A Blog Mirror Post: Do it yourself, was "How to Grocery Shop on the Cheap Humility, thy name is Aldi."

 

Rockwell's World War Two era illustration of one of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, this one being Freedom from want.  This came from a March 6, 1943 Saturday Evening Post illustration although it was completed in November, 1943.  Rockwell was inspired by a Thanksgiving dinner in which he photographed his cook serving the same in November, 1942.  The painting has come to symbolize Thanksgiving dinners.   Interesting, compared to the vast fare that is typically associated with the feast, this table is actually fairly spartan.

This is a really good article on grocery shopping.

How to Grocery Shop on the Cheap

Humility, thy name is Aldi.

I'm going to take this in a slightly different direction, but this blog post is, I'll note, really good.

And I love the kitties featured in the article.

Anyhow, it ought to be obvious to anyone living in the US right now that groceries, that odd word discovered by Donald Trump in his dotage, are pretty expensive.  Less obvious, it seems, is why that is true.  Again, not to overly politicize it, but the common Trump Interregnum explanations are largely complete crap. It's not the case, as seemingly suggested, that Joe Biden runs around raising prices in a wicked plan to destroy the American lifestyle for "hard working Americans". Rather, a bunch of things have contributed to that.

To start with, the COVID 19 pandemic really screwed up the economy, and we're still living with the impact of that.  One of the impacts of that is that certain supply chains somewhat broke and have never been repaired.  Added to that, global climatic conditions are impacting crops in what is now a global food distribution system. Weather has additionally impacted meat prices by impacting the Beef Cattle Heard in the last decade, which has been followed up upon by the visitation of cattle diseases, and poultry diseases, that have reduced head counts. That definitely impacts prices.  The Administration, however, believing that the country exists in the economic 1820s, rather than the 2020s, fiddles with inflation causing tariffs on a weekly basis, which raises prices on everything. And finally the ineptly waged Russian war against Ukraine has impacted grain supplies world wide.  It reminds me of, well. . . :

Then I watched while the Lamb broke open the first of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures cry out in a voice like thunder, “Come forward.”

I looked, and there was a white horse, and its rider had a bow. He was given a crown, and he rode forth victorious to further his victories.

When he broke open the second seal, I heard the second living creature cry out, “Come forward.”

Another horse came out, a red one. Its rider was given power to take peace away from the earth, so that people would slaughter one another. And he was given a huge sword.

When he broke open the third seal, I heard the third living creature cry out, “Come forward.” I looked, and there was a black horse, and its rider held a scale in his hand.

I heard what seemed to be a voice in the midst of the four living creatures. It said, “A ration of wheat costs a day’s pay, and three rations of barley cost a day’s pay. But do not damage the olive oil or the wine.”

When he broke open the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature cry out, “Come forward.”

I looked, and there was a pale green horse. Its rider was named Death, and Hades accompanied him. They were given authority over a quarter of the earth, to kill with sword, famine, and plague, and by means of the beasts of the earth.

Not that dire, of course. . . 

Anyhow,  this reminded me of an agrarian topic.  How can you, dear agrarian reader, reduce your grocery bill?

Well, do it yourself, of course.

What do I mean?

Well, grow it and kill it yourself.

Assuming, of course, you can. But most people can.

Now, let me be the first to admit that this is more than a little hypocritical on my part now days. The pressures of work and life caused me to give up my very extensive garden some years ago.  I'd frankly cash in my chips and retire life now, but my spouse insists that this cannot be so. So, in my rapidly increasing dotage, I'm working as hard as ever at my town job.

 

The last garden I put in, 2017.

An Agrarian's Lament indeed.

Anyhow, however, let's consider this.  Many people have the means of putting in a garden, and many have the means to take at least part of their meat consumption in by fishing and hunting.  Beyond that, if you have freezer space, or even if a friend has freezer space, you can buy much, maybe all depending upon where you live, of your meat locally sourced.

Given as this is Thanksgiving, let's take a look at how that would look.

I'll start off with first noting that there's actually more variety in Thanksgiving meals than supposed, as well as less. This time of year in fact, you'll tend to find all sort of weird articles by various people eschewing the traditional turkey dinner in favor of something else, mostly just in an effort to be self serving different.  And then you have the weirdness of something like this:

I suppose that's an effort by our Vice President to be amusing, something he genuinely is not, but frankly, I do like turkey.  I like it a lot.  A lot of people do.  Vance, of course, lives in a house where his wife is a vegetarian for religious reasons, so turkey may not appear there.

Anyhow, what is the traditional Thanksgiving meal?  Most of us have to look back on our own families in order to really determine that.

When I was growing up, we always had Thanksgiving Dinner at one of my uncle's houses.  My father and his only brother were very close, and we went there for Thanksgiving, and they came to our house for Christmas evening dinner.  Both dinners were evening dinners.  We probably went over to my aunt and uncle's house about  4:00 p.m. and came home after 9:00 p.m., but I'll also note that this is now a long time ago and my memory may be off.  This tradition lasted until the year after my father passed away, but even at that, that's now over 30 years ago.

Dinner at my aunt and uncles generally went like this.  

Before dinner it was likely that football was turned on the television, which is a big unfortunate American tradition.  My father and uncle would likely have a couple of beers.  My father hardly drank at all, so this was relatively unusual.  My mother would generally not drink beer and interestingly it was largely a male drink.¹   I don't think I saw women really drink beer until I was in college.²  Anyhow, at dinner there's be some sort of white wine, although I can barely recall it.  Nobody in the family was a wine connoisseur, so there's no way I could remotely give an indication on what it was, except that one of my cousins, when he was old enough to drink, really liked Asti Spumante, which I bet I haven't had in over a decade.³ Dinner itself would be a large roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, bread, salad, and a marshmallow yam dish.  Dinner rolls would also be present.

Desert was pumpkin pie.

Pretty common fare, and frankly, very good fare, for Thanksgiving.

After my father died, Thanksgiving dinner was briefly up to me for a time, as my mother was too ill by that stage in her life to deal with cooking much.⁴ In light of tradition, I'd probably cook a smaller turkey, although if I had wild waterfowl I'd shot, I'd go with that.  Otherwise, mashed potatoes and yams.  To drink, for me, probably beer.

After I started dating my wife, Thanksgiving was at her folk's place.  My mother in law is an excellent cook, and my wife is as well.  Unlike J. D. Vance, I'm not afflicted with vegetarian relatives, and indeed, as my wife is from a ranch family, all dinners very much show that.

On the ranch, Thanksgiving is a noon meal. So is Christmas dinner.  Noon meals are generally odd for me, as I don't usually eat lunch, but that reflects a pretty strong agricultural tradition.  Big meals are often at noon.  Meals associated with big events, such as brandings, always are. So it makes sense.

Thanksgiving there shares a common feature with the ones that were at my aunts and uncles, in that usually somebody offers everyone a drink before dinner, while people are chatting.  Unlike my aunts and uncles, however, somebody will usually offer people some sort of whiskey.

Their Thanksgiving Dinner has a very broad fare.  There's a large roasted turkey, but there's also a brisket.  Both are excellent and everyone has some of both.  There's salad, mashed potatoes and two different types of stuffing, as some of us likey oyster stuffing, and others do not.  Cranberry sauce is handmade by one of my brothers in law, who is an excellent cook.  There are other dishes as well, and there's a variety of desserts.  Homemade dinner rolls are served as well.

So, that leads to this.  If I were cooking a Thanksgiving Day dinner, what would it be.

It's be simple compared to what I've noted for the simple reason that I'm simplistic in my approach to dinner in general.  I had a long period as a bachelor before being married, and I know how to cook, but my cooking reflects that bachelorhood in some ways.

The main entre would be a turkey, or perhaps a goose, which I'll explain below.

Two types of stuffing, for the reasons explained above.

Salad.

Mashed potatoes (but with no gravy, for reasons I'll explain below).

Bread.

Yams.

Pumpkin pie and mincemeat pie.

To drink, I'd probably have beer and some sort of wine.  I'd have whiskey available before dinner.

Okay, if that doesn't meet the Walmart definition of a Thanksgiving dinner, that's because nobody should buy things at Walmart. . . ever.

So, in applying my localist/killetarian suggestions, how much of this could I acquire while avoiding a store entirely?

Almost all of it.

Starting with the meat, I always hunt turkeys each year, but I don't always get one.  If I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner, however, I'd put a more dedicated effort into it.  Turkey hunting for me is sort of opportunistic, and given that I do it in the spring its mostly a chance to try to get a turkey while getting out, usually with the dog (although poor dog died in an automobile accident earlier this year, he only every got to go out for turkeys).  If I put in more hours, which I should, I'd get one.

If I can't get one, however, by this time of year I definitely can get a goose.

Which, by way of a diversion, brings up J. D. Vance's stupid ass comment above.  If your turkey is dry, that's because you cooked it wrong.  And if wild turkey is dry, that's because the cook tried to cook it like some massive obese Butterball.

Tastewise and texture wise, there's no difference whatsoever between a wild and domestic turkey.  People who say there are say that because one of them, if not both of them, were cooked incorrectly.

Which is true of goose as well. Goose tastes very much like roast beef, unless the cook was afraid of the goose and cooked it like it was something else and ruined it.

Anyhow. . . I can provide the bird myself

So too with the vegetables, mostly.  When I grew a garden, I produced lettuce onions and potatoes.  One year I grew brussels sprouts.  Of these, only the lettuce either doesn't keep on its own or can't be frozen in some fashion.  I  could grow yams, I'm quite confident, even though I never did.

Now, on bread, I can bake my own bread and have, but I can't source the ingredients.  So those I'd have to buy.   I could likely figure out how to make my own stuffing, but I probably wouldn't bother to do so, unless I wanted to have oyster stuffing.  I would have to buy the oysters.

I'll note here that I wouldn't make gravy, as I really don't like it.  My mother in laws gravy is the only gravy that I like.   Otherwise, there's no excuse for gravy. I put butter on mashed potatoes, and I always have.

But I buy the butter.

I'd have to buy marshmallows for the yams too.

That leaves something to drink.  I know that some people will distill their own whiskey as a hobby, but I'm not about to try that, and I"ve never brewed beer.  If I ever lived solely on what I produce myself, mostly, I'd take it up.  I clearly don't have the time to do that now.

Dessert?

I'm fairly good at making pies.  I like pumpkin pie, but I've never grown pumpkins.  I could give that a shot, but I'd still have to buy most of the constituents.  My grandmother (father's mother) used to make mincemeat pies, but I've never attempted that.  The real ingredients for mincemeat pies freak people out, I"d note, those being, according to one granola website I hit and may link in, the following:

Old-Fashioned Mincemeat Pie Recipe:

Ingredients:

1 lb beef (I used ground beef from grass-fed cows) *

¾ teaspoon salt (I like using Real Salt)

1 ½ lbs apple, peeled and chopped (about 3 cups)

⅓ cup suet or tallow or coconut oil, or butter or coconut oil *

¾ cup apple cider

1 Tbs ground mace (or ½ Tbs nutmeg if you don't have mace)

½ Tbs cinnamon

½ teaspoon nutmeg

8 Tbs (½) cup raisins (or 1 full cup if not using currants too). I like to use organic raisins when possible

8 Tbs (½ cup) dried currants (or substitute raisins if you choose)

3 Tbs chopped candied citron pieces (optional)

Which brings up a lot of stuff I'd have to buy.  Everything but for the beef, as I too have beef from grass fed cows that I knew personally.

All in all, pretty doable.

Cheaper?  

Well, if you are an efficient agrarian/killetarian, yes.  

Footnotes:

1.  My father normally only bought beer during the middle of the summer, and sometimes to take on a fishing expedition if somebody was going along.  Otherwise, it just didn't appear in your house.  The only whiskey ever bought was Canadian Whiskey, and a bottle of it would last forever. We often didn't have it at all. . . indeed, normally we did not.  He only bought it when I was very young, if we were having guests.  

This is interesting as in this era offering a drink to guests was very common.  A different aunt and uncle liked Scotch and would offer it to guests, but my father hated Scotch.  

When I was young, my parents would occasionally buy wine, but it was almost always Mogan David.  Clearly were were not wine connoisseurs. 

2. This probably seems odd, but it's true.  I saw women drink beer so rarely that it was a shock when I was a kid to see a woman drinking a beer. They just normally didn't.

Indeed, by the time I was a teenager a girl drinking a beer sort of made her a "bad girl", but not in the Good Girls Don't sense.  Rather, that was in the rowdy party girl sense.  Or so we thought. We knew this, but we really didn't know any beer drinking girls as teenagers.

In college things were different, but the reputation that college students have for partying didn't really match the reality, at least for geology students.  As an undergraduate in community college we might very occasionally go out for a beer, and that was almost always the collection of us who had graduated from high school together when everyone was home.  For part of the last year of community college I had a girlfriend and I can remember being in a bar with her exactly once, when she was trying to introduce another National Guardsman to her sister.  Otherwise, that relationship was unconsciously completely dry.

At UW as an undergrad most of my friends were geology students, like me, and the discipline was so hard there really wasn't any partying.  Sometimes a group of guys would go out for a beer, but that was about it.  Early on I recall there being a party of geology students who had all gone to community college together in the freezing apartment that one of us had.  There were some beers, but generally, we just froze.  A girlfriend who was also in the department and I went to a Christmas party the year I graduated, which was a big department affair and there was beer there, but that's about it.

In law school the story wasn't much different, frankly.  Indeed, it wasn't until I got out of law school, and started practicing law, that I encountered people who really drank heavily.

3.  To be honest, as a person always should be, when my mother's illness began to advance dramatically, she began to drink heavily.  It was a problem that my father and I had to deal with.  The oddity of it was that she had never done that when she was well.  

As an added element of that, when she was well she took a wine making class. The wine she made was absolutely awful and she was the only one who would drink it, but because it was so bad, she'd fortify it with vodka to make it tolerable. That acclimated her to drinking.  She gave it up completely as she began to recover just before my father died.

4.  While she recovered a great deal, she never fully recovered. She was also an absolutely awful cook.  As my father's health declined in the last year of his life, I took over cooking from him.

The Agrarian's Lament: Dreams denied and abandoned.

The Agrarian's Lament: Dreams denied and abandoned.: I've seen this place from the side of the road quite a few times, although its in a remote location.  It wasn't until earlier this f...

Dreams denied and abandoned.

I've seen this place from the side of the road quite a few times, although its in a remote location.  It wasn't until earlier this fall that I realized that it's all on Federal Land.

I walked in, as you have to do, while hunting doves.  I only saw one.

It's a full homestead.  Barns, outbuildings, and a substantial house. This is very unusual as a lot of work went into this, but for some reason, it wasn't proved up.  I'll have to see if I can figure out the history of it. So far I've had no luck.

It was well thought out, and sheltered. A substantial hay field, on Federal Land, worked by the current leaseholder remains. What's really surprising, however, is the house.  It was very well built. So much so, that for a time I debated it if was a school, but it was better built than rural schools by quite some margin, and frankly larger.  It's a house.

Usually, although not always, when you walk up on an abandoned homestead, they're on private, not Federal, land.  And that makes sense.  It only took five years to prove up a homestead, and proving it up was one of the first things the people eligible to do so did.  It protected their investment, which was substantial, both in terms of time and labor, but moreover in actual cash outlays, which were actually quite a bit more extensive than people imagine.

The peak year for homesteading was 1913, during which 11,000,000 acres were claimed.  I"m a bit surprised by that, as I thought it was 1914.  World War One caused a massive boom in homesteading which was aided by the weather.  A lot of people took up dry land farming in that period, following the naive popular assertion of the time that "rain follows the plow.

Abandoned wagon.

It doesn't.

A large part of what inspired homesteading entries at the time was the Great War. With Imperial Russia off of the farming export market, which was a huge portion of its GNP at the time, and with European farming massively impacted by the war, grain production, beef production, and horse production turned to the United  States, Canada, and Australia.

Trouble began to set in after the war, although interestingly not immediately so.  1919 was the last year that American farmers had economic parity with those who lived in municipalities.  That started changing soon thereafter, however, and its never reversed.  The Agricultural Depression of the 1920s set in early in the 1920s, and basically carried on until the Great Depression hit in 1929.  Having said that, people continued to attempt to file homestead entries, some people naively believing that if they couldn't make it in town, they could as a farmer or rancher.

The buildings on this spread, however, are too nice to be a late homestead entry.  I've seen a few comparable ones that were abandoned, but they were all earlier homesteads in which the owners became over extended and couldn't make their bank payments during the Great Depression.  A lot of money went into some houses and whatnot while things were going well.  That must have been the case here. So what happened?

That is, at least right now, impossible for me to say.  But what seems clear is that a lot of money went into this spread during good times, and the owners pulled out when hard times hit.  That, and the fact that the abandoned equipment is horse, not vehicle, drawn would suggest that the homesteaders were doing okay during World War One but didn't weather the change in the economic climate of the Agricultural Depression of the 1920s.  If I had my guess, this was probably a World War One vintage homestead which collapsed, after a huge investment of time, effort and money, soon after the war.

They didn't last long enough in order to prove up.

Their dreams must have been crushed.  I hope, and pray, that the rest of their lives went well.  

I'd also note that, more than ever before, when I see places like this I have a maudlin tinge of regret.  My dream was something like this too.  At age 62, I won't make it.

The Agrarian's Lament: Now, more than ever, it's time for an Agrarian/Distributist remake of this country.

The Agrarian's Lament: Now, more than ever, it's time for an Agrarian/Dis...: 

Now, more than ever, it's time for an Agrarian/Distributist remake of this country.

I was going to use the work "revolution", but didn't as I don't want it suggested that I mean an armed revolution.  I'm not.  Indeed, I'm not keen on violence in general, and as I intend to refer to the American Revolution in this essay, I'll note that had I lived in the 1770s, I'd have been genuinely horrified by events.  I highly doubt that I would have joined the "Patriots" and likewise I wouldn't have joined the Loyalist either.  I'd have been in the 1/3d that sat the war out with out choosing sides, but distressed by the overall nature of it.

The other day I posted this:

The Agrarian's Lament: Lex Anteinternet: CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 10...: Lex Anteinternet: CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 108th Edition. “The... :  CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 108th Edition. “The brave men and w...

In that item, I noted this:

Interestingly, just yesterday I heard a Catholic Answers interview of Dr. Andrew Willard Jones on his book The Church Against the State.  The interview had a fascinating discussion on sovereignty and subsidiarity, and included a discussion on systems of organizing society, including oligarchy.

Oligarchy is now where we are at.

I've been thinking about it, and Dr. Jones has really hit on something.  The nature of Americanism, if you will, is in fact not its documentary artifacts and (damaged) institutions, it is, rather, in what it was.  At the time of the American Revolution the country had an agrarian/distributist culture and that explained, and explains, everything about it.

The Revolution itself was fought against a society that had concentrated oligarchical wealth.  To more than a little degree, colonist to British North America had emigrated to escape that.

We've been losing that for some time.  Well over a century, in fact, and indeed dating back into the 19th Century.  It started accelerating in the mid 20th Century and now, even though most do not realize it, we are a full blown oligarchy.

Speaking generally, we may say that whatever legal enactments are held to be for the interest of various constitutions, all these preserve them. And the great preserving principle is the one which has been repeatedly mentioned- to have a care that the loyal citizen should be stronger than the disloyal. Neither should we forget the mean, which at the present day is lost sight of in perverted forms of government; for many practices which appear to be democratical are the ruin of democracies, and many which appear to be oligarchical are the ruin of oligarchies. Those who think that all virtue is to be found in their own party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state. A nose which varies from the ideal of straightness to a hook or snub may still be of good shape and agreeable to the eye; but if the excess be very great, all symmetry is lost, and the nose at last ceases to be a nose at all on account of some excess in one direction or defect in the other; and this is true of every other part of the human body. The same law of proportion equally holds in states. Oligarchy or democracy, although a departure from the most perfect form, may yet be a good enough government, but if any one attempts to push the principles of either to an extreme, he will begin by spoiling the government and end by having none at all. Wherefore the legislator and the statesman ought to know what democratical measures save and what destroy a democracy, and what oligarchical measures save or destroy an oligarchy. For neither the one nor the other can exist or continue to exist unless both rich and poor are included in it. If equality of property is introduced, the state must of necessity take another form; for when by laws carried to excess one or other element in the state is ruined, the constitution is ruined.

Aristotle, Politics.

Corporations were largely illegal in early American history.  They existed, but were highly restricted.  The opposite is the case now, with corporations' "personhood" being so protected by the law that the United States Supreme Court has ruled that corporate political spending is a form of free speech and corporations can spend unlimited money on independent political broadcasts in candidate elections.  This has created a situation in which corporations have gobbled up local retail in the US and converted middle class shopkeeping families into serfs.  It's also made individual heads of corporations obscenely, and I used that word decidedly, wealthy.

Wealth on the level demonstrated by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump simply should not exist.  It's bad for average people and its corrupting of their souls. That corruption can be seen in their unhinged desire for self aggrandizement and acquisition.  Elon Must acquires young white women of a certain type for concubinage  Donald Trump, whose money is rooted in the occupation of land, has collected bedmates over the years, "marrying" some of them and in his declining mental state, seeks to demonstrated his value through grotesque molestation of public property.

Those are individual examples of course, but the government we currently have, while supported by the Puritan class, disturbingly features men of vast wealth, getting wealthier, with a government that operates to fork over more money to those who already have it.  The MAGA masses, which stand to grow poorer, and in the case of the agricultural sector are very much already suffering that fate, deservedly after supporting Trump, continue to believe that the demented fool knows what he's doing.

I don't know the source of this, but this illustration perfectly depicts how MAGA populists treat Donald Trump.

This system is rotten to the core and it needs to be broken.  Broken down, broken up, and ended.

The hopes of either the Democrats or the Republicans waking up and addressing it seem slim. The GOP is so besotted with it's wealthy leaders that the Speaker of the House, who claims to be a devout Christian, is attempting to keep the release of the names of wealthy hebephiles secret.  Only wealth and power can explain that.  The Democrats, which since 1912 have claimed to be the part of the working man, flounder when trying to handle the economic plight of the middle class.  Both parties agree on only one thing, that being you must never consider a third party.  

It is really time for a third part in this country.

In reality, of course, there are some, but only one is worth considering in any fashion, that being the American Solidarity Party.  Perhaps it could pick up the gauntlet here and smack it across the face of the oligarchy.  Or perhaps local parties might do it.  In my state, I think that if enough conservative Republicans (real conservatives, not the Cassie Cravens, John Bear, Dave Simpson, Bob Ide, Chuck Gray servants of the Orange Golden Calf Republicans) it could be done locally.  The U.S. has a history, although its barely acknowledged, of local parties, including ones whose members often successfully run on the tick of two parties.  New York's Zohran Mamdani and David Dinkins, for example were both Democrats and members of the Democratic Socialist Party.  Democrats from Minnesota are actually members of the Democratic Farm Labor Party, which is an amalgamation of two parties.  There's no reason a Wyoming Party couldn't form and field its own candidates, some of whom could also run as Republicans.

Such a party, nationally or locally, needs to be bold and take on the oligarchy. There's no time to waste on this, as the oligarchy gets stronger every day.  And such candidates will meet howls of derision.  Locally Californian Chuck Gray, who ironically has looked like the Green Peace Secretary of State on some issues, will howl about how they're all Communist Monarchist Islamic Stamp Collectors.  And some will reason to howl, such as the wealthy landlord in the state's legislature.

The reason for that is simple.  Such a party would need to apply, and apply intelligently, the principals of subsidiarity, solidarity and the land ethic. It would further need to be scientific, agrarianistic, and distributist. 

The first thing, nationally or locally, that such a party should do is bad the corporate ownership of retail outlets.  Ban it.  That would immediately shift retail back to the middle class, but also to the family unit.  A family might be able to own two grocery or appliance stores, for example, but probably not more than that.

The remote and corporate ownership of rural land needs to come to an immediate end as well.  No absentee landlords.  People owning agricultural land should be only those people making a living from it.

That model, in fact, should apply overall to the ownership of land.  Renting land out, for any reason, ought to be severely restricted.  The maintenance of a land renting system, including residential rent, creates landlords, who too often turn into Lords.

On land, the land ethic ought to be applied on a legal and regulatory basis. The American concept of absolute ownership of land is a fraud on human dignity.  Ownership of land is just, but not the absolute ownership.  You can't do anything you want on your property, nor should you be able to, including the entry by those engaged in natural activities, such as hunting, fishing, or simply hiking, simply because you are an agriculturalist.

While it might be counterintuitive in regard to subsidiarity, it's really the case, in this context, that the mineral resources underneath the surface of the Earth should belong to the public at large, either at the state, or national, level.  People make no contribution whatsoever to the mineral wealth being there. They plant nothing and they do not stock the land, like farmers do with livestock.  It's presence or absence is simply by happenstance and allowing some to become wealthy and some in the same category not simply by luck is not fair.  It 

Manufacturing and distribution, which has been address, is trickier, but at the end of the day, a certain amount of employee ownership of corporations in this category largely solves the problem.  People working for Big Industry ought to own a slice of it.

And at some level, a system which allows for the accumulation of obscene destructive levels of wealth is wrong.  Much of what we've addressed would solve this.  You won't be getting rich in retail if you can only have a few stores, for example.  And you won't be a rich landlord from rent if most things just can't be rented.  But the presence of the massively wealthy, particularly in an electronic age, continues to be vexing.  Some of this can be addressed by taxation. The USCCB has stated  that "the tax system should be continually evaluated in terms of its impact on the poor.” and it should be.  The wealthy should pay a much more progressive tax rate.

These are, of course, all economic, or rather politico-economic matters. None of this addresses the great or stalking horse social issues of the day.  We'll address those, as we often have, elsewhere.  But the fact of the matter is, right now, the rich and powerful use these issues to distract.  Smirky Mike Johnson may claim to be a devout Christian, but he's prevented the release of names of men who raped teenage girls.  Donald Trump may publicly state that he's worried about going to Hell, but he remains a rich serial polygamist.  J.D. Vance may claim to be a devout Catholic, but he spends a lot of time lying through his teeth.

And, frankly, fix the economic issues, and a lot of these issues fix themselves.

Bite the Hand That Feeds You: Essays and Provocations

 

Bite the Hand That Feeds You: Essays and Provocations 9780300155525

This includes the excellent essay The Idiocy of Urban Life, which I've occasionally cited here under its original The New Republic name, The Cows Revenge.

The Agrarian's Lament: Blog Mirror: Couple Donate Legacy 38,000-Acre, $2...

The Agrarian's Lament: Blog Mirror: Couple Donate Legacy 38,000-Acre, $2...:   Couple Donate Legacy 38,000-Acre, $21 Million Cattle Ranch To Keep It A Ranch

Sunday, November 4, 1945. Independent Smallholders Party win the Hungarian parliamentary elections.

The Independent Smallholders Party won the Hungarian parliamentary elections.

Contrary to what is commonly assumed, Eastern Europe didn't become Communist instantly upon the Soviet occupation of their territory. Where elections were allowed, often non Communist parties did well.  It took some months for the Communists to effect what essentially amounted to coups in most places, with the exceptions being Poland and East Germany, where Communists were immediately installed, and the Baltic States, which were reabsorbed into the Soviet Empire.

The party revived after the fall of Communism, but only holds one seat currently.

Libyan rioters killed 121 Jews.  British troops had to fire upon the rioters and arrested over 500.

The Sunday Parade magazine installment to newspapers across the country had a man and woman on the cover, goose hunting.  This cover, posted under the fair use exception, shows how widely hunting remained part of the culture before the post war relentless advance of urbanization cut into it.

The man is carrying a Browning Auto 5 or the Remington equivalent of it.  The device on the barrel of the shotgun on the right is a Cutts Compensator, which was designed to reduce recoil and in later versions allowed for changeable chokes.

It's noted on Reddit's 80 Years Ago sub that "Dick Winters finally embarks from Marseille to return to America."  I wouldn't have regarded that as a "finally" item, really, which I suppose shows my failure to appreciate how rapid demobilization actually was.

Last edition:

Saturday, November 3, 1945. Chinese Civil War, Game Wardens Killed.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, A Mystery, Cartoons, Chinese Civil War, Court, Crime, Espionage, Indonesia, Indonesian National Revolution, J.R. Williams, police, Wyoming, Wyoming Game & Fish Department

Friday Farming. Um. . .large farmers.

N.C. Wyeth, The Farmer.  1911.

On Friday, this blog tries to post something about farming, but it often lets everyone down by failing to do so, posting instead on various other inanities, such as a legislative committee passing a goofball ignorant bill on chemtrails.

Och!

Anyhow, we've been watching the news as first soybean farmers, and then later cattle farmers, have come on the news and stated, effectively, "we didn't think leopards would eat our face!" after Donald Trump took the tariff club and beat them upside the head and then decided that the Golden Arches could serve up Big Mac's with carne molida rather than ground beef.

What a bunch of amadán breallach.  Oh well, it's hard to feel sorry for them.  Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Put that in your Happy Meal, bucko.

But this thread isn't on that.

Rather its on this.

We admire farmers and ranchers, as is rather obvious.  It's our true vocation, even if an unfulfilled one. And we are familiar with actual farming, not the Green Acres/Hallmark/Homesteading type of agriculture.

But we're also agrarians.

Anyhow, I can't help but note this, even though its rude.

The spokesmen for soybean farmers have, at least on some occasions, been enormously fat.

That's a bad look.  They're huge.  And they're not huge in the way that some large people are who are pretty fit, and I've known more than a few.  Indeed, I've known some outdoor employed people, both blue collar and in the sciences, who were really big, but quite fit.  You could tell that what was at work with them was genetics.  But many of these farmers, or at least the snipped I've seen, are just flat out fat.

This isn't the case with working ranchers.  

I guess that shows us the extent to which mechanized farming has become, well, mechanized.  At least one of these great big farmers has been interviewed in his farm machinery as he and it are working in his fields.  And that's just not conducive to living well.  Ranching is still a pretty physically active line of work.

With these guys, I suspect, but of course don't know, that they're still consuming a farm diet that developed prior to the 1980s.  Say, perhaps, before World War Two. Big breakfast, followed by heavy activity, big lunch, followed by heavy activity, and a  lighter dinner. . .sometimes followed by heavy activity.  Now, however, you can omit the heavy activity.

Which gets us back to, I guess, the state of the world in general.  Our technology is, frankly, killing us.  We really weren't meant to live that way, or much of the way our technological world is having us live.

And, as a minor fwiw, you really can't come on to television seeking sympathies for farmers if you look like, to use an analogy, a fat cat.  You guys have obviously been eating well.  Yes, that really shouldn't matter, and its not a moral failing, but it doesn't look good in the presentation.

The Agrarian's Lament: Lex Anteinternet: An East Wing Post Mortem. An East Wing Post Mortem. Outrage over our Gilded Overlords.

The Agrarian's Lament: Lex Anteinternet: An East Wing Post Mortem. Outra...: 

Lex Anteinternet: An East Wing Post Mortem. Outrage over our Gilded Overlords.

I've posted a fair amount on this story. 

Lex Anteinternet: An East Wing Post Mortem.:   Comparative air photos posted by CBS News. Put up under commentary and fair use exception. I've never seen the East Wing of the White ...

One of my old friends, whose become a hardcore right wing populist, while also interestingly being a hardcore corner crossing advocate (the two are in fact mutually exclusive), posted this on his Facebook feed:

The President, and "your President" decides to renovate the Whitehouse, with donations and on his own dime mind you, and he is “Destroying Democracy?” Some of your hypocrisy cancels your outrage. I’m so sick of this crap. It’s just another reminder that the other side has nothing to offer Americans other that staged outrage over bull. TDS much??

Some on the far right have completely swallowed that this is "staged outrage".  The irony is that the exact same people were outraged about everything that Joe Biden did, and Barack Obama did.  Some of that outrage was because they were told to be.

And here's the next thing. The ballroom is probably not going to be completed before Trump leaves office.  Frankly, as the matter is now in litigation, there's going to be some delay.  If a judge is really upset, which is unlikely due to the way courts work, there's precedent for returning the structure ot the status quo ante before anything goes forward, which would in and of itself likely take years.

That's unlikely of course, but there's going to be a district court ruling and then an appeals court ruling. All that will take six months on a project that would normally take several years to complete.

But that's not the point.

The next President, unless its J. D. Vance, is going to take this down, it it gets built  If its a Republican like Thomas Massie it'll gleefully be torn down.  If its a Democrat, it's also coming down.

Let's make it clear.

The ballroom, if its built, or however much of it that's built, will be taken down and erased from the public memory.

At that point in time, will those who support Trump in whatever he does state: The President, and "your President" decides to renovate the Whitehouse, with donations and on his own dime mind you, and he is “Destroying Democracy?”

Not hardly, even if no public funds are then used.  They'll be outraged about how its "destroying" the legacy of a "great" president.

So why does this bother me?

Well in part because I'm an agrarian and this entire project is an insult to agrarians.

Ballrooms are the high school basketball courts of the super wealthy  A place where the extremely wealthy can meet and mingle and do those things Trump noted, have drinks in the foyer, etc.  The kind of place where you can talk shop and meet with the rich and powerful, and heads of state.  Maybe have the Saudi king over, or rub elbows with guests like Prince William. . . or maybe Harry and Jeff Epstein.  It's a public building, no matter whose tribute is used to pay for it, but you can't book your wedding reception of bar mitzvah reception there.

Because you are a peasant.

The entire concept of a massive ornate public building like this is that you peons will love it because you love to bask in the glory of your benighted leaders.  And those benighted leaders, having been born into wealth, really believe that.  You love them as they love themselves, and you are happy to serve the glorious benighted.

That's the antithesis of the American concept.

Here's what the White House grounds should return to, and I'm not joking.

The West Wing also dates back to TR's time in the White House with the construction of what was supposed to be a temporary structure.  That structure was expanded in 1909 and ultimately came to be the White House office space.  I don't doubt that they need office space, but as noted, maybe it can just be somewhere else.

And in fact, for the most part, it should be.

Taft family milk cow Pauline Wayne, one of two milk cows the Tafts kept and allowed to freely roam the White House grounds. What is now known as the Eisenhower building is in the background.  This is as things should be.

Sometime last week I was somehow the recipient of a real estate brochure entitled "Land".

I didn't get around to looking at it until today, even though I knew what it was going to be.  Agricultural land turned into the playgrounds of the rich.

That should end.  People who hold agricultural ground, or even large blocks of ground, should have to make their livings from it and nothing else.  The wealthy holding such ground hurts those who would make a living in this simple manner.

We live in a new Gilded Age.  That age gave rise to the Progressive movement and swept into office people like Theodore Roosevelt.  Something like that needs to happen again.

Yes, I'm outraged over the East Wing coming down for a ballroom, and the very concept of a ballroom outrages me.  I'm outraged that common people have fallen for outright lies and believe everything Donald Trump tells them.  I'm outraged that the extremely wealthy are running the show on everything while, at the same time, our Gilded masters tell us to hate the poorest of the poor.  I'm outraged that Congress will not do its job.  I'm outraged that our military is being ordered to murder people in the Caribbean.  And I"m outraged that our local politicians tell us to support this crap when they do so, in at least 2/3s of the instances, as it keeps them in their elected jobs.

An East Wing Post Mortem.

 

Comparative air photos posted by CBS News. Put up under commentary and fair use exception.

I've never seen the East Wing of the White House, and of course, now, I never will.  I have very little, as in no, interest in touring Washington D.C. and  have even less interest than that now that the illegitimate Trump gang of insurrectionist is occupying the nation's capital.  

This has been a very revealing series of events however, and we can take some things away from it.

The first thing we have learned is how utterly desperate Donald Trump is to amount to something.  He started too late in life and his character is too fixed in order to achieve that, absent late in life inspiration of an existential type which would require him to make a profound change in his behavior.  Born into wealth and a playboy by character, he's desperately trying to buy and build himself into seriousness and relevance.  In the back of his mind, or frankly maybe in the forefront, he knows that he's a fart in a windstorm.  After he's out of office, and no amount of far right fantasizing is going to keep him there, his successor, right or left, will begin the process of trying to repair the damage Trump has done.  If its a right wing leader, like wannabe NatCon J. D. Vance, it'll be National Conservative far right, but less insane than Trump.  It probably won't be Vance however, but somebody from the political center, particularly if the Democrats get their act together and dump their own wackadoodle far left, which there are signs they will, or from the actual libertarian populist right.

My prediction, early though it is, is that the next President will be Tammy Duckworth, maybe on a Duckworth Klobuchar ticket.  I can see, however, Thomas Massie and Rand Paul taking a run at Vance's dreams and keeping them from happening.

Vance would keep the Trump monument to himself up and pretend to like it, as he only is where he is now due to Trump, but as soon as somebody who wasn't a Trump sycophant is in the Oval Office, it's coming down.  That will be symbolic of the entire Trump legacy, destruction that will ultimately come down, and have to be rebuilt.

Trump want to see himself as a great man, a sort of Napoleon being crowned, but knows that he's more like Napoleon on Elba.  He's not going to get there.  He's really extremely pathetic.

Also sad is the degree to which it has been demonstrated that a life of extreme wealth is corrosive.  Trump's entire life of largess already showed this, but he really does believe that the White House needs a huge overblown rushed ballroom as he's seen those of failed monarchies in Europe.  The republics, or in one case dictatorship, that inherited that stuff still uses it as it's a human instinct not to rip things down.  That's why the Brandenburg Gate, which should have been blown to rubble in 1945, is still standing.  Yes, it's a monument to German militarism, but it's big and already there so we keep it around.  That's the reason the Eiffel Tower is there, even though its a giant ugly radio tower, or why the "egg beater" thing in Casper Wyoming is still there.  We just can't bring ourselves to rip things down, no matter hideos they are, or how symbolically problematic.

The egg beater in Casper Wyoming.  It's ugly.

This will come down.

It'll come down in part as it just won't work with an 18th Century large house built on a budget.  It wasn't constructed to be a palace, but just a big house.

Which brings me to my next point.

Perhaps the West Wing, after actually going through the proper process, ought to be taken out as well.

No attachments to the structure are really consistent with its original concept.  It isn't supposed to have a lot of offices and the entire concept of the First Lady needing room for anything is absurd.  The First Lady is simply the President's wife, or Trump's case in regard to the monarchical role to which he aspires, the current concubine, or in the American Civil Religion context, his current wife. 

Maybe it ought to be just scaled back to its original footprint.

Some would object that that would mean that it wouldn't have enough room for its purpose Well, No. 10 Downing Street has less room than the White House.  And if more space is really needed, they can find it somewhere else in Washington D.C.  Nixon actually did that with the nearby Eisenhower Building.

The White House in 1846, when it was first photographed.

Restoring the White House back to scale would also be symbolic.  The entire office of the Presidency needs to be restored to scale.  Right now, Trump is in fact ruling as a dictator, with the complicitly of the Dixiecrat Party that has taken over the GOP.  That needs to end, and end to an enormous degree.

The drift towards an imperial presidency started with Theodore Roosevelt, who is a person I admire, but whom I admire more than I once did.  TR, like Trump, tended to act unilaterally, the difference being that Roosevelt was a profoundly intelligent and moral man, where as the opposite is true of Trump.  The East Wing started off in his administration as the fairly modest East Terrace, which looked nice and wasn't an overblown Sun King structure like the proposed ballroom will be, but it nonetheless got the modification trend rolling.

It would be TR's cousin Franklin that really got the modern Presidency established, however, and that due to the emergency of the Great Depression and World War Two.  Franklin Roosevelt did not rule as a dictator, although people liked to accuse him of that at the time.  Ironically, a President that the Republicans hate to this very day is the one, in some ways, that Trump has tried to emulate, even to the extent of wishing for a third term, which he cannot legally occupy.  Franklin, of course, redid the East Wing, which was done in part due to the bomb shelter that was constructed underneath  it.

The West Wing also dates back to TR's time in the White House with the construction of what was supposed to be a temporary structure.  That structure was expanded in 1909 and ultimately came to be the White House office space.  I don't doubt that they need office space, but as noted, maybe it can just be somewhere else.

And in fact, for the most part, it should be.

Taft family milk cow Pauline Wayne, one of two milk cows the Tafts kept and allowed to freely roam the White House grounds. What is now known as the Eisenhower building is in the background.  This is as things should be.

The ascent of the ignorant.

I know I have an Ivy League education which is now supposed to make me ashamed. 

But I am really tired of trying to argue with ignoramuses who don’t know anything about anything on this hellsite.

It will be a miracle if America survives this ascent of the ignorant.

Jon "Bowzer" Bauman.

We need to stop trusting the experts... Trusting the experts is not a feature of science or democracy, it's a feature of religion and totalitarianism.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., ignoramus.

Bauman, famous for his portrayal as a deep voiced "greaser" in the band Sha Na Na, but in fact very well educated and now a Democratic political activist, has it right.

I've struggled to put together posts on this topic, unsuccessfully several times.  Lots of people like me, Conservatives back in the day, and Social Conservatives still, keep wondering what happened, even while pretty much knowing what happened. We're horrified as the country rockets towards Petainism, or Francoism, or just outright stupidity, even while we wonder how on earth we went to a country in which homosexual propaganda is outright directed at the young.

Justice Kennedy. . . you are to blame for a lot of this.

Anyhow, one of the real stunning things of the Trump ascent has been the ascent of the ignorant.

And that's hard to take.

William F. Buckley, conservative intellectual.  He wouldn't recognize, or approve of, the current Republican Party.

Conservatism used to be fairly intellectual. . .well it was fairly intellectual after the McCarthy era.  In truth, it's always cycled between intellectualism and wild conspiratorial phantasy, just as the left has cycled between  intellectualism and wild eye flaming goofballedry . To some extent, the poor nation is getting both of these now at the same time, but it's most prominent on the right.

Ronald Reagan and conservative George F. Will.  Will left the Republican Party due to Trump.  This is the same room that Trump has made look like a movie set designers version of a 19th Century New Orleans whorehouse.

A big part of Trump's intellectual, if you will, drive now comes from Dominionist who claim to be carrying a sword for Christianity but who don't grasp the mains intellect of it.  It was Cardinal Newman who noted that to know history was to make a person a Catholic, and the Dominionist neither know history nor, for that matter, Christianity very well.  Outside of those carrying a Pine Tree flag are those who are in the Petainist/Francoist Christian Nationalist movement, who at least aren't anti intellectual and are relatively intellectual themselves, when their beliefs are drilled into.

But beyond that are a great mass of people, including people now in power, who reflect blistering ignorance.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Anti vaxxers, who took their initial inspiration from a Playboy model whose only claim to fame was her boobs, and then having had a child (out of wedlock, of course), went into full bore ignorance during COVID, showing how low education in the country generally sunk.  A person can oppose vaccines for themselves on philosophical, or even theological, grounds, but you can't oppose them on scientific grounds. That's just ignorant.  Nonetheless, Trump has elevated Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and "Dr. Oz" to positions of real power, when they ought to be in the waterfowl section of the local zoo.  No serious nation would have either of these people in positions where they dealt with anything biological, even if that meant they were disqualified from being dog catchers.

Mehmet Oz.

Most of the cabinet officers we hear from on a frequent basis are total sycophants who sound like their on the losing end of a debate in a high school forensics team.  Some sound like outright thugs.  Our Ambassador to Israel is there as he wants to help bring about the Apocalypse.  

Trump is outright weaponizing the Justice Department into the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and persecuting (not a typo) anyone who publicly opposed him.  He's also sending the National Guard, converted into the Ersatzheer, into Republican cities illegally.  While all  this occurs a populace that would have previously flooded into the streets in protests sits on its hand believing that there must really Marxist, Communist, Fascists, Monarchist about to take over these cities and convert them into Communist Anarchist Monarchies.

It's really doubtful the nation can recover from this.

At a lower level, we're debating library books in the children's section which an adult nation ought to be able to sort out in about fifteen minutes. But perhaps a bigger example is the outright believe by people who believe that you ought to drink petroleum oil for breakfast that nuclear power is going to turn your housecat into the central character in 1950s Japanese horror film.  In the meantime, a legitimate concern on the part of some, youth being exposed to pornography, has been captured by local members of the Freedom Caucus who are freely dumb in their local efforts to oppose it, going to public forums like school boards to act up.

The press rarely gets things 100% right, indeed a local big story that I know very well has recently amused me by how off the mark the reporting is, but the press has become a whipping boy for people with agendas on both sides.  Chuck Gray, the Wyoming Secretary of State, is so enamoured of this that he can't pick up a lunch menu without claiming its the product of  the "radical left wing media".  The left accuses the press of ignoring Trump's mental decline, which is obvious to everyone, while the right basically seeks to totally shut down everything but the Völkischer Beobachter.

How we get out of this is really questionable, but education, and I mean public education, is going to have to be they key to a large extent.  People need to learn science again.

I don't know how Americans became so uneducated.  

I went through the local public school system which wasn't perfect, but frankly it was pretty good.  My parents also took a real interest in how we were doing in school, and I think everyone's parents did.  My own kids went through the same system after I had, and it had improved from good to really good.  

Even then, there were some hints of things changing, mostly in the form of a handful of homeschooled showing up in sports and the rise of a series of private Christian schools and schools that were private Christian schools but which wouldn't admit that they were.  Homeschooling was, and is, mostly marked here by what the parents don't want their children to learn.  Some of those parents were really well educated themselves, but imports from elsewhere and often members of distinct minority religious communities.  Outside of the Catholic school, and probably the Lutheran school, this was true of the Christian schools as well.  

Following COVID, here locally, we got the influx of people from somewhere else who detested education even as they put their kids in schools  One member of the legislature enrolled her two kids in the local high school noting how she was a "refugee" from Illinois, where she'd been on a school board.  Now we have a Freedom Caucus legislator being such a problem at a school board meeting she had to be escorted away from the podium when you can bet that every member of the school board is, in fact, conservative.

What I think that tells me is that education elsewhere had declined, and we took in an influx of the uneducated, who in the sprit of the times, spread their views to elements ready to accept it locally.

Another thing is this.

Americans have always had a sort of populist anti intellectual streak, which is heavily ironic as the Founding Fathers of the nation were largely well to do elitists.  Indeed, Jefferson figured the republic would not last, as ultimately it would yield from hard working yeoman farmers to a city living mob, dependent upon the government.  He wasn't quite right, but he wasn't all that far off.  We've had two prior New York born Presidents in the country, a highly educated but quite rural intellectual, a more urbane intellectual, and a real estate developing complete buffoon.  

The essence of populism is that people have a native wisdom.  The problem is, only an educated public does.  Jefferson appreciated that, which is why he so heavily depended on the yeomanry to carry the republic.  Family units, living independently, and frankly as somewhat genteel hardworking Christian farmers.  He wasn't a yeoman himself.  He did foresaw a day in which the republic would be much like it has become, a screaming mass of poorly educated people who were easily lead.

The "new people", German propaganda poster from 1938.  In reality, most Germans never looked like this, just as right now most Americans don't really reflect the ideals of the New Apostolic Reformation. 

Populist movements have in fact always been easily lead.  The Nazis were able to do it with the German populace.  The Communist were able to do it with the Russian people.  The Fascists were able to do it with the Italians.

Manipulation of the masses by forces co opting populist movements is uniformly simply.  The people are worshipped for having common sense, with their leader supposedly reflecting back their wisdom.  Out side of that group, are the enemies, some vague, often faceless group, who are out to destroy the common people.  For the Nazis, those horrific enemies were the Communists and the Jews, as well as Gypsies, Catholics, homosexuals, and Slavs.

For the Fascist, it was the Socialist, Communists and Slavs. 

Soviet realist painting of female farm worker. Female farm workers were a favorite subject for Soviet propaganda posters.  They were always smiling, and tended to be a little chunky.

For the Communists, the population is the workers, whose enemy are capitalists, those who own their own businesses, and people who believe in any kind of religion.

Chinese girls are a favorite of Chinese Communist posters

For Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, which has been co opted by the National Conservatives, it's anyone who isn't a Christian conservative.  

Now, it's always the case that populist movements, after they get co opted, are shot through with hypocrisy  The movements become vehicles for obtaining power and people at the top either never believed in the movement, or they regard themselves as exceptions.  Nazism was virulently anti homosexual, but Ernst Röhm was a flaming homosexual.  Goebbels had been a Communist.  Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler all lived well, not as common people.  English roundheads in the English Civil War may have fought for Calvinist morality, but they kept in some cases mistresses.

And so we have Trump and his followers.  Trump probably has no real solid moral beliefs at all, and is a serial polygamist who was born obscenely wealthy and is getting richer in the office.

The problem with populism is that the bloom always comes off the rose.  It turns out that native intelligence is often pretty ignorant.  It always collapses in one way or another, often violently  It's followers are left to pick up the pieces often having been exposed, by the end, as people who were enemies of the very movement they espoused.  

It didn't have to be this way.

There were real reasons that the mass of people were discontent.  Ignored on immigration and the erosion of an industrial base for decades, and watching the decay of moral values even as they joyously participated in that decay themselves, there was a real opportunity for a return to true conservatism.  Even National Conservatives had the opportunity to participate in that, although they'd lost faith in democracy in general which caused them to choose not to.

When this flies apart, and it will, the reckoning is going to be huge.  What will have been achieved is to anger those who became victims of it.  The real number of populists in the country is fewer than supposed, and the true diehards fewer yet. Trump mostly won because Joe Biden chose to run in his dotage, which was obviously advanced, and which camouflaged Trump's mental decline.  That can't be camouflaged any longer.  

Nonetheless, like good fascists, the GOP is going to go down with Trump, even though it need not to.  Mike Johnson is effectively releasing cheery news from the Führerbunker as the edifice of the Republic literally collapses around him.  The Leader and his Favorite Architect plan a monumental building as an old one is destroyed.  Miller and Bondi send their thugs out to hang supposed enemies from lamposts. Loyal reports from loyal lieutenants about not being able to hang on are ignored.  Vance consults his Plans for the Fatherland book as if he has a political future.

It should be obvious where this is headed.

But it's easier just to blame it on Trump's style, or his amazing intelligence that we can't grasp, and just ignore it.