the spear in the cultural revolution. Every activist declared herself a journalist and dedicated her life to finding heretics. Her job was to “report on the heretic” but her hope was that major media would pick up her “reporting” and have the heretic hurled into the void. Like every political terror in the ideological age, what started with the politicians was visited on the people.

This is when ideological and theological fevers break. People can suspend their disbelief and accept even the most bizarre moral framing, when it is limited to the action on the stage. They know it is just entertainment. Even when in the form of a lecture or sermon, they believe they can take from it what they will. When the directors of the moral drama begin dragging the people onto the stage, or off to the gulag, then the people can no longer suspend their disbelief.

The natural questions of all moral disputes then begin to appear. Those questions are “Who says?” and “So what?”. These questions crept up on the managerial class over the last ten years and they were never able or willing to answer them. This became obvious in the runup to the election. The media kept screaming, “Trump is evil!” and the people kept wondering, “Who says?” When they yelled about his alleged crimes and indictments, the response was, “So what?”

A great man once said that you will know that the revolution is upon us when a conservative waddles onto the stage muttering about the various “isms” and “who we are” and the audience remains silent. Then someone giggles, then another laughs and suddenly a wave of laughter sweeps the room. The great preference cascade is unleashed as everyone all at once seems to realize that everyone else thinks what they think about these ridiculous fools.

It is what we are now witnessing. Team Trump has started smashing up the managerial system in ways thought impossible. The media rushed to their pulpits to give their sermons, but the audience just laughed. The Wall Street Journal did the point and shriek at one of the DOGE kids and the audience not only laughed but turned “Big Balls” into a hero of the cause. The Vice President now goes on Twitter and mocks reporters who do the point and shriek.

There was a scene in the movie Braveheart in which William Wallace kills a group the king’s soldiers in an effort to free his wife. The last of them is the magistrate, who had killed Wallace’s wife. Wallace initially lowers his eye when he confronts him, then looks him straight in the eye and slashes the man’s throat. It is a great scene because it reflects the reality of power. The man had power over Wallace, as long as had moral authority, but he had squandered it.

That is what is happening in the United States. The media and the managerial class they represented held the moral high ground and people accepted it. This was the real power of the media. Then they squandered their moral capital on the cultural terror of the last decade. Their excesses not only damaged their credibility but also discredited their moral claims. They are now on the same level as the rest of us and we are cheering as the DOGE kids put them against the post.

The New Sea People

Posted on February 17, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the clash between the formal and informal rules in Washington, a post on the new world order, a video from the new studio and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

This week Marco Rubio will meet with Russian officials to kick-off what Western media is calling Ukraine peace talks, but should properly be called normalization talks, as in the normalization of relations between Russia and America. The topic of Ukraine will be a part of the process, but not the focus of it. This is something that both sides have said regarding the hour-long talk between Trump and Putin. It was about much more than the war in Ukraine and how to end it.

This is what gets missed in Western media coverage. They are still operating by the old system where everything revolved around Ukraine. It was the lens through which all diplomatic relations were conducted. The new way of doing things is for the major powers to have a framework within which they can work out issues of common interest and settle issues where they are in dispute. For that to happen they must rebuild diplomatic relations between the major countries.

This is why Europe is not included. The EU is not a real place. It is a vague concept that has no sovereign authority. Ursula von der Leyen imagines herself as the empress of Europe, a managerial version of Napoleon, but in reality, she is a bureaucrat who failed up into a position that probably should not exist. As for the major powers of Europe, they will eventually play a role in the new security architecture, but they need to join everyone else in the 21st century before that can happen.

There is another reason the Europeans have been shut out from the talks. It is clear that they do not want anything to change. For them, the new world order is an existential threat so they will do what they can to booger up the process. Amazingly, the Trump people anticipated this. That was one reason for the one-two punch delivered by Hegseth and Vance last week. It has the Europeans reeling, and they are unprepared to do anything about the meetings between Russia and America.

This is right out of the Trump business handbook. The Trump organization was infamous for operating like a whirlwind. Once they got into a deal, they moved so fast and in so many directions, the rest of the parties had no choice but to go along with what they were doing. Not every Trump deal was a smashing success, but all of them were Trump deals and Trump got what he wanted from them. That is clearly what they are doing with regards to the Russia talks.

The other thing you see here is the deliberate minimalization of Ukraine dictator Zelensky by the Trump people. They do not treat him like an equal or even as a European head of state. Instead, he is being treated like a subordinate. He flew to Qatar thinking he could weasel his way into the talks in Saudi Arabia but was told that he would not be invited. Someone might call him if the Trump team felt the need to inform him of anything that happened in the talks.

This is part of the process of minimizing Ukraine. Instead of it being the top priority of the American government, it is now one of many issues that must be discussed between the great powers, once there is a process in place. It may be why the Brits have started to blame Zelensky for squandering the weapons given to him. It has dawned on them that for Trump, Ukraine is not going to be a priority. Now it is time for the political class in the UK to catch up and get with the new program.

Of course, the Russians are clearly uninterested in changing course in Ukraine without resolving the root causes of the war, so they will fight on, even as they are working with the Trump people. The Russians are old school and look at the battlefield as part of the negotiating table, so something like a ceasefire is for the end of the process, not something to be traded away in the middle. This means every day the situation for Ukraine grows worse and thus better for Russia.

That may not be so bad for Team Trump. If Zelensky were to suddenly turn up dead or deposed, replaced by a new ruler free of past errors, the Trump team would have more options as far as working out a peace deal. It is why they keep insisting on elections as soon as possible. Everyone knows that elections mean the end of Zelensky, so the sooner there are elections, the sooner the world is free of the little green man who has held the West captive for three years.

Another fascinating aspect of this revolution in global arrangements is the usual suspects have been marginalized. The attack on the financial superstructure is one reason for it. You cannot rent a mob to make loud noises in front of the media if you no longer have billions from the blob to pay for them. More important, the assault on the administrative state has the media spinning, so they are ignoring the usual suspects, leaving them to complain amongst themselves.

What knits it all together is the Trump whirlwind. The reason there has been so much progress in a short period of time is there are so many things happening in so many places, the “resistance” does not have time to figure out what is happening to them, much less organize to defeat it. The first month of Trump 2.0 has been the most exciting period in politics since FDR’s first one hundred days. It is like the Sea People swarming the brittle empires of the Bronze Age.

That is, perhaps, the way to look at this. Over the last thirty years the troubles for the managerial regime built up to the point where they were facing a tidal wave of enemies, but thought they had them under control. Once the walls were breached, those enemies are flowing in, and they are not interested in having a meeting of the executive steering committee to plan meetings for how to proceed. Like the Sea Peoples, the enemies of the managerial state just want to dismantle it.

Radio Derb February 17 2025

Posted on February 14, 2025 by thezman

This Week’s Show

Contents

02m53s Healthcare gets a new boss
03m49s Healthcare horror Down Under
05m33s Immigration enforcement gets real
09m55s Why are politicians so rich?
13m05s Healthcare:a history
26m43s Signoff with a medical melody

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Transcript

01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners. This is your feebly genial host John Derbyshire with our weekly survey of the passing scene.

My choice of adverb there was reluctant but accurate. For the past few days Mrs Derbyshire and I have been afflicted with a nasobronchial disorder of the lesser sort, not serious enough to raise our temperatures or justify a doctor’s visit but leaving us enervated and operating at half speed.

The podcast will therefore be shorter than usual, for which I apologize. The commentary on current affairs will be thin gruel. When you’re feeling unwell it’s hard to concentrate on anything other than how unwell you’re feeling.

There will also be a healthcare theme to the podcast. Not a personal one: there is nothing more boring than listening to other people talk about their health issues, unless you’re a doctor and getting paid for it. I shall therefore not impose on you with accounts of our own ailments. I shall, though, later on give you a segment on health in general, in social and historical context.

And yes, of course, we both know there any many worse afflicted than ourselves, often in solitude. We at least have the consolation of feeling miserable together. With noses red from sneezing and throats hoarse from coughing, she is still my Valentine, and I am hers. God bless you, my Valentine.

OK: First let me do what little I can do with the week’s news. For symmetry, I’ll start with some healthcare-related items. Continue reading →

The Drug War Rabbit Hole

Posted on February 14, 2025 by thezman

One of the consequences of the unfolding revelations in Washington is that we must reexamine the past in light of this new data. We now know that the political process was captured by the Blob and used to serve the Blob. That means the alleged policies of past presidents were probably not their policies at all. They were simply staying ahead of the policies put forth by the Blob.

At the same time, much of what we want government to do has gotten worse as the Blob has assumed control. Name a problem and not only has it gotten worse, but the cost of addressing it has grown out of control. One great example is the war on drugs that has tracked closely with the growth of the Blob. The cost of fighting it has spiraled out of control, while the problem has only grown worse.

It is the nature of managerialism to look for things to manage, but managing is not the same as solving or even mitigating. You cannot remain a manager if what the problem you are tasked to manage gets solved. In fact, solving the issue is exactly what you must seek to avoid, which means you become part of the problem. This is what we have seen with the drug war going back to the Reagan years.

That is the show this week. It is a dive into the rabbit hole of the drug war to try and explain how the drug menace is the result of managerialism. At every stop along the way, government either deliberately or incompetently advanced the flow of drugs into the country and the diversity of drugs available. The reason we did not have a drug epidemic a century ago is we did not have managerialism a century ago.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

Intro
The War On Drugs
What Happened?
Maxine Waters Was Right
The Poppy Fields
Syrian Captagon
Purdue Pharma
Fentanyl & Meth
Marijuana Legalization
Drugs, Protection & The State

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

The Universe Smiles

Posted on February 13, 2025 by thezman

Tomorrow the Trump team arrives in Germany to participate in the Munich Security Conference, where they are expected to inform the Europeans of their plans to bring Project Ukraine to an end. No one knows what Trump is planning, but the Europeans are braced for bad news. That bad news is either a plan for peace brokered without them or a plan that hands the whole mess over to them. Team Trump had made clear that their first priority is accounting for the money.

As a general rule, anytime the guy giving the money starts making angry noises about accounting for the money, the guy receiving the money is in trouble. This type of scene is always part of gangster movies for a reason. It means the giver is unhappy with the receiver and has come to a conclusion about the arrangement that is going to be bad for the receiver. Imagine some DOGE kids stuffing Zelensky into a locker and you have a good idea of what is coming.

To make matters worse, Trump just had a long call with Putin and both sides described it in very positive language. There has been an exchange of prisoners, with Trump indicating the Russians asked for little in return. He was making clear that he understood their gesture and was ready to reciprocate. It is the sort of thing that is done when two sides are looking to build a larger relationship. You do small deals to build trust and develop a process for larger deals.

What is clear is that Trump has looked at his options with regards to Ukraine and did not see a deal worth pursuing. The Russians are not interested in anything but the deal they feel was done in Istanbul in 2022, plus some extra to cover the costs of litigating it on the battlefield for the last two years. They will get that deal either at the table or on the battlefield and there is nothing to be done to prevent them. Trump seems to understand this and accepts it.

Deal making always starts with discovery. You must first learn if there is a deal to be had, otherwise you are wasting your time. The number one rule in deal making in the private sector is that time is your most precious asset. The best salesmen maximize their time by not wasting time chasing bad business. For Trump, Project Ukraine, as constructed by his predecessor, is bad business. The goal now is to get this off the agenda as quickly as possible.

Most likely, the starting place this week is to inform the Europeans and Zelensky that the deal for them right now is Istanbul plus some other things. If they are ready to take that deal, then the Trump Team will hammer out the deal with the Russians and at some point, the Ukraine government will be invited in to sign it. Who the representative of that government is will be determined by elections to be held immediately. That means Zelensky will not be part of the signing ceremony.

This is why they are talking about the money. Imagine the bosses from Chicago coming out to Las Vegas to talk to the guy they sent out to oversee their operations, and their first question is, “Where’s our money?” Zelensky made the fatal mistake of saying he will never be able to account for it. That sealed his fate. There is simply no way Trump will do business with the guy. It now means any support requires elections and repayment of the money.

Like the guy who cannot pay in the gangster films, this leaves Zelensky and the Europeans in an impossible position, which is the point. Team Trump is prepared to work with the Russian on other issues, even if they cannot get a deal on Ukraine, so they are prepared to walk away from Ukraine entirely. If Europe wants to keep the United States engaged, then it means elections and an accounting of the hundreds of billions sent to Kiev over the last three years.

Now that the Trump plan is coming into focus, the girl boss running EU foreign policy issued a statement declaring the unconditional support for Ukraine. Not having come to grips with what is happening in Washington, she seems to think Team Trump will sit down with her to talk it out and come to a compromise. Instead, this will be used to justify handing the whole mess over to the Europeans so Trump can move onto matters far more important than Project Ukraine.

This is the other thing coming into focus. The war caused the Russians to rethink their relationship with Europe. They stopped taking calls from people like Macron and Schultz, because there was no point in speaking with them. The Chinese have gone out of their way to humiliate European leaders who turn up in Beijing. Men close their doors to the setting sun and that is what is happening to Europe. The emerging great powers of the new world order are ignoring Europe.

Now we are seeing Trump do the same thing. Vance was in Paris this week, in advance of the Munich meeting, and he told the Europeans in no uncertain terms how things are going to be going forward. They were properly offended, and that was most certainly the point of his speech. Friday, the Trump delegation is going to tell the Europeans how it is going to be with regards to Ukraine. If they do not like it, they can go it alone, but everyone knows they lack the ability to do it.

It is proof that the universe has a sense of humor. Four years ago, the Eurocrats were congratulating themselves along with Biden people, telling each other stories about the new world order and how they would build back better. Now, the guy they thought they had vanquished will be telling them their place in the new world order. The guy building back better, will be the guy they were sure was the final boss in their quest to spread the managerial revolution around the globe.

Prudentialism

Posted on February 12, 2025 by thezman

One of the many interesting aspects of the Trump era has been the collapse of what was called conservatism in America and the rise of a new coalition to replace it as the dominant force in the Republican Party. Most pundits have been happy to call it Trumpism or MAGA, as they hope it is temporary. Others have tried to jam it into the populist bucket, despite the fact it is not a populist movement. Beyond these superficial attempts at labeling, not much has been said about it.

Not everyone in the coalition is thrilled by what they are seeing. Many older conservatives, the paleo variety, are happy to see Conservative Inc. head off to bankruptcy, but they are a bit uncomfortable sharing a pew with people like Robert Kennedy Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard. They wince when Tucker Carlson gets along with old school lefties like Jimmy Dore or Aaron Maté. They spent their lives on the opposite side of these people and now they share the same movement.

In fairness, it is even more difficult for the old school lefties, because for them, politics defines their life. That means they are now faced with supporting that which they were sure was evil until not so long ago. It also means their conception of evil may have been wrong, which means their conception of themselves was wrong. This is why it is difficult for an ideologue to adjust to new evidence. Unlike the non-ideologue, such adjustment requires a reexamination of their soul.

That aside, the issue everyone is struggling with is that our political buckets, like so much of the past, have been a fiction. The left-right framing was never two groups opposing one another, but two groups negotiating with one another. It was Team Fast versus Team Slower, both agreeing on the destination. The “conservatives” were never interested in conserving anything but their sinecures, while the liberals were hellbent on sweeping liberalism into the dustbin of history.

For as long as anyone has been alive, the consensus in American politics has been the radicalism at the heart of progressivism. Egalitarianism, universalism, and the blank slate are the three legs of this ideological stool. What motivates and justifies using this stool to smash up American society and go abroad to smash up other cultures is the intense belief that they are commanded by history or history’s God to impose this ideology on the people of the world.

This is how we arrived at this odd time where John Derbyshire and Paul Gottfried share a pew with RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. The excesses of progressivism, unconstrained by the necessity of the Cold War, have put everything at risk, thus calling forth an old force that has been dormant since Gettysburg. That force is prudentialism. The thing that lies at the heart of Western conservatism is a set of precautionary principles that act to avoid unknowable negative consequences.

If you listen to what RFK Jr. says about medicine, for example, it generally boils down to restoring prudence to the field. The drug makers operate on the assumption that they must rush everything to the market, which often causes new harms while having little impact on the thing they are trying to mitigate. The Covid vaccine is a great example of the recklessness of medicine. Even a little bit of prudence would have avoided this easily avoidable error.

Similarly, Tulsi Gabbard’s main reason to exist is her skepticism of the military industrial complex and the foreign policy community. For the last thirty years, we have staggered from one ill-conceived conflict to the next, never stopping to ponder if what we are doing will have negative consequences down the road. No one seems to be able to think beyond the first move. The main thrust of Gabbard’s critique is that a tiny bit of prudence could have prevented many of these debacles.

The reason these two are attracted to Trump’s movement is that fundamentally, Trump is the great champion of prudence. He would rather not spend money than spend it, not because he is cheap, but because he knows that spending it has consequences and unless you put those consequences in the balance, you are recklessly spending money and that is not prudent. Trump’s foreign policy is motivated by a desire to not create new problems which will lead to new conflicts.

If Team Slower had not abused the word “conservative” for so long, what we are seeing could be easily labeled “conservatism.” Decades of verbicide have left us with a poverty of language to describe what we are seeing. It is why Trump never uses the old labels when talking about politics. He did not call the people running USAID “leftists” or even “radicals” but instead called them “lunatics.” In the current context, it is both the appropriate word and the accurate one.

Even so, Trumpism is the return of prudence to our politics, and it is the necessary precursor for the return of a genuine American conservatism. To paraphrase Michael Oakeshott, “Trumpism is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

The boys and girls in conservative sinecures are hostile to Trumpism because it casts light on their project, revealing it to be nothing more than the sidecar to the radicalism they claimed to oppose. For the neocons, Trumpism is a mirror, revealing their lack of a soul and exposing the vampirism that animates them. For others, it is an uncomfortable calling home of the prudent into a disposition that has defined their lives but never defined their politics.

For lack of a better way of stating it, what we are seeing is the forming up of a new prudentialism, that in the fullness of time may be able to rehabilitate the term “conservative” but for now must settle for Trumpism or MAGA. It is not running around trainyards yelling stop. It is a great rolling back of the progressive project, not driven by superficial romanticism, but by prudent necessity. To make America great again, we must sweep away progressivism and its reckless implementations.

The Return Of Chesterton’s Fence

Posted on February 11, 2025 by thezman

One of the things lost in the excitement of the first month of the Trump administration is the pending reform of the FBI. When Kash Patel was grilled by the Senate, he repeatedly made clear that reforming the agency was his top priority. This is one reason Senate Democrats are stalling his nomination. This paramilitary wing of the Blob is calling in every favor to preserve itself. That lawsuit seeking to prevent the DOJ from getting the names of the J6 agents is a similar move.

There is little questioning the underlying premise of the reform cause. The FBI has lost all credibility with the public after a string of scandals. Framing people is a terrible thing but creating elaborate traps for not-so-bright people, as we saw in the Michigan kidnapping hoax, is monstrous. Most people do not know this has been common practice for decades, but many people know it. Of course, you have the outlandish behavior of the FBI during the first Trump term.

The topic of reform starts with looking at how an organization reached the point where reform is required to save it. That is where the FBI is now. Many people think it might be best to just close it down entirely. The few necessary things it does could be transferred to other agencies or maybe to a new agency with a severely limited portfolio, something like an FBI-lite. When forty percent of the agency was used to go after the J6 people over the last four years, the agency is rotten to the core.

The number one reason the FBI is a mess is that it, like most police forces in the country, was turned into a paramilitary unit. After the North Hollywood shootout, where two heavily armed bank robbers tried to shoot their way through a police cordon, every police department has been transformed into a paramilitary unit. They got money for military grade weapons, body armor and tactical training. They also tapped into the military for equipment and the sort of men who enjoy military life.

The result is the police now function like British soldiers patrolling Northern Ireland during The Troubles or American Marines patrolling Afghanistan. No law enforcement organization group has been deformed more than the FBI by this. Years of selection pressure has resulted in agents who not only look at the general public with contempt, but look forward to confrontations with them. They arrive in full battle gear and have a hostile attitude to arrest mothers holding their children.

It is not an accident that the things the FBI is supposed to do have not gotten better over the last thirty years. Whenever some well-known crazy goes nuts and shoots up a public place, we always learn that this person was “known to the FBI.” We also learn they did nothing about it. Over the last thirty years, the FBI has been transformed from the nation’s top law enforcement agency into a heavily armed gang of thugs who only care about pushing around the average citizen.

You see this in the collapse of standards for FBI agents. A common video online is two portly agents, dressed like they are going to watch their kid’s t-ball game, paying a visit to a citizen over a social media post. The grotesque lack of professional standards jumps off the screen. People now expect higher standards from building inspectors and parking attendants than from FBI agents. The ones not playing soldier are slovenly couch potatoes with the disposition of a postal clerk.

The image of the FBI is a good example of the interplay between the aesthetic and the spiritual that we used to understand. The poorest man used to have a suit for going to church and for when he was buried, because the formal things in life were the important things in life, so it was reflected in your appearance. The Medieval scholar Erasmus, paraphrasing Quintilian wrote, “To dress within the formal limits and with an air gives men, as the Greek line testifies, authority.”

This is where to start with reforming the FBI. The first thing that should happen is every agent must pass a physical test, controlled for their age and sex, within the first ninety days or be fired. At the same time, the agents start wearing suits and the corresponding for female agents. Get rid of the casual clothes and you get rid of the casual attitudes they have toward their jobs. For most, showing up to work dressed like an adult will be terrifying, but maybe they should find other work.

Along the same lines, there is no reason for FBI tactical units. Agents get a standard sidearm that is locked up at their office when they are off duty. The automatic weapons, body armor, flashbangs, etc. all go back to the military. The guys who signed up so they can bust down doors will not like it, but they need to think about either going back into the military or signing up with an international security contractor. Free people do not tolerate paramilitary units operating in their society.

Of course, this will result in most agents leaving the FBI. The PT will eliminate a good chunk of them and the new dress code will filter out many more. The goons playing soldier will find the new culture intolerable. That opens the door for the next reform, which is a return to the old education standard. It used to be that the FBI required a degree in accounting. Then it is expanded to computer science. Now the ranks are littered with criminal justice majors.

In this age, the role of the FBI is to investigate technical crimes, like computer trespass, electronic fraud, corporate crimes, and other crimes that require intelligence. You not only need smarts to do this work, but you need technical skills. Reestablishing educational standards, like bringing back the dress code, is as much about fixing the culture of the organization as raising the quality of people in it. Smart people who take pride in their work tend not to beat up old ladies.

In the end, the problems of the FBI are a microcosm of what has brought managerialism to the brink of collapse. They simply stopped caring about their core function and stopped caring about their own standards. This opened the door to mischief and the sorts of people who feed on mischief. It turns out that those old standards had a purpose after all. The lesson here is Chesterton’s fence. The reform of government starts with revisiting all the old, abandoned rules.

The Great Reckoning

Posted on February 10, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the importance of enjoying the moment, a post on urban dependency culture, a video from my creek and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

As expected, the lawsuits are quickly piling up as the regime tries to buy time to regroup after the initial attacks from the Trump administration. There are multiple cases involving the Treasury, all aimed at preventing Trump appointees from doing their jobs, at least without permission from the court. There is one case involving the FBI, where the judge is asked to stop the Justice Department from looking into J6 cases. There is at least one case challenging the buyout system.

All these cases have been launched by activists trying to halt the Trump agenda, but they all have something important in common. They revolve around a set of core questions about these executive agencies. Who controls these agencies, by what means do they control them and by whose authority? The activists are challenging the Trump admin on the claim that these are independent agencies. They do not report to the President, so he cannot take these actions.

The trouble with that is there is nothing in the Constitution defining a fourth branch of government under which these agencies are organized. At best, it is a bit of make-believe Washington has indulged since Nixon. The mythology of Watergate says Nixon used these agencies to terrorize his political opponents, so he was driven from the temple of the people. Ever since, permanent Washington has waved around the bloody shirt whenever they did not like what a President was doing.

There is something more important behind this. Watergate was the triumph of the managerial class over the political class. For fifty years, an unelected and unaccountable class of experts has been left to run the administrative state, only indulging the President when it comes to appointing agency heads. In most cases, the appointees were from the managerial elite. These people took turns circulating between government and the Blob.

In his first three weeks, Trump has launched a big arrow offensive on this system and the underlying logic of it. Once these cases get to Supreme Court, administration lawyers will point out that there is no fourth branch of government and that these agencies are part of the executive. While Congress maintains the power of the purse, it does not run these agencies. That is left to the executive branch, which means the President and whomever he appoints to do it.

This seems rather straight forward, but the courts are as corrupt as the rest of the managerial system, so there are plenty of judges who will issue crazy rulings to stop the Trump agenda. While the Supreme Court only has a few ideologically deranged judges, it may not be eager to get involved. This is fundamentally a political dispute, and the court prefers to stay out of those. At the minimum, it may wait until they can choose a clean case to make a clean ruling.

The people filing these suits seem to be banking on the courts dragging this out and never getting to a final decision. They think if they drag it out and make it an issue in the midterms, they can win the House and Senate, then impeach Trump. You can already see hints of this in their rhetoric. While this may sound insane, given the public response thus far, these people live in a bubble. That and they have no other options, given what Trump is doing.

Team Trump seems to be prepared for this. In fact, part of the overall reform agenda is to get one of these cases in front of the Supreme Court to argue for the unitary executive theory, which says the President of the United States has sole authority over the executive branch. Even if the Court rules that Congress plays a role in how these agencies are administered, it will be a massive win. It means the administrative state returns to the control of the political class.

Why is this important?

For the last fifty years, these agencies, along with the media, the academy and the vast network of not-for-profits has operated independent of the President. Further, they have used their capture of the regulatory mechanism and the political finance system to control both political parties, thus controlling the legislative branch. USAID used its billions, in part, to control more billions in the budgets of the agencies, which it directed into its political projects, foreign and domestic.

The reason elections have had no impact on public policy is that the people making public policy were not subject to the voters. The political system became a theater to keep the people distracted. It is why the politicians have become increasingly frivolous and absurd. When Congressman and Senators are furniture, props in the theater of democracy, they tend to be theater kids. No serious person wants to subject himself to the humiliation rituals required of elected office.

The hammer blow delivered to USAID was aimed at shattering the financial structure of the Blob by removing the mechanism the Blob used to circulate money. If they are no longer underwriting the vast network of non-for-profits and regime media outlets, those entities will struggle to control the discourse. The DOGE boys examining every disbursements from Treasury is about starving the Blob of money. The restructuring of the agencies removes their power over the political class.

The reason the economic elite is backing this is because they see that the Blob is threatening their interests. It is out of control. When a girl boss judge in Delaware can crater the state’s economic model, and threaten the country’s financial model, the system that makes her possible must be destroyed. A million girl bosses armed with taxpayer money have set fire to the country for the last decade. What we see now is an effort to put out the fire and eliminate the fire starters.

In the end, we are in one of those momentous times when the fundamental questions of every human society are in the balance. Who decides, by what means do they decide and by whose authority do they decide? The Constitution answers all these questions, but it has been ignored for at least fifty years. Trump wants to restore that old political order, while the Blob seeks to bury it forever. Every civil war and revolution have been fought over these questions, so the best is yet to come.

The Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff