The 2026 Election, 1st Edition: Spring Training Edition.

Walter "Big Train" Johnson, April 11, 1924.

Yes, the 2024 Election hasn't even occured yet, and the 2026 one is clearly on, at least locally.

What we can tell for sure is that Chuck Gray is running for the office of Governor.  He always was.  The Secretary of State's office was very clearly a mere stepping stone in that plan, and the plan probably goes on from there.   By coming to Wyoming, a state with a low population and a pronounced history of electing out of staters (we nearly have some sort of personality problem in that regard), it was a good bet, particularly when combined with his family money, although it was never a sure bet that he'd make the legislature and on from there.  His plan requires, however, or at least he seemingly believes it requires, that he keep his name in the news, which he's worked hard to do, being involved in lawsuits, which is probably unconstitutional on his part, and releasing press releases that are extraordinary for his role, and for the invective language they contain.  Mr. Gray has probably used the term "radical leftists" more in his two years of office than all of the prior Wyoming Secretaries of State combined.

This explains something that was otherwise a bit odd that we noticed recently, which was Secretary Gray's appearance in Casper in opposition of something he'd otherwise voted for:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 63d Edition. Strange Bedfellows.

 

Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

The environmental populists?

Politics, as they say, makes for strange bedfellows.  But how strange, nonetheless still surprises.

Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray, who rose to that position by pitching to the populist far right, which dominates the politics of the GOP right now, and which appears to be on the verge of bringing the party down nationally, has tacked in the wind in a very surprising direction.  He appeared this past week at a meeting in Natrona County to oppose a proposed gravel pit project at the foot of Casper Mountain.  He actually pitched for the upset residents in the area to mobilize and take their fight to Cheyenne, stating:

We have a very delicate ecosystem, the fragility up there, the fragility of the flows … the proximity to domestic water uses. All of those things should have led to a distinct treatment by the Office of State Lands, and that did not happen.

I am, frankly, stunned.  

I frankly never really expected Mr. Gray to darken visage of the Pole Stripper monument on the east side of Casper's gateway, which you pass by on the road in from Cheyenne again, as he's not from here and doesn't really have a very strong connection to the state, although in fairness that connection would have been to Casper, where he was employed by his father's radio station and where he apparently spent the summers growing up (in an unhappy state of mind, according to one interview of somebody who knew him then).  Gray pretty obviously always had a political career in mind and campaigned from the hard populist right from day one, attempting at first to displace a conservative house member unsuccessfully.

We have a post coming up which deals with the nature of populism, and how it in fact isn't conservatism.  Gray was part of the populist rise in the GOP, even though his background would more naturally have put him in the conservative camp, not the populist one.  But opportunity was found with populists, who now control the GOP state organization.  The hallmark of populism, as we'll explore elsewhere, is a belief in the "wisdom of the people", which is its major failing, and why it tends to be heavily anti-scientific and very strongly vested in occupations that people are used to, but which are undergoing massive stress.  In Wyoming that's expressed itself with a diehard attitude that nothing is going on with the climate and that fossil fuels will be, must have, and are going to dominate the state's economy forever.   The months leading up to the recent legislative session, and the legislative session itself, demonstrated this with Governor Gordon taking criticism for supporting anything to address carbon concerns.  Put fairly bluntly, because a large percentage of Wyoming's rank and file workers depend on the oil and gas industry, and things related to it, any questioning on anything tends to be taken as an attack on "the people".

Natrona County has had a gravel supply problem for quite a while and what the potential miner seeks to do here is basically, through the way our economy works, address it.  There would be every reason to suspect that all of the state's politicians who ran to the far right would support this, and strongly.  But they aren't.

The fact that Gray is not, and is citing environmental concerns, comes as a huge surprise.  But as noted, given his background, he's probably considerably more conservative than populist, but has acted as politicians do, and taken aid and comfort where it was offered.  Tara Nethercott ran as a conservative and lost for the same office.

But here's the thing.

That gravel is exactly the sort of thing that populists, if they're true to what they maintain they stand for, ought to support.  It's good for industry, and the only reason to oppose the mining is that 1) it's in a bad place in terms of the neighbors and 2) legitimate environmental concerns, if there are any.  But that's exactly the point.  You really can't demand that the old ways carry on, until they're in your backyard.  

Truth be known, given their nature, a lot of big environmental concerns are in everyone's backyard right now.

The old GOP would have recognized that nationally, and wouldn't be spending all sorts of time back in DC complaining about electric vehicles.  And if people are comfortable with things being destructive elsewhere, they ought to be comfortable with them being destructive right here.  If we aren't, we ought to be pretty careful about it everywhere.

There actually is some precedent for this, FWIW.  A hallmark of Appalachian populism was the lamenting of what had happened to their region due to coal mining.  John Prine's "Paradise" in some ways could be an environmental populist anthem.

Right about the time I noted this, Rod Miller, opinion writer for the Cowboy State Daily, wrote a satiric article on the same thing:

Rod Miller: Flip-Flops Around The Ol’ Campfire

We have no idea, of course, who his opponent will be, unless it's Gordon, who is theoretically term limited out, but we already know from prior litigation that the restraint on his running again is unconstitutional.  And Gordon clearly doesn't like Gray, a dislike that's not limited to him by any means.  Gordon would have to challenge that in court, however, unless 1) a group of citizens does, and 2) the court ruled they'd have standing.

As voters, they should.

If that happens, I wouldn't be surprised to see Gordon run again, and to be asked to run again.  While he was a candidate initially I worried about him, as he was further to the right on public lands issues than any candidate since Geringer, but he's actually acted as a very temperate Governor, something made difficult by 1) the intemperate level of our current politics, and 2) the occasional shortsightedness of the legislature.¹

Anyhow, if you've ever had the occasion to see, Gordon and Gray together in an official setting, it's clear they don't get along.  Indeed, on the State Land Board, it's clear that Gordon isn't the only one that's not keen on Gray.  Gray for his part reacts back, as he did recently when he sent an unprecedented lengthy letter to the Governor on his vetoes. 

Gray, like Donald Trump, has some feverish admirers.²  Indeed, this seems to be a hallmark of the populist right.  They not only run candidates, but they develop personality cults routinely.

Rod Miller, again, in a recent column noted a real problem that Gray has.  As, so far, they haven't really been able to advance their agenda without the help of conservatives, they have an advantage there as they always portray themselves as besieged by the numerous barbarians, the last legionnaire on Hadrian's Wall.  Trump has actually, at a national level, worked to keep that status by ordering his party to defeat immigration legislation that was probably a once in a lifetime conservative opportunity.

Anyhow, as noted, Rod Miller recently noted a problem that Gray has.  He's not married.

Rod Miller: Bride Of Chucky – Or – Advice To The Lovelorn From The Ol’ Campfire

Is this actually a problem?

It shouldn't be, but it might be.

Indeed, without going into it, there was a figure in Wyoming decades ago whose marriage was questioned by whisperers on the basis that they believed he married just to end the speculation on why he wasn't married.   The marriage lasted a very long time, so presumably the rumors were without foundation, but there were questions, which is interesting and shows, I guess, how people's minds can work.  

Another way to look at it, I supposed, was prior to Trump if a person was a conservative people would ask about things that appeared to be contrary to public statements about conservatism.  Not being married, for a conservative, was regarded as odd, and for that matter there are still people who whisper about Lindsey Graham, while nobody seems to worry about AOC being shacked up with her boyfriend or whatever is going on with Krysten Sinema. 

And then there's Gray's age.  It will make people suspicious of him at some point, or people will at least take note.  Indeed, some of his critics from the left already have, but in a really juvenile way.

Actually determining Gray's age is a little difficult, and indeed, knowing anything about his background actually is.  But Cowboy State Daily, a conservative organ, managed to reveal about as much as we know.

Gray was born in California and raised outside of Los Angeles.  According to somebody close to the family, or who was, he was homeschooled by his mother.³ He felt uncomfortable about his birthplace, and stated in the campaign

I come from a divorced family, like many people in our country. A judge said I was to live in a different place, but my dad lived here, built a business here, and I spent my summers here during the time that was allocated by the judge.

According to the same source, he didn't seem all that happy in Casper, Wyoming as a kid, but the circumstances could well explain that.  The same source, who probably isn't a family friend anymore, reported to the Cowboy that Gray's father had a focus on the family owned radio station impacting legislation at a national level.  Photos have been circulated of the father with President Reagan.

Gray graduated from high school in 2008 and the respected University of Pennsylvanian in 2012, which makes it all the more remarkable that he's been a success in Wyoming politics.⁴   If we assume the norm about graduation ages, he would have been 22 in 2012, which would make him 34 now.

In Wyoming, the average age for men to marry is 27.8 years on average, while for women it's 25.6.  Gray's now notably over the median age, but that is a median.  I was over it too when I married at age 31.  My wife was below the female one.  That's how averages work.

My parents, I'd note, were both over the median, although I don't know it with precision for the 1950s.  In the 50s, the marriage age was actually at an unusual low.  My father was 29, and my mother 32.

So his age, in the abstract, doesn't really mean anything overall, although it might personality wise.

As has been noted elsewhere on this site, Gray is a Roman Catholic and indeed I've seen him occasionally at Mass, although I would never have seen him every weekend as there are a lot of weekend Masses and my habits aren't the same as his.  I have no reason to believe that he didn't attend weekly as required by the church.⁵  Catholics are supposed to observe traditional Catholic teachings in regard to sex and marriage.  I'm not really going to be delving into that, but again we have no reason to believe that Gray isn't observant, in which case, as he is not married, he should be living as a chaste single man, and he probably is (something that has casued juvenile left wing ribbing).

Wyoming, however, is the least religious state in the union and while Catholics, Orthodox, Mormons and Protestants of traditional morality observe that morality, here, as with the rest of the United States, the late stage mass casualty nature of the Sexual Revolution means that a lot of people in these faiths don't, and the society at large does not.  We've gone from a society where such outside the bounds of marriage behavior was illegal in varying degrees, to one where, nationwide, society pushes people into things whether they want to or not.

Be that as it may, save for Casper, Laramie, and probably Cheyenne, sexual conduct outside the biological gender norm is very much looked down upon.  Indeed, in a really dense move, a Democratic Albany County legislator went to a meeting in Northeast Wyoming a while back on homosexual issues and was shocked by the hostile reception she received.  She shouldn't have been.

No, I'm not saying this applies to Gray.  I have no reason to believe that, and indeed I believe the opposite.

However, we've gone from a state whose ethos was "I don't care what you do as long as you leave me alone" to one in which, largely due to the importation of Evangelicals from elsewhere, a fairly large percentage of the population really care about what you do, particularly if they don't like it.

Indeed, at the time that Matthew Shepard was murdered, I was surprised when I heard an anti-homosexual comment.  Such comments do not surprise me now, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear one now in the context of a murder.  As noted, the exceptions seem to be Laramie (where Shepard was murdered, but which has never been hostile to homosexuals), Casper (which has had a homosexual 20 something mayor and which has a lesbian city council member) and Cheyenne (which has a homosexual member of the state House, as does Albany County).  Well, I omitted Jackson and should include it here too.

At any rate, being an open homosexual and aiming for major office probably is impossible, although for minor ones it hasn't proven to be.  The point is, however, that Miller is right. At some point, people are going to start wondering why staunchly populist Gray isn't married.

Maybe it's because he is in fact a staunchly populist out of state import.  There aren't that many women in that pool.  Indeed, having a one time vague contact with our staunchly populist Congresswoman, I was very surprised when it turned out she was a populist, or even a conservative.  I'm not saying that she's not, I'm just surprised.

Gray is in a sort of oddball demographic.  Not being from here, he wouldn't be in any circles in which women from here, professionals or otherwise, would be in.  He appears to really be a fish out of water in terms of the local culture.  When he appears at things, he does wear cowboy boots, but you can tell they've never been in a stirrup, and he otherwise is, at least based on my very limited observation of him, always dressed in what we might sort of regard as 1980s Denver Business Casual.  I'd be stunned if I saw him on a trout stream or out in the prairie with his bird dog, Rex.  I've seen him at a bar once, for a grand opening of something, but I don't imagine him walking up to the tender at The Buckhorn or The Oregon Trail and ordering a double Jack Daniel's either.

I was once told by an out-of-state lawyer who had been born in the state but who had moved to Denver after graduating from law school, regarding Wyomingites, that "you have to be tough just to live there".  People who live here probably don't realize that, but there's more than a little truth to it.  I'm often shocked by the appearance of populist legislature Jeanette Ward, as it's so clear she just doesn't belong here.  She's not the kind of gal who would be comfortable sitting next to the ranch girl chewing tobacco who has the "Wrangler Butts Drive Me Nuts" bumper sticker on her pickup truck.⁶   Gray probably isn't comfortable with such a gal either.  "Tomboys", as they used to be called, are sort of the mean average for Wyoming women.  

Gray is well-educated, of course, which is part of the reason that I suspect a lot of his positions are affectations.  I don't think he really believes the election was stolen, for example, unless he's doing so willfully, which would mean that he really doesn't believe that.  Recently he's taken on the topic of firearms arguing, as part of the State Facilities Commission, that the state needs to open up carrying guns at the capitol, which is frankly absurd.  While I don't know the answer, I suspect that Gray isn't really a firearms' aficionado. 

Up until very recently, Wyomingites knew a lot about the people they sent to the legislature and public office, often knowing them personally to some degree.  We actually knew the Governor and the First Lady on some basis other than politics, quite frequently, and our local reps we knew pretty well.  The populist invasion defeated that to some degree, and in some cases, a great deal.  The question is whether this is permanent, or temporary.  It wasn't until the last election that people looked at Gray's background at all, and they still have very little.  People haven't really grasped until just now that many of the Freedom Caucus are imports, not natives.  We don't know much about some of them or their families, and chances are an average Wyomingite, or at least a long term native, would regard them as odd on some occasions.  Chuck Gray just ran an op ed that was titled something like Only Wyomingites Should Vote In Wyoming's Elections.  Most long term and native born Wyomingites feel that strongly, and wouldn't actually regard a lot of our current office holders as being Wyomingites.

There's evidence that the populist fad is passing. We'll see. This and the 2026 election will be a test of it.  2026 is a long ways off.  For that matter, it's sufficiently long enough for these candidates to evolve if they need to. Some are probably capable of doing that.  Others, undoubtedly not.  The question will be if they need to.

May 11, 2024

It's very clear, to those paying any attention, that Wyoming elected executive branch officials really dislike Chuck Gray, including those who are very conservative.  This became evident again when Superintendant of Education Degenfelder indicated Wyoming would join a Title IX lawsuit in opposition to the Federal Government's new rules on "transgender" atheletes.  Degenfelder indicated that she'd been working behind the scenes with Gov. Gordon on this matter.  In doing so she blasted Gray who earlier made comments wondering where the state's officials were on this matter, even though his office has less than 0 responsiblity in this department.  Degenfelder stated in regard to Gray, "I would encourage Secretary Gray to join those of us actually making plays on the field rather than just heckling from the sidelines".  Gray, who is a Californian who has lived very little of his life in Wyoming save for summers here while growing up, declared in response he was on "Team Wyoming".

FWIW, Wyoming really doesn't need to particpate in lawsuits maintained by other parties, as they're already maintained.

July 8, 2024

Now here's an interesting development. . . 

I may have mentioned on this blog before that I feel Gov. Gordon should consider running, text of the Wyoming Constitution aside, for a third term.  In doing so, if I did (I know that I've discussed with people) I've noted that the Constitutional prohibition on him doing so violates the Wyoming Constitution.

Turns out that I'm not the only one speculating on that.

Chuck Gray Says He Won’t Certify Candidacy If Gordon Seeks 3rd Term

And it turns out that Chuck Gray doesn't like the idea at all.

January 7, 2025

I managed to miss it, but back in November, Brent Bien announced for Governor.

Bien is on the far right, and is a Wyoming native, but he spent 28 years in the Marine Corps before retiring in 2019 and coming back to the state.  This puts him in the camp of far right Republicans in the state who spent their entire working lives drawing on one of richest portions of the government t** while also never actually having to make sure a business actually functioned.  

I've never quite grasped "trust me, I know how run things for the common man. . .I've never actually had to work in a business. . . "

Moreover, Bien was a prime mover on the initiatives that will be on the ballot to cut property taxes 50%, essentially meaning he's backing bankrupting local governments and schools.  So, after living off of taxpayers for his adult life, having retired, with a retirement funded by taxpayers, he doesn't want to pay them himself.

Well, Bien will have competition, as we know.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 70th Edition. Inside Wyoming Political Baseball

Labels: 1890s, 1990s, 2026 Election, Johnson County War, Lies, Politics, Public Land, Sagebrush Rebellion, Wyoming

March 14, 2025

Cynthia Lummis ‘Gearing Up For Reelection’ To US Senate In 2026

Rob Hendry leads slate in sweep of Natrona County Republican Party leadership

Footnotes

1. There are numerous examples of this, but a really good one is Gordon's effort to buy the UP checkerboard, which the legislature defeated.  It would have been a real boon for the state, but fiscal conservatives just couldn't see it that way.

Recently, Gordon hasn't been shy about vetoing highly unadvised bills that have come out of the legislature, or shutting down bad regulations that come out of the Secretary of State's office.

2.  And not just Gray, Harriet Hageman does as well.

3. Homeschooling, for whatever reason a person does it, can be developmentally limiting.  I don't know about Gray's case, but its notable that some on the far right have done it, as they believe that schools are left wing organs and there are things they don't want their children exposed to them.  The problem this presents is that children who are homeschooled grow up in a very narrow environment, whereas, at least here, those who go to public, and for that matter religious schools, do not.

4. There used to be a school interview of him from the University of Pennsylvania, in which he expressed a desire to become a lawyer.  He's clearly not going to do that now, unless of course his political career ended, which is perfectly possible.

5.  As noted here in prior posts, lying is regarded as a potentially serious sin in Catholicism, and lying about something like who won the 2020 election would be, in some circumstances, a mortal sin if you were a political figure.  

6.  Ward is from Illinois and openly calls herself a political refugee. At the time of moving here, she posted something about her children not having to wear masks in our public schools, adopting the far right wing view that trying to protect others in this fashion is somehow an intrusion on liberty.  I suppose it is, but not relieving yourself in public is as well.  Anyhow, at some point, presuming those children remain in public school, she'll be in for a shock as Casper's schools truly have a really wide demographic and are not exactly made up of an Evangelical populist sample of the population.

March 25, 2025

Hmmm. . . the tide seems to be coming in.

Former Wyoming Legislators Win Big In County Republican Party Elections

March 29, 2025

Donald Trump has endorsed Cynthia Lummis.

April 2, 2025

While a non partisan race, in Wisconsin the liberal Democratic candidate for the Supreme Court prevailed over the Musk backed conservative Republican.

The race was widely regarded as a test of how people are feeling about Trump.

In Florida two Republicans won election in open House seats in heavily Republican districts, but the Democrats did better than expected.  A Democratic victory would have been a huge upset, so in some ways this also showed that people aren't keen on the GOP path.

April 17, 2025

And the race for Governor is sort of on.

Now in the GOP race are two declared candidates, one of whom has filed, Joseph Kibler.  Brent Bien has said he's running as well.

Both are in the far, far, right.  Kibler moved to Wyoming (his wife is from Wyoming) in 2020.  Bien is a Wyoming native, but completed a Marine Corps career and therefore fits into the crowed of Wyoming anti government candidates whose careers were in the government.

Related threads:

Want to Play a Game? Global Trade War Is the New Washington Pastime. Two dozen trade experts gathered recently to simulate how a global trade war would play out. The results were surprisingly optimistic.

Labels: Blog Mirror, Economics, Games, Hex and Counter War Games

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 70th Edition. Inside Wyoming Political Baseball

Labels: 1890s, 1990s, 2026 Election, Johnson County War, Lies, Politics, Public Land, Sagebrush Rebellion, Wyoming

A Primer, Part 2. How did we reach this lowly, and dangerous state. Soap Poisoning and Grape Nuts. (Written before the election).

We left off the last edition with this:

A warning

And here we get, in a way, to where we are now.

Conservatives in the modern West, and always in the English-speaking West, have democracy as a primary virtue, in spite of being aware that they're never in the majority, although the National Conservative movement, which is reactionary in the true sense of the word (it's reacting to something) is weakening that and looking to a pre Second World War model of European conservatism.

Liberals are always in favor of democracy.

Progressives and Populists really aren't quite often. Sometimes they are, but often they are not.

And Progressives and Populists only are in the forefront of politics in odd, and dangerous, times.

We are in odd and dangerous times.

To put it another way, like Ralphie's dad in A Christmas Story asks about Ralphie's imagined blindness, how did we reach such a lowly state?

Do we have soap poisoning?

Well, sort of.

A little history

We've gone into this before, so we won't belabor it too much, but in large part what we're seeing now is the combined effect of ignoring what was going on in the country on a political and social level.  

As we already noted, populism only rises in strength during times of severe stress. The mere fact that its strong now, and has taken over one of the two parties, means something extremely stressful is going on.  Progressivism is always there in some form, but it rarely takes over either.  The fact that it too is so strong right now indicates something has occured that is fueling it. 

The fact that the two of them are vying for the country right now, and this is going on in other country's as well, means that we are really at some massive tipping point for global politics.

What happened?

Well, we should know. We've been here before.  More than that, Europe has been here before, and gone further down the road than we have.

An American Tale

If we go back to 1900 or so we'll see that Progressives, Populists, Conservatives and Liberals were all significant forces in the US, and in Europe as well.

The 1890s had been extremely strained economically in the 1890s.  Added to that, the late stages of the industrial revolution were taking people off of fields everywhere and putting them in factories, under grim conditions.  Agriculture, which had been the economic backbone of the US, was under severe strain.  Conservatives chalked everything up to the business cycle, which they did not believe should be tinkered with.

This gave rise to the first real liberal movement in the US since the Civil War, although there had been liberals all along.  Calling themselves "Progressives", even though they were not that as we've defined the term, they sought government intervention in the economy to address these ills.  Theodore Roosevelt, in his campaign of 1912, proposed something like Social Security for the first time.  He also proposed treating large corporations as public utilities, a radical, but liberal, proposition.

Progressives of that era were really basically the Socialists. We have a pretty good idea of what they stood for, so we probably don't need to dwell on it. Of note, Progressives of the GOP and Progressive Party, which we've defined as being liberal, campaigned partially on the concept that if they didn't prevail, the Socialist ultimately would.

The Populists, whom as we have noted had their own party at the time, campaigned in 1892 on graduated income tax, a radical proposition in a country that didn't have an established one, direct election of Senators, a shorter workweek, restrictions on immigration to the United States, and public ownership of railroads and communication lines.  As the country fell into a depression, "free silver" became a bid deal with them.  Some of them fell into radical Anti Catholicism, and some became virulently Anti-Semitic. . . sound familiar?

In 1896 the Populist Party united with the Democratic Party, giving us an example of a movement co-opting an established party which had sympathies with it. The Democrats indeed had a strong populist base in the American South, which had seen populist sympathies from before the Civil War and which retains them to this day. Populist William Jennings Bryan ran as the candidate for both parties, and lost.  He did so again in 1900, although by that time the Populist Party as an independent party was declining both because it had captured the Democratic Party, as because the economic crisis seemed to be passing.

Both parties had learned their lesson from two election in a row. The GOP lurched to the left in 1904 and ran Theodore Roosevelt, a liberal.  Alton Parker's campaign went nowhere.  By 1912, however, the Democrats were running a liberal of their own, Woodrow Wilson.  Populism, except in the South, disappeared in the US as a political force, the stress gone.  Progressivism remained, but very much on the back burner.

Both would be back during the Great Depression.  Populists rose up with figures like Huey P. Long and Fr. Charles Coughlin, both of whom posed a serious threat to Franklin Roosevelt's administration.  Long was ultimately assassinated and Coughlin was silenced by the Catholic Church, but the fact is that populist radicalism was alive and well in the 1930s.

So was Progressivism.

Radical progressives found roles in Roosevelt's Administration, demonstrating one of the weaknesses of both parties in believing that fellow travelers are pretty much just like you.  Mainline Communists, Trotskyites and Socialist all found homes in the numerous agencies created in the 1930s.  Attempts to warn the administration fell on deaf ears until really very late, when at least worried Democrats were able to remove Henry Wallace from FDR's final Presidential ticket.  It wasn't really until the late 1940s when it became clear how deep this had gone, at which time the Democratic Party undertook a monumental effort to hide it, something that they were so successful at that it remains largely unappreciated to this day.

Coming out of World War Two the US had the only industrial economy that hadn't been bombed, and accordingly the country had an extremely good economy from the end of the war into really the very early 1970.  It's interesting that in this period the liberals and conservatives moved very much towards a consensus on things, giving us pretty much what might be regarded as a second Era of Good Feelings.  It would be difficult, really, to hold that Eisenhower's administration was much at odds with Truman's, or Kennedy's.  There were difference, but in that era, which was one of low economic stress, the differences weren't large enough to cause severe distractions, in spite of the dangers of the Cold War.  Populism remained in the American South, but without much influence.  Progressives existed, but not until 1968 did they really start to emerge back to the forefront.

And then things fell apart.

It really started with the Courts, although it was not obvious at first.

American society, and politics, following 1945 moved towards the center, but it was a center left where it moved to.  The two Republican Presidents fo the era, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, would be regarded as being quite liberal today.  Interventions in the economy were accepted.  And brining civil rights to the South, and elsewhere, became a dominant feature of both parties.  Populists, mostly located in the South, were squashed.  Progressives were largely satisfied with the direction of things.   But it all took a lot of court intervention to get things done.

Conservatives and Liberals were fine with this throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and for good reason.  Progress on long dormant things they both agreed upon, such as Civil Rights, was really being made.  But the Courts were, without it really being noticed, drifting increasingly to the left.  At the same time the number of lawyers in the country exploded as the revolution in education following World War Two vastly increased the number of people with university degrees.  Courts, without people really noticing it, began to become effectively a second legislative and second executive branch, without being elected.

Thing began to really fly apart in 1968, as a result of the Vietnam War.  But they came off the rails in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade decision.  Conservatives suddenly realized that they couldn't be heard on social issues that really mattered anymore.  Liberals went asleep to a large degree because now the Courts were achieving for them tasks that they wanted to, without having to do any work for them.  The political consensus that had dominated the 1945 to 1973 era collapsed.  By 1976 Conservatives were moving steadily to the right, and railing against the courts.

At the same time, Southern Populists were a force in the South, but an ineffective one, throughout the 50s and 60s.  Southern Populism being part of the Democratic Party had initially made sense in the 19th Century, and even as late as Woodrow Wilson's Presidency, but it stopped being natural during the Liberal administration of Theodore Roosevelt.  It was kept together as a marriage of convenience as the Republican Party remained associated with the Southern defeat in the Civil War and the GOP, for its part, remained the party of civil rights into the 50s and 60s.  By 1968 Southern Populists were seething over desegregation and busing.

Rust Belt populism was just beginning to rise.  Solidly Democratic in the 40s, 50s and early 60s, as the economy became more strained in the late 60s and the Democrats moved increasingly to the left, they began to rebel against their party.  It'd grow much worse in the 1970s as the Great Recession started to change American heavy industry forever.

The now more conservative Republican Party was well aware that conservatism in and of itself, while increasingly popular to sections of the electorate, remained in the background enough not to be able to come into power on its own.  People were unhappy with the economy and the distress brought about by inflation, the loss of the Vietnam War and social changes brought about by court action, but they weren't so unhappy that they were willing to take a radically new direction, or they didn't' think they were.  The election of Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford was as much about competence, which Carter proved not to have, as anything else.  Conservative Ronald Reagan, however, saw an opportunity to recruit Rust Belt and Southern Populists into the Republican Party, and did so for his 1980 campaign.

Reagan had the first conservative US administration since Herbert Hoover, but it was never purely so.  Reagan was an actor and a compromiser, who brought in elements that he didn't really believe in so that htey could be used.  Hoover had never done anything like that.  The conservative Republicans thought they could control the imported populsits, and at first they proved correcdt.  Indeed, following Reagan the next two Republicans were more Nixon like than Reagan like.  But the populists having come over, did not leave.

Nor did their concerns get addressed.  By the 1980s the economy was fundamentally changing in the wake of the 70s.  Heavy industry was not returning, "good" blue collar jobs were evaporating.  Ethnic enclaves in urban areas were smashed.  The progressivism of the late 60s and 70s felt free to attack long standing social matters. The liberals in the Democratic Party went to sleep and Democratic politicians appealed increasing to Progressives the way that conservatives had to Populists.

The breaking point proved to be a court decision again, that being the Obergefell decision.  I warned it would have that impact at that time, but it was such a shock to core beliefs of conservatives and populist that a reaction by both was inevitable.  The populists reaction carried along with it rage over a host of issues they'd been ignored on, many of them essentially economic, but some of them social.  Because the social issues were there, conservatives did what they'd been doing since 1980, figure they could simply carry the populist along.  

The 2016 election proved that to be completely incorrect.  Two populists emerged, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.  Election controls built into the Democratic Party's' process kept Sanders from being the Democratic nominee.  No such controls existed in the GOP, and Trump ended up winning the election against Hillary Clinton, and incredibly poor choice for the Democrats, but only through the electoral college. Clinton carried the popular vote.

It was populists, particularly Rust Belt populist, who carried the day for Trump.

Enough of the conservatives remained in the party, and Trump was incompentent enough as a President, that conservatives kept the Trump Presidency from goign full bore populists.  He knows that and his supporters do as well.   A second Trump Presidency will not repeat that.

A European Tale

Giving the European story is more difficult than the American one, as Europe is of course a collection of countries, not one, and each country has its own story.  So we'll do broad generalizations.

Europe, going into the 20th Century, remained more traditional, and hence more conservative, than the United States.  Almost every European country, save for France, had some kind of monarch who at least represented tradition, but who had very limited, if any, powers, save for Austro Hungaria, Germany, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire, whose monarchs held real power.  The Russian Czar actually held absolute power.  Many countries, however, such as Sweden, had monarchs who had a least some veto type power over their  parliaments.

In this system extremism was bound to rise, but underground.  The more substantial a European monarchy was, the more likely it was to have really radical underground movements which, in the way we are analyzing this, would be termed Progressive.  Imperial Russia had a host of far left Socialist parties.  Germany had a strong radically left Socialist Party.

Other more democratic countries had radical movements as well, but they tended to never get as strong, or they would see their radicalism dissipate if they received voter support.  So, for example, French socialist were elected to power, but they never behaved like a Communist Party once in power.

World War One smashed the old order in Europe.  Democratic countries became more democratic.  Countries with parliamentary democracies began to make their monarchs symbolic or eliminate them altogether.  Monarchs in Austro Hungary, Germany, Russia, Finland (which had just become independent) and Turkey were tossed out, with the Russian one and his family losing tehir lives.  

The 1920s accordingly saw struggles between liberalism and conservatism all over Europe, and in the most stressed countries, a type of populism and progressivism enter the mix as well, sometimes as arm contestants for the future of the country.  The Russian Revolution can be seen as a contest between liberals and conservatives as allies, against progressives as enemies, with the radical left winning.  The Russian Civil War can be seen as a contest between Progressives and Populists as allies, against Conservatives.  Weimar Germany saw endless contests between Liberals and Conservatives, with Populists being the allies of extremists on the right and the left, giving their support to the KDP and the NASDP.

All of that, of course, gave rise to Communism, Nazism, and FAscism, which in turn gave rise to the Second World War.  

World War Two, like World War One, smashed the existing order and saw the triumph of Liberalism in the West.  Communism, won in the East, of course, but not in the same fashion.  Like in the US, the post war free European states were very much consensus oriented and remained so even after the stress of 1968.  AFter the Cold WAr, however, all European states began to see some of the same economic issues, and cultural issues, that had arisen in the United STates rise in Europe.  Some of the state accordingly began to fall into extremism.  Russia retreated into a weird sort of conservative imperialism that recalled its pre World War One status, but without a Romanov.  Putin became the new imperial head.  Hungary outwardly abandoned liberal democracy in favor of illiberal democracy.  Poland teetered on the edge of liberal and illiberal democracy.  Ukraine went for the long pass of liberal democracy.

And now we have a war in the former Russian Empire over the question.

Grape Nuts.

And in the US, we're about to have an election over it.  

Unfortunately, that election will feature only two parties, and in one of them the ancient candidate feels he must take input from progressives in his party. The other party's candidate is an ancient narcissistic oddball who tells populists what they want to hear, and who feeds from them in an application of the Führerprinzip.  

This is not good, to say the least.

The Democrats, of course, retain liberals in their party still.  The progressives are few, but influential.  The Republicans retain conservatives, but hey'v ebeen largely silenced and castrated.  The GOP is the populist party.

Part of the reason we're where we are is due to a poverty of parties, and language.  Populists have never been conservatives, and they aren't now.  But they think they are.  Progressives aren't liberals, but liberals don't really understand the extent to which that's not true.

Grape Nuts aren't made of grapes. . . but there's probably a lot of people who think they are.

Last prior edition:

A Primer, Part I. Populists ain't Conservatives, and LIberals ain't Progressives. How inaccurate terminology is warping our political perceptions.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. 74th Edition. Surgery by butchers, MAGA Concubines, the Gualieter of Ohio, Portents, and the blind and deaf.

It's been a weird and horrific week for the Republic.

Surgery with a cleaver.

"DOGE" persists in making cuts that are inefficient based on Elon Musk's management style.  One of the things they did this past week was to axe a buch of employees who provide nuclear security.  They, and the Dear Leader, didn't know what they did. They had to scramble to hire them back.

They should have unionized in the meantime and asked for employment contracts, with one being that if they were terminated without cause for the next four years Elon Musk has to surrender his cash, along with Trump, assuming Trump has much.

Trump supporters, I'd note, are cheering on his actions, or rather Elon's, while the disaster looms.  The Forest Service, which only had about 34,000 employees to start with, is losing 10% of them. That's going to hit Wyoming like a ton of bricks as campgrounds close and the like this summer, and the State has to learn to fight fires with its own money and resources, none of which we're doing the slightest thing about.

That ain't conservative

Regarding Musk, Ashley St. Clair, whom I was previously unaware of, announced herself as another one of Musk's concubines who has produced a child.

St. Clair is supposedly a "conservative influencer", but whelping children out of wedlock isn't conservative.  This lays bear the whole hypocrisy of contemporary American conservatism. . . there isn't any in the US.  Spreading your legs for Elon doesn't boost your street cred with real conservatism and it certainly doesn't make you Eva Vlaardingerbroek.  It just makes you gross.

It does interestingly cast back to an earlier era, however, when men of royalty engaged in concubinage, because they could.  Both Trump and Must exhibit that trait.  They're not moral men at all, and yet somehow the peasantry attributes nobility to them.

It's interesting that the super genius Musk doesn't chose plain jane girls for his concubines.  They're all not bad looking.  Courtesans were often chosen for their looks and wits.  Maybe these were too.

Of course, this assumes that St. Clair is telling the truth.  She might not be.

It also show the weird Calvinism that prevails in the American Civil Religion, as well as, interestingly, the Boers.  Musk is from a Canadian family that moved to South Africa.  Calvinist, in their pure form, believe that God foreordained who goes to Heaven or Hell and there's nothing you can do about it.  They were heavily represented in the Roundheads who fought the crown in the English Civil War.  Anyhow, I recall reading a letter from one imprisoned Roundhead figure who asked if the Crown could send his mistress to him.  His mistress, not his wife.

Calvinism, we might note, is also responsible for the warped "Protestant Work Ethic", but more on that in some other post.

Anyhow, it's funny how the Evangelical Protestants who find Trump "Godly" don't mind his sexual behavior, or that of Elon Musk's, neither of whom behave particularly Christian.  Indeed, Musk has claimed in the past to be an atheist.

I'd like Evangelicals to explain this.

Vance lecturing the lumpenproletariat

J. D. Vance lectured Europeans, Germans in particular, on how neo Nazis really ain't that bad.

Telling.

Pete Hegseth tried to lecture people on something, but it was so spastic its hard to know what he was saying, if he knows.  That he's a small man in a big job is pretty evident.  He's not going to last in this position.

The Pentagon is bracing for defense cuts, fwiw.  They ought to be bracing for women to be removed from combat MOS's, which is one of the few things this interregnum could do at this point which I'd support.  What I don't support, however, is the elimination of education on sexual assault in the military, which the Navy and Marine Corps have done, following what they believe to be orders from up the hill.  The Service has a huge problem with sexual assault, and it'll get worse.  

In some ways, I wonder if the current leadership doesn't care about that.  It'd drive women from the service, which they may be wishing for.

Portents

It's easy to see signs that aren't there, but since Trump came into office there have been a pile of local and national oddities.

One thing has been the number of airplane crashes.  There's been a lot.  A small private plane went down in Sweetwater County a couple of weeks ago, and one went down on the highway near Rawlins last week.

Yesterday there was a massive accident in one of the Interstate Highway tunnels near Green River that killed at least two.

Wyoming can't afford its highways, fwiw, which is one of the things that it is seemingly unaware of.  Starting this year, probably, we're going to have to figure out how to.  My guess is that we just will let them decay.  There's remnants all over the state of old state highways before there was Federal money, and they're, well, bad roads and were pretty much from day one.

There's been a lot of shootings in Wyoming over the past year, not all of which hit the news.  This past week two did, one in which a mother killed three of her four children and herself.  Another occurred when a teenager playing with a handgun killed another teenager.  I"m pretty convinced, as I'll post in another thread, that gun control is coming, and Trump will be the one who brings it in.

The Gulf of Mexico and the Press

Trump has excluded the AP from press briefs as they continue to call the Gulf of Mexico the the Gulf of Mexico.

Everyone on earth except for the Trump besotted calls the Gulf of Mexico by that name, and the second Trump leaves office by any means, it's going back to that name and he'll be derided for thinking he could change it.

Time, I might note, is apparently not afraid of Trump. Their current cover:

Good for them.

You can't save everyone

I had a friend I went to grade school with who was in real personal trouble by the time we were high school.  It got worse afterword.  He died in his 30s down in Louisiana at work, of a massive heart attack, but in actually from a lifetime of booze and alcohol.

There was no saving him.

I note that as it was obvious where his life was headed, just as its obvious where the country is headed. We're headed for a real disaster, but you can't tell the MAGA people that.  They're incapable of believing it.

Last edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. 73d Edition. Long outages and Donny wasting the taxpayers money.

Sunday Morning Scene, part Pars Duo: Please, stop.

Next year with be a Jubilee Year in the Catholic Church. For some reason, the Church felt it needed a mascot for this.

This is what it came up with:

How does a 2,000 year old institution in possession of much of the Western World's great art, come up with something so juvenile, and indeed something that looks like its out of Pokemon?

In announcing this, Archbishop Rino Fisichella stated that the cartoon imagine, titled "Luce" (light in Italian) was inspired by the Church's "to live even within the pop culture so beloved by our youth."  This presents the classic problem of the elderly, now the Baby Boomers, recalling the desires of "youth" in terms of when they were fairly youthful themselves.  Indeed, in my mind it brings to mind attending the "Teen Life Mass", or whatever it was called, that used to be held on Sunday evenings.  I generally tried to avoid it, but when I did, you'd find a guitar band with bongos for the music, lead by a Boomer, and a bunch of aged Boomers who would sway and whatnot to the music.  

In contrast, if you hit some Masses with a lot of young people, you'd find young women, some down in their teens, wearing mantillas.

I'm pretty convinced that in 2024, with ready access to the Internet, and all the news that's on it, combined with all the sewage that's washed up with it, such as horrific political arguments, the revival of racism, far right and far left extremist, Hamas murder and rape of young people in Israel, an aged geezer in the Kremlin trying to revive the Soviet Union, and young women prostituting themselves on TikTok, a childish cartoon from the 1980s isn't really going to win hearts and minds.  Indeed, its even worse than the Comic Sans Serif font and 1970s vintage art that was officially used for the Synod on Synodality.  And it gives emotional support to the Orthodox who are looking for reasons not to come back into the Church, even if superficially. This sure doesn't look like something Saints Cyril and Methodius would have passed out.

I've long held, and have stated it here, that Western culture had experienced Post World War Two materialism and found it lacking, and that the generations that have come up in the wake of the Baby Boomers are struggling to through the cultural innovations of the 1960s and 1970s off.  We don't believe that "Greed is good" or that the Sexual Revolution was freeing. The problem is that so much was destroyed that recovering is hard, particularly when the aged hand remains on the tiller.  Often that aged hand reaches out with what it thinks the young want, not grasping what that is, and actually making things worse.

This cartoon is really bad.  Somebody should look around the Vatican and see if something serious might be available.  The young Catholics in blue jeans, the mantilla girls, and myself, will all be thankful.

Postscript

I'm hating this image slightly less after some Twitter person made some interesting riffs off of it, but I still don't like it.

The Four Things.

Because I've referenced it more than one time, but apparently never posted it (cowardice at work) I'm going to post here the topic of "the four sins God hates".  I'm also doing this as I'm getting to a political thread about this years elections and the candidates, in the context of the argument of "Christians must. . . " or "Christians can. . . "

First I'll note using the word "hate", in the context  of the Divine, is a truncation for a much larger concept.  "Condemns" might have been a better choice of words, but then making an effective delivery in about ten minutes or less is tough, and truncations probably hit home more than other things.

Additionally, and very importantly, sins and sinners are different.  In Christian theology, and certainly in Catholic theology, God loves everyone, including those who have committed any one of these sins, or all of them.

This topic references a remarkably short and effective sermon I heard some time ago. The way my 61 year old brain now works, that probably means it was a few years ago.  At any rate, it was a homily based on all three of the day's readings, which is remarkable in and of itself, and probably left every member of the parish squirming a bit.  It should have, as people entrenched in their views politically and/or economically would have had to found something to disagree with, or rather be hit by.

The first sin was an easy one that seemingly everyone agrees is horrific, but which in fact people excuse continually, murder.

Murder is of course the unjust taking of a life, and seemingly nobody could disagree with that being a horrific sin. But in fact, we hear people excuse the taking of innocent life all the time.  Abortion is the taking of an innocent life.  Even "conservatives", however, and liberals as a false flag, will being up "except in the case of rape and incest".

Rape and incest are horrific sins in and of itself, but compounding it with murder doesn't really make things go away, but rather makes one horror into two.  Yes, bearing a child in these circumstances would be a horrific burden.  Killing the child would be too.

The second sin the Priest noted was sodomy.  He noted it in the readings and in spite of what people might like to say, neither the Old or New Testaments excuse unnatural sex. They just don't.  St. Paul is particularly open about this, so much so that a local female lesbian minister stated that this was just "St. Paul's opinion", which pretty much undercuts the entire Canon of Scripture.  

A person can get into Natural Law from here, which used to be widely accepted, and which has been cited by a United States Supreme Court justice as recently as fifty or so years ago, and the Wyoming Supreme Court more recently than that, and both in this context, but we'll forgo that in depth here. Suffice it to say that people burdened with such desires carry a heavy burden to say the least, but that doesn't make it a natural inclination.  In the modern Western World we've come to excuse most such burdens, however, so that where we now draw lines is pretty arbitrary. 

Okay, those are two "conservative" items.

The next wasn't.

That was mistreating immigrants.  

This sort of speaks for itself, but there it is. Scripture condemns mistreating immigrants.  You can't go around, as a Christian, hating immigrants or abusing them because of their plight.  

Abusing immigrants, right now, seems to be part of the Conservative "must do" list.

And the final one was failing to pay workmen a just wage.  Not exactly taking the natural economy/free market approach in the homily.

Two conservatives, and two liberal.

That's because Christianity is neither liberal or conservative, but Christianity.  People claiming it for teir political battles this year might well think out their overall positions.

What on Earth does the Republican Party stand for?

Ronald Reagan was the first President that I was able to vote for, or against (I voted for) in my lifetime.

The GOP of that era was far from perfect, but I knew what it stood for.  

It was pro life, pro defense, tough on crime, pro fiscal responsibility, and overall conservative.

People have claimed that for the Trumpist GOP, but what of it?

1.  Pro life?

The GOP went into this election cycle claiming responsibility, which it had every right to do, for the repeal of Roe v. Wade, which returned the abortion issue to the states.  Not surprisingly, however, a controversial issue remains controversial.  Now the GOP is running from the issue as quickly as it can.  It took its pro life plank out of its platform, where it's been for decades.  And now we have Trump, who has flip flopped on the issue for decades, stating this, in regard to a proposed six week provision in Florida:

I think the six week is too short, there has to be more time

This is really a simple issue.  Either you believe that life starts at conception, or aren't sure when a human is a human and therefore you err on the side of life, or you think killing only matters at some arbitrary point in time in which you can't stomach it.

At best, the Republicans here can claim to support State's Rights, but pro life?  Donald isn't.

Added to that is this, which gets also into the next topic.

I am announcing today that under the Trump administration, your government will pay for or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for all costs associated with IVF treatment.

We want more babies!

IVF means the creation of large numbers of embryos that are later killed, and in Catholic theology, IVF  is regarded as a moral evil.  

It's notable that Vance, who is a Catholic convert, has made some statements now generally supporting IVF as he runs towards Trump and away from his Faith.

2.  Fiscal Responsibility?

Trump added 8T to the federal debt in his term in office.

And he proposed, prior to Harris, cutting income taxes on tips, which has no logical defense.  Income is income.

Trump has stood for tax cuts, which have amounted to tax cuts for the wealthy.  People, including the wealthy like Elon Musk, have noted the country is going bankrupt.  Well, this is a big part of the reason why.

Back to the above, the GOP whined endlessly about Obamacare, and now proposes to expand government support for an insurance payment. What the crud?

3. Pro defense?

The Republican willingness in many quarters to abandon Ukraine says all you need to know about this. Added to it, Trump has a weird relationship with Russia that has never been explained.

Much of the current GOP wants to return to isolationism, which worked oh so well during the 1930s.

4.  Tough on crime?

Running Trump says all you really need to know on that.

This party, in spite of what its supporters believe, stands only for reelecting Donald Trump, and nothing else.

Mind you, there were signs of this happening for some time.  The entire spectacle of Evangelical Christians lashing themselves to the decks of the Trump serial polygamy ship was never easy to fathom.  National Conservatives came on board in a calculated fashion, thinking that when Trump shuffled off his mortal coil they'd be in charge, only to see the less popular portions of their beliefs mocked and categorized as "weird".  The Hawk Tuah girl was embraced by the Lynyrd Skynyrd branch of the populist whose Christianity is rather thin and not hardly of the Mike Johnson New Apostolic Reformation variety.

So what does that do to the populist movement in the GOP and the GOP in general?  Well, quite a few real Republicans are abandoning ship, particularly those cultural conservatives who were never really Trumpites, but believed there was a moral obligation to support the GOP due to its cultural conservative positions.  The American Solidarity Party is suddenly getting a lot of attention because its actually prolife.  But a lot of the Trumpites now stand for nothing but Trump and will go down with him like stormtroopers in Berlin on May 2, 1945.  Locally those politicians who have arisen in the Populist Freedom Caucus will keep on saying the same things they've been saying, even as their leader is saying the opposite.

Populism always gets co-opted in the end.  Here, it already has been.  Conservatism, for its part, was simply killed in the party.

Second and Third mortgages.

It’s one thing to sell your soul cheaply. It’s another to keep taking out second and third mortgages on it until all that’s left is debt and shame.

The Atlantic on conservatives supporting Trump. 

Blog Mirror: The Issue of Christless Conservatism and Traditionalists.

The Issue of Christless Conservatism and Traditionalists.

Bookends

I probably should have guessed, but I didn't.

I'd never met him before, and couldn't even place him in the set of people related to people I knew.  He was, or is rather, the grandson of a rancher I've known for eons, but I'd never seen him at a rural gathering.  He was dressed in a rural fashion, with the clothes natural to him, but wearing a ball cap rather than a cowboy hat.  I probably was too.  It was unseasonably cold, I remember that.

He was holding forth boldly on what was wrong on higher education.  All the professors were radical leftist.  

I figured he was probably right out of high school, in part no doubt as I'm a very poor judge of younger ages.  It was silly, so I just ignored him, although I found his speech arrogant.  The sort of speech you hear from somebody who presumes that nobody else has experienced what you have. ¹  I.e., we were a bunch of rural rubes not familiar with the dangerous liberals in higher education.

I figured he'd probably get over it as he moved through education.  

Yes, there are liberals in higher education. Frankly, the more educated a class is, the more likely that it is at least somewhat liberal.  That reflects itself in our current political demographic.  The more higher education a person has, the more likely they are to vote for the Democrats.  It's not universally true, but it's fairly true. And the Republicans, having gone populist, which is by definition a political stream that simply flows the "wisdom of the people", is a pretty shallow stream.  Conservatism isn't, but it's really hard to find right now.

I heard earlier this year that he'd obtained a summer position in D.C. with one of our current public servants there, and thought that figured, given the climate of the times.  Recently, his grandfather told me he'd just taken the LSAT.  

I didn't quite know what to say.  

I didn't have any idea he was that old.  And I didn't realize that was his aspiration.  I asked his progenitor if being a lawyer was his goal, and was informed that it was.  I did stumble around to asking what his undergraduate major was, thinking that some have multiple doors to the future, and some do not.

"Political science".

"Well, he doesn't have any place else to go then".²

Not the most encouraging response, I'm sure.

I've known a few lawyers that were of the populist political thought variety, but very, very few.  Of the few, one is in office right now, but I didn't know that person had that view until that person ran.  One is a nice plaintiff's lawyer who holds those views, but it's not his defining characteristic, like it tends to be with some people, and he's friends with those who don't.  One briefly was in the public eye and has disappeared.

He's going to find that most law professors, if you know their views at all, and most you won't, aren't populists.  Some are probably conservatives, and most are liberals.  A defining characteristic of the Post GI Bill field of law is that it's institutionally left wing.  As I've often noted before, there are in fact liberal jurists, but there really aren't "conservative" jurists in the true sense, in spite of what people like Robert Reich might think.

I suspect politics is the ultimate goal. By the time he's through with law school, and has some practice under his belt, the populist wave will have broken, a conservative politics will have reemerged and liberals will be back in power.³

So I hope that he likes the practice of law, as that's what law school trains you to do.  Not to save the world.  Not to "help people".  Not to provide opportunities for people who "like to argue".⁴ 

I'm not holding out a lot of hope.

Recently, I ran this:

June 25, 2024

An article on Hageman's primary challenger in the GOP:

Democrat-turned-Republican challenges Wyoming’s Harriet Hageman for U.S. House seat

Helling has a less than zero chance of unseating Hageman.  What this item really reminded me of, however, is just how old these candidates are.  Helling is an old lawyer.  His bar admission date is 1981, which would make him about 70.  Hageman's is 1989, which I knew which would make her about 61, old by historical standards although apparently arguably middle-aged now.

Barrasso is 71.  Lummis is 69. John Hotz, who is running against Barrasso, has a bar admission date of 1978 which would make him about three years older than Helling.  Seemingly the only younger candidate in the GOP race this primary is Rasner.

This isn't a comment on any of their politics, but rather their age.  Helling is opposed to nuclear power, a very 1970ish view.  With old people, come old views, quite often, even if they're repackaged as new ones.

Right after I ran it, I went to a hearing where one of the opposing lawyers is approaching 70 and supposedly is getting ready to retire, but doesn't seem to be.  Right after that, I was in a court hearing in which there were two younger lawyers, but a host of ones in their late 60s or well into their 70s.  One of the late 60s ones appeared to be stunned and noted that there was at least 200 years of legal experience in the room.

I was noticing the same thing.

Lawyers have a problem and that's beginning to scare me, not quite yet being of retirement age.  I'm not sure if they don't retire, can't retire, don't think they can retire, or something else.

It's not really good for the profession, I'm sure of that.  While it's a really Un-American thing to say, a field being dominated in some ways by the elderly pushes out the young.  And it's also sad.

It's sad as it's usually the case that younger people have wide, genuine, interests.  Lawyers often, although not always, give a lot of those up early on to build their careers. Then they don't go back to them due to those careers.  By the time they're in their late 50s, some are burnt out husks that have nothing but the law, and others are just, I think, afraid to leave it.

I think that's, in part, why you see lawyers run for office.  Maybe some are like our young firebrand first mentioned in this tread.  But others are finding a refuge from a cul-de-sac.  A lawyer who is nearly 70 should not become a first time office holder, and shouldn't even delude themselves into thinking that's a good idea (or that it's feasible).  They should remind themselves of what interested them when they were in their 20s.  The same is true of office holders in general who are in their 70s, or older.  

Footnotes:

1.  I've often seen this with young veterans and old ones.  Some young veteran will be holding forth, not realizing that the guy listening to him fought at Khe Sanh or the likes.

2.  That wasn't the most politic thing to say, but I was sort of hoping that the answer was "agriculture" or something, that had some more doors out.  

Political science really doesn't.  Maybe teaching.  But if our young protagonist graduates with a law degree and finds himself not in the world of political intrigue making sure that the American version of Viktor Orbán rises to the top, but rather whether his client, the mother of five children by seven men gets one of them to pay child support, which is highly likely, he's going to have no place to go.

3.  Bold prediction, I know, but probably correct.

Right now, I suspect that Donald Trump will in fact win the Presidential election, and the country will be in for a massive period of turmoil.  By midterm, people who supported Trump will be howling with rage about the impact of tariffs and the like and demanding that something be done.  The correction will come in 2028, but by that time much of the damage, or resetting or whatever, will have been done.  The incoming 2028 Democratic regime will set the needle more back to the center.

4.  Being good at arguing, in a Socratic sense, makes you a good debator or speaker.  Liking to argue, however, just makes you an asshole.