It further finds that Trump is rocketing the United States into the status of a failed democracy.
Showing posts with label Liberal Democracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liberal Democracy. Show all posts
Monday, July 20, 2026
Sunday, July 19, 2026
Trump's simply a very bad person, declining into senility. Who is backing him?
And by backing him, let's leave MAGA to the end of the discussion, although we'll address it.
Last week we saw Donald Trump at his outright worse. He delivered a speech in what would normally be prime time, although it wasn't covered on two of the major networks in what seems to have been an extraordinarily late acknowledgement that he's a lying liar who lies and a danger to humanity. He's been trying to subvert democracy for years. The speech this past week was an open declaration of war against the franchise.
This has been oblivious to the point of absurdity now for months and to anyone who cared to pay attention for years. We've discussed this several times over the past couple of years. For those of certain age, the rise of Trump has been an almost indecipherable phenomenon, although we've discussed and tried to decipher it quite a few times (and frankly, we've been largely correct).
Where we were wrong, however, is in predicting that the 25th Amendment would be applied to him. . . by now. We still feel there's a good chance, but its fundamentally different than it was previously. At this point the non fanatic elements around him, such as they are, must be talking. It could take any number of roads, from a Curragh Mutiny to a type of the Blue Flu. We'll see.
What's very clear, is that the non MAGA forces, mostly in the Democratic Party, but elsewhere, must, and will, start mobilizing. Trump's a menace to humanity. And to add to that, the speech fell flat and even m many Republicans have openly admitted that it not only failed to miss the target, the gun was never loaded. It came across as the pathetic ramblings of a demented old man.
What's crystal clear at this point is that Donald Trump is working right now on stealing the 2026 elections. He's doing everything he can, with a major effort being the SAVE act which would have the immediate effect of wiping out the ability of huge numbers of Americans to vote. So far it appears unlikely to pass, although that cannot be assured. The next step is going to be a direct attack on the polls themselves. Trump will station his SA and perhaps even the military at polling locations he wishes to disrupt and following the election he's going to proclaim the results invalid.
That's not a maybe. This will occur.
Trump's goals are personal. He's mentally ill and he's never been mentally right. He was a bully as a child which caused his parents to send him to military school. He helped his father deride his troubled brother. His life has been based on greed, greed for money and greed for a certain profile of women. He's been a frequent failure at business and frankly he's not that smart. He is a good salesmen, however, and he sold his image and reputation multiple times over the years, finally selling it to viewers of American television stupidly, a sales job that got him into office. He lost the 2020 election and cannot personally stand to be thought of as a loser.
Stealing the election for him is personal, not political.
So, with that being the case, why would any sane person support him, and who are they?
The Useful Idiot
Let's start with what's really the case with Trump. Why are people surrounding him willing to put up with him? Why are they willing to soil themselves with lavish heaps of praise on the man? Do they really adore and admire him the way they say they do?
Not likely, save for a very limited few.
No, he's a useful idiot. And he's a useful idiot for two of the camps in his circle. They are, however, two camps. And their goals are not the same.
The Francoist
The coat of arms of the Spanish Francoist state. The motto is "Una Gran de Libre", a Latinized version of the motto in Spanish which was "Una Grande y Libre"; "one, great, and free".
Back in 2024, not long ago, an intern to Harriet Hageman, Gabe Saint, lost his position when his social media contest was discovered. It included links to Francoist, as well as to Groypers, like Nick Fuentes.
What's this have to do with Trump?
Quite a lot.
Now, Trump wouldn't know Saint from Adam, but the fact of the matter is that a far right Wyoming politicians had somebody on her staff who was effectively a Francoist Groyper, and only the seeming embarrassment of that, at the time, cause Saint to drop off her staff. Saint, however, didn't disappear. He remained in the background, associated with Charlie Kirk's organization, and popping up every now and then in the far right Wyoming Freedom Caucus camp.
Now, I bet it'd make hardly any difference at all.
Una Gran de Libre.
Groypers are, to a certain extent, the SA or the Roter Frontkämpferbund. Some have a grasp of what they're fighting for, but that grasp is on a big scale from fully committed Ernst Röhm's who very much do, to single basement dwelling 20 something men who are mad at the world because they can't get a date. There's every scale in between. But the Francoist element has tapped into a real movement, and that movement, small though it is, is National Conservatism.
National Conservatism is very closely aligned, in some quarters, with Christian Nationalism. It has a real thesis, and it has a real set of intellectuals behind it. Those intellectuals are Rod Dreher (who now seems to be questioning it), Patrick Dineen, and Kevin Roberts, amongst others.
J.D. Vance is a close associate of Roberts. Vance is in this camp.
The thesis is this.
The United States is a Western Nation. All Western Nations are defined by the Edict of Thessalonica (380 A.D.) accepting Christianity in the Roman Empire. That makes Western Europeans a Christian culture. Similarly, the Christianization of Russia in 988 makes that region a Christian culture as well.
So far so good .That is essentially correct. The United States is undoubtedly a Western Nation and in fact Western European culture is undoubtedly defined to an enormous degree by the Roman Empire accepting Christianity (and it is additionally enormously defined by having been in or under the influence of the Roman Empire).
Beyond that, however, National Conservatives (and Christian Nationalist) do not believe in democracy at all. The reason varies, with some willing to ground it historically in the French Revolution and its aftermath which is much less connected with religion of any kind than they think. The French Revolution was, in the cities, definitely opposed to religion, but it was effectively, at its start, mob rule until Napoleon turned cannons on the mob. The French revolutionaries were operating effectively on the same ethos as Jim Stark in Rebel Without A Cause.
Not all of the French populace as like that at all. And what was occuring in France had been effectively predicted by the writings of the Agrarian Jefferson about large urban populations.
Anyhow, that experience left some in this camp distrustful of democracy to this day. In their view, democratic states always turn to mob rule, and they always feature declining morality. And there is evidence they can site to, starting effectively with the Supreme Court's 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade and carrying it through to 2015's Obergefell v. Hodges. They feel that "liberalism", meant in the classic sense, and liberal democracy, have failed.
The solution, in their mind, is illiberal democracy. That was the political thesis that Viktor Orban operated on, which explains why Rod Dreher had decamped to Hungary (he's unfortunately returned. Democracy of this type would sort of exist, but in the same fashion that it did, sort of, in Imperial Germany. There would be elections, but what you could really vote on would be predefined in a way. Serious cultural issues would never be on the ballot. Those would have been dictated. So you could only decide matters in a sort of narrow, non cultural, sense.
You can see a lot of that in the warp and woof of the Trump Administration where these figures have had serious influence. It explains not on the opposition to the fraud of transgenderism, but also the periodic insistence that everyone have more children, by which is meant those of very direct Western European ancestry have more children. If you look carefully in the background you'll fine that not only are they opposed to abortion, but also to pharmaceutical birth control (and maybe to birth control of any kind).
Now, some conservatives hold these views as well. I'm not far from some of them, or I outright agree with some of them. But the real difference here is that as National Conservatives do not trust or believe in democracy, these things would be dictated.
Effectively they are for a Francoist state.
Trump isn't their Franco.
J. D. Vance is. But they can't get to Vance, or complete their project of illiberal democracy, directly It has to be camouflaged. And Donald Trump is a giant orange clown who serves that purpose.
The Roundheads
The second group surrounding Trump are members of an Evangelical Right movement, the New Apostolic Reformation. Not all precisely aligned, the generally see the United States as a Protestant nation that has gone badly astray and in need of being taken back over so that Puritanism can be restored. Many hold to Seven Mountains Dominionism holding that there are seven aspects of society that believers seek to and must dominate, those being: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government. If they succeed, and many believe that they will as God has ordained it, the United States will become, effectively, a Calvinist theocratic state. In that state, only those who closely adhere to a Calvinist world view will really have right, and everything will center around that.
It's important to note that those holding this view are constantly improperly described as "Christians" or "Christo Fascist". Most Christians in the United States and the vastly overwhelming number elsewhere do not hold the political or theocratic views that the NAR does by any means. Indeed, most Christians on earth are Catholics, and the second largest group are Orthodox, with both groups being Apostolic Christians. Apostolic Christians do not see any country on Earth as ordained with a Christian mission and never have. NAR adherents are not, we might observe, reading City of God.
They don't, in many instances, even regard Apostolic Christians, who are the original Christians, as Christian. In this sense they are not only radical, but ignorant. But as a small radical group, they're reinforced in their ignorance, only tending to lose it when they start to widely associate with other Christians.
What exactly the NAR would seek is not completely clear as there's enough diversity amongst the Evangelical right to force it to be unclear. They don't all see things the same way. But we have major glimpses of it from some of their major figures. If they had their way, they'd be like the Puritans were in New England, forcing the state to adhere to their religious views. A lot of what they seek, or rather oppose, is pretty clear, but only where it overlaps with other conservatives. They're opposed to abortion, transgenderism, and the like. But there's a lot beyond that. They generally oppose women being involved in politics and some would remove the right to vote from them. They don't approve as minorities as not only is this nation to be a Calvinist one, it's to be strictly white one, what it should have been, in their view, had the original 1620 landing formed the complete demographic future of the country.
When a person realizes what they want, Mike Johnsen's view that he was to be a new Moses makes sense. He meant it.
This group does not see Trump as a figure adhering to their movement, but many do see him as divinely ordained. They believe he's a latter day Cyrus the Great, delivering them but not part of them.
Trump, accordingly, is their man.
The NAP cannot bring the country into a Calvinist promised land without Trump and they cannot do it within the next two years. They also can't do it with J. D. Vance at the helm. Vance is a Catholic who hangs around with traditionalist Catholic intellectuals and they don't like Catholics or intellectuals This is why a figure like Rod Dreher, who helped get us to this disaster, is now worried about the glidepath into what he brought about. This also helps explain why the 25th Amendment has not been invoked. Vance would actually have the impact of terminating this movement in a major way and they know it. They need Trump to stay in office.
And by stay in office, I don't mean until 2028, I mean beyond that.
They believe he's protected by God. They believe that its morally justified to steal the election this year as that's what they need in order to bring their goals about, and they believe that God has decreed that it shall come about. The wrong people, in their view, do not have rights anyhow.
Oliver Cromwell, who held very similar views.
Who succeeds Trump in 2032, or even later than that, is something they aren't focused on. It's not Johnson. Moses was not allowed to enter the Holy Land. It'll be somebody else, after all the corrupt and debased influences of liberalism are put to rest.
Fellow travelers.
Those are the two main forces in Trump's cabinet and orbit. Vance is the primary National Conservative in the cabinet, with Rubio tilting towards it. Behind the scenes you have people like Bannon, Fuentes, Bishop Robert Barron, and others. The NAR is better represented, with people like Johnson being prominent. The conflict between the two, as noted, is what I think is keeping our prediction of the 20th Amendment from being invoked from occurring. The National Conservatives aren't strong enough to bring it about.
But there are others who are in the orbit. That keeps this nightmare going as well.
- The Confederates.
Diehard ignorant racism has always been there, but it actually increased in the first half of the 19th Century, and ultimately of course gave rise to the Civil War. The losers in that war never accepted the results, and unfortunately a forgiving nature in American culture allowed them to get away with that. Had Radical Reconstruction being carried out, much of what we're enduring right now would not be occurring. The 1877 abandonment of Reconstruction allowed Southern oligarchs to restore a condition of near slavery over blacks in the South. The Lost Cause Myth was developed and glorified in the late 19th and early 20th Century. In spite of the post World War Two Civil Rights movement, people with a Confederate mindset have never given up.
This movement is crude and really only has as its central points a hatred of everyone who isn't lily white and a sense that "liberty" means whatever they say it means. This group also intermixes with the NAR but it also includes members of other Protestant denominations, often in sort of a ignorant fashion. The American Civil Religion is strongly represented, in which a person can conceive of themselves as a decent person as long as they're not having gay sex.
Groups like the Wyoming Freedom Caucus have a large element of Confederates in them. Generally they're better defined by what they hate, than what they actually support.
This group's spark was ignited by two things, one being the election of Barack Obama and the other being the Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. I didn't vote for President Obama. I voted third party. But I did mistakenly see Obama's election as the sign that the country had made it past its racist past. It hasn't, It sparked a renewal of it by those shocked that the country would elect a black man.
I thought and still think that Obergefell was a horrible decision, devoid of legal support, and demonstrating a complete lack of the understanding of the history of marriage and natural law. Obergefell was the wake up call for National Conservatives and the NAR as well. But with this group it was more primitive. National Conservatives basically have the view I just stated as well as a belief that its contrary to Christian beliefs. The NAR believes the latter as well. But most Confederates really don't care who you fuck, as long as they're of the opposite sex.
Trump is their man as well, as he's the NAR's man, and because he speaks well of them. Profound ignorance of history, religion, and culture tend to dominate in this group, and always have. That makes them easy to command. . . up until a point.
The line of departure for many of them is when things become really personal. If they're hurt economically, or if Trump policies hurt locally, they start to awaken.
- Opportunists, the ambitious, and cowards.
Sen. Dr. John Barrasso, who probably doesn't believe most of the crap he's shoveling.
This may seem like a summary of three groups, but it's basically one.
The GOP right now is packed with politicians and figures who have no love for Trump at all, aren't National Conservatives, and who haven't darkened a church door in years. But they'll express undying loyalty to Trump.
They don't mean it.
The problem with the political class is that many of them are hyper ambitious, some are lazy, and others are outright cowards. Many of them combine all three of those characteristics. Their primary motivation is just to keep their job.
Lots of currently serving Republicans expressed disdain for Trump before it became imprudent to do so. J. D. Vance is one of them, so is Marco Rubio. Chances are that neither of them have actually changed their views one bit. Lindsey Graham sacrificed his dignity by become a Trump apologist, and didn't live long to restore his reputation. All of these figures profited politically by supporting Trump.
Indeed, the entire current Wyoming Congressional delegation fits this category. John Barrasso has mastered the art of never giving you a clue of what he's thinking at any one time, so he didn't have to live any statements down, but to people who are close to him, it's well known that he doesn't agree with what's going on even as he acts as the majority whip. That makes him both ambitious and cowardly. Cynthia Lummis was open about her disdain for Trump at one time.
And in the current political field, hoping that you fit into the Confederate or NAR groups, lots of local politicians are on the Trump bandwagon when you can strongly suspect that some don't actually support him at all. Megan Degenfelder has her endorsement by Trump on her signs. Steve Friess sends out endless flyers with his love for Trump, when what he probably really is would be much closer to Reagan's views, mixed in with some lingering Confederatism. Reid Rasner, whose flyers have dried up, loudly proclaimed his undying loyalty to Trump while is gadfly reels have gone after Democrats but also the transgendered. Rasner is a homosexual and there's no real good reason to believe that he believes what he's saying, or that he is what he proclaims to be in terms of his image (gun toten' horse likeing, Frontier type).
Which brings us to a real problem of the political class in general. As it can become a career, and as careerism itself means compromise, something needs to be done to keep it from being a career.
- The besotted and the ignorant.
Finally, some of MAGA is made up of people who are just amazingly ignorant or completely besotted by Trump, the latter of which is completely creepy.
The ignorant are pretty strongly represented in the rank and file MAGAs. They are extremely poorly informed and believe that Trump is in their camp as he says he is. Frequently there's something they know they like, or they know that they hate, and based their decision on something very narrow. Because of very strong prejudices, wants or the like, they're willing to go along with everything else. They don't really think anything through. I have friends I see in sporting goods stores who fit this definition. As long as the Second Amendment is protecting firearms, which in spite of the way they may see is a strong hobby interest for them, they don't care about anything else whatsoever.
And then there's the besotted, the most pathetic of all of Trump's supporters. They love him because they love being in love with him. He's their Frank Sinatra and they're his bobbysoxers. He's their Elvis. He's their Beetles. They don't look at anything else, as they don't want to. They don't want to know about Sinatra's personal life or connections with mobsters, they don't want to remember Elvis as sweaty and fat, and they don't want Yoko Ono coming in and messing things up. They love him, and they always will.
Which says more about them, than him.
Some of these people have, I think, an odd deficit to their lives and this is what they fill it with. Chuck Gray seems to fill it with Trump and hatred, for example. Looking at his life, it seems as if there's a big gaping hole he's trying to fill. Only child of a divorced couple, spends summer in Wyoming, etc. Anyhow, if Trump turns out not to be their beloved, they'll be crushed, so they'll go on imagining that he loves them as they need to..
The Cold Civil War and the uneasy alliances.
The US hasn't faced a crisis analogous to this, ever. The closest we actually come is the English Civil War that was fought from 1642 to 1651, before we were a country, but still part of our overall history. Indeed, the landing of the Mayflower in 1620 already expressed the tensions that would lead to that horrible event. Post 1776, the only crisis that's semi analogous is the American Civil War, which has the distinct difference of the pro democracy forces being solidly in charge of the government, as opposed to what we're experiencing now which is the opposite. Still, lessons are there as well.
The English Civil War saw what we could regard as populist religious zealots seizing control of the government and struggling against the forces of tradition and true conservatism. The war isn't commonly fully portrayed that way, but it's a fair way to look at it. Oliver Cromwell was a Puritan religious zealot whose views did not represent the majority of Englishmen. He succeeded in deposing King Charles and installing himself as Lord Protector over a theocracy so extreme that to this day the location of his head is kept secret. As hated as he came to be, Mike Johnson, the Huckabees, and Pete Hegseth would all recognize the man as a kindred spirt.
It didn't last, however. The monarchy was restored in 1660, along with football on Sundays, and the like. In a lot of ways, while the Parliamentary forces won the Civil War, the harshness of the following regime resulted in an appreciation of what the Puritans were not, and that set the country, including the country's colonies, on to what they later became. Not only that, but the Puritan figures who were still living were hunted down by restored monarchy.
In the American example, which is different for the reasons noted above, the wrongdoers really weren't hunted down, which preserved the evil we're confronting today. If the English Civil War suggests that people won't endlessly endure a regime like Mike Johnson wants to install, the American Civil War suggests that after this is over, the perpetrators of an assault on democracy should be marginalized beyond the point of return.
And one final thing. An attempted revolution with two completely separate sets of goals is unlikely to succeed long term. The Dineens, Roberts, Drehers and Vances are not going to be able to make common cause with the Johnsons and Hegseths. And that may be MAGA's Achilles heel.
Johnson, Lee, Hegseth and the like are just as much religious zealots of minoritarian sects as Oliver Cromwell was. If they get within reach of their goal, they'll begin to enact laws accordingly. MAGA members of the American Civil Religion will be fine with reversing Obergefell, but they really won't be keen on reversing Griswold v. Connecticut, something already being discussed in right wing circles, let alone Eisenstadt v. Baird. Defining citizenship by a person's whiteness might be okay with far right populists who regard the country as Puritan, but it's not going to be with people whose predecessors came from Galway, Lebanon, or who founded Santa Fe. MAGA, at the end of the day, is a ragged tent in which numerous small factions are gathered under the banner of Trump to either use him or be besotted by him. He won't last forever.
But he'll try to, which makes from now until January extremely dangerous.
Labels: 1870s, 1877, 2020s, 2026, 2026 Election, 2028 Election, 2032, Catholic, Christian Nationalism, Christianity, Curragh Mutiny, homosexuality, Orthodox, Protestant, Reconstruction, religion, Viktor Orbán, Wyoming Freedom Caucus,1640s, 1642, 1650s, 1651, 25th Amendment Watch List, Chuck Gray, Civil War, French Revolution, Kevin Roberts, Moses, Patrick Dineen, Puritans, Rod Dreher, Roman Empire, Stuart Restoration, The Lost Cause, The Madness of King Donald
Tuesday, November 15, 2022
Can real conservatism exist without authoritarianism?
By SanchoPanzaXXI - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3415994. Francoist Span's coat of arms. The motto means "One, great, and free".
Look at Wyoming GOP right now, and you would have to assume that the answer to this question must be "no".1
And frankly, buying off on election theft myths and mutually reinforcing propaganda aside, there's some reason to think that. That's basically what Patrick Deneen of Harvard has warned of. He's the author of Why Liberalism Failed, a major work criticized heavily by the mainstream press, as we've previously noted, and adopted by current conservatives. Yale's snippet on the book states, as we also previously noted:
Has liberalism failed because it has succeeded?
"Why Liberalism Failed offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril."—President Barack Obama
"Deneen's book is valuable because it focuses on today's central issue. The important debates now are not about policy. They are about the basic values and structures of our social order."—David Brooks, New York Times
Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.
Now, Deneen did not state that we needed to elect an orange haired Duce whom we "must work towards" in order to impose the proper order upon society.2 At least, I don't think he did, having not read his book. And the essence of what Deneen apparently states here, as summarized by the Yale review, is correct. Political liberalism "trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality" It also "discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history."
All that is true.
Perhaps more disturbing is that liberalism/progressivism has unmoored itself from any sort of external greater force. Depending upon how you view it, it either takes the position, basically, that man can vote on his own private wishes, and God must endorse them, or that individual desires are paramount and nature must bend to and accommodate them. There's no possibility of unity in any of that, and it's deeply anti-nature. There's not even the possibility of a society functioning that way, on a long term basis.
So, given that, is it the case that conservatism must assert itself, by force?
That seems to be the conclusion that Orbán and a host of Eastern European leaders have concluded. They're willing to tolerate democracy, but only if certain things are universally agreed on first. And that sort of top-down directive nature of government, as long as it seems conservative, is the reason so many Americans of the MAGA persuasion, like Tucker Carlson, have been Putin cheerleaders. It's also the reason that CPAC has swooned over Orban and has come very close to adopting his Illiberal Democracy point of view. And it's the sort of point of view, sort of, that lead the Edmund Burke Foundation to adopt a "National Conservatism" manifesto this past June.
But it's also deeply illogical.
The basic core of real conservatism, indeed any political philosophy, is that it's right. And conservatives believe they're right on two things, social issues and economic ones. . . well conservatives who have completely bought the package believe that, there are plenty of people who believe in one of the two tenants of conservatism and not the other.
But ironically, in believe that they are right, real conservatives, have always believed that man is flawed, and it's best to rely on tradition and what we know of science to guide us. Old time conservatives, quite frankly, in the Buckleyite era, tended to be elitist, and proudly so. They were well-educated, at least at the upper levels, and didn't take their beliefs from the masses. Indeed, often they assumed they were a permanent minority that could influence heavily, but was unlikely to rule.
We should note here that populist, at least right now, are fellow travelers of conservatives, but their views aren't really the same at all. Populist tend to believe that the mass of people have some native instinct that's right because they have it. It's thin on education and tends not to trust elites of any kid, because they ain't elite.
Basically, five guys in a corner drinking Budweiser, and lots of it, are presumed to know more about just about anything, to current populists, than five theologians or conservative philosophers.
And of course, in various circumstances, populists can be extreme rightist or leftists. Early Soviet Reds were basically a type of populist.
Note the irony of the illiberal democracy point of view. Conservatives believe they're right, but they also believe, if they are illiberal democrats, that the attractions of progressivism are so strong that they'll overwhelm those truths unless they're enforced by force.
The current right, basically, believes that if offered dessert over dinner, kids will east dessert first every time. Put another way, the current American right believes that given a choice, everyone is going to opt to be transgendered and there's no argument against it. None at all. So people have to be forced to comport with what 99% of humanity already does naturally.
Progressives have believed something similar for decades, which is why they sought to enforce their beliefs through the courts. The basic concept was to enforce their beliefs through liberal courts and either plan on that enforcement indefinitely, or hope that people would get used to the enforced change over time and accept it. Conservatives took the opposite view, at least up until recently.
This is what the recent battle of being "woke" is about. Truth be known, hardly anyone anywhere, as a large demographic, has been in favor of things that may be defined as "woke". But the courts enforced wokism, or at least opened the doors and windows for it. So, for example, you have Obergefel redefining what love means and the ancient concept of marriage, and soon thereafter "accepting" transgenderism is a major societal push.
Illiberal democrats argue that we should simply close the door on these arguments via fiat.
The problem with that is twofold. No bad idea ever goes away in darkness. That's why the goofball economic theory of Communism rose up in autocratic states. Bad ideas, like viruses, die in the sun.
Secondly, it presumes that your own arguments, while right, just can't compete. Arguments that can't compete, however, can't compete ever.
Now, the way that Illiberal Democrats would probably put it is that the truth has been established but corruption, unleashed by evil, is always there to take things down. In some ways, this view is an elitist one, even though populist that have adopted that are anti elites and don't know that (which is part of the reason that currently conservatism and populism may ride on the same bus, but they aren't the same thing). Basically, this view at some level, openly or simply instinctively, takes the position that regular people are like children.3
Enforcing conservative via fiat has never worked.
Ask Marshal Petain.
The French political right has never recovered from Vichy, and it basically lost its ability to really influence anything.
The Trumpist wing of the GOP is taking the Republican Party in that exact same directly. If it keeps going this way, you can guaranty that Gender Queer is coming to a school library near you, pretty freaking soon.
There's a much better way to go about this.
And what that is, is this.
Conservatives should make their argument, and in making it, take a page from their Buckleyite past. When accused of being elitist, embrace it. Football players in the NFL are elites. The Green Berets are elites. Accused of being an "elite", lucky you. Say you are, and as an elite, you know better.
Adopt Western Society, but its great thinkers and lights. Donald Trump isn't one of them.
Don't try to be populists, populists can come to you.
Don't eschew science. Science is science and it aims at the truth. If you reject it, your chances are better than not that you are favoring myth over reality, and dangerously so.
Realize that cultural conservatism doesn't equate with capitalism. Capitalist are after the money. You are after the culture. Confusing the two sews the seeds of destruction. Things that are deeply conservative, in real terms, are often anti-capitalist.
Embrace democracy. You aren't always going to win, but you can always argue your point. Arguing your point is trying to convince. Forcing your point via fiat is a concession that you can't win through persuasion, as your argument is weak.
For a few minutes there, before Trump' narcissism spawned his coup, and the Supreme Court returned to the rule of law, you really had something.
You're blowing it.
Footnotes
1. Based upon the most recent proclamations of the Central Committee, you also have to be deeply anti-scientific and an adherent to wacky conspiracy theories. If you ever wondered how a rational German could have believed that the Jews were responsible for all of Germany's ills of the 20s and 30s, well just look at how the Central Committee thinks that Bill Gates and George Soros are messing with the state's energy sector.
2. "Working toward the Führer" was a primary ethos of Nazi Germany. Hitler didn't come up with all the bizarre beliefs and policies of the Third Reich on his own, his acolytes developed many just trying to figure out what Hitler would do if he was working on the topic. The Trumpist wing of the GOP has pretty much picked up on that sort of thing and worked towards Trump, who in turn has worked back towards them.
3. The irony of this is that quite a few members of these movements have already eaten the desert. If their underlying foundation is really meant, and they have, for example, adopted any aspect of the Sexual Revolution, which frankly most Americans have, they're hypocritical.
Related Threads.
Illiberal Democracy. A Manifesto?
Tuesday, November 8, 2022
How did things get so messed up?
By Di (they-them) - This SVG flag includes elements that have been taken or adapted from this flag:, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=114863039
American democracy is in real trouble right now, there's no doubt. The evidence is everywhere.
From 2016 to 2020 the President was a boorish multimillionaire whose early history was that of a New York Democrat. Picking up on the anger in the country, he converted himself into a populist Republican and ran the nation in a semi unhinged manner restrained only by as set of advisors that reigned him in, or simply just didn't do what he wanted right up until when he tried to retain control through a coup. On the plus side, however, Mitch McConnell basically ran the judicial nomination system, and after decades of Democratic picks who regarded the Constitution as more of a loose set of guidelines than a law, and weak kneed Republican nominees who turned out to be disappointments, some real jurists were finally elected.
Now we've reached the point where in Arizona there's a serious chance the next Governor will be an election denier, in Pennsylvania a quack doctor may be their next Senator, and in Wyoming we're going to elect a Congressional candidate who stabbed her predecessor in the back and claims to believe, although I very much doubt she does, that the election was stolen. Indeed, if she doesn't believe it was stolen, that makes her all the worse for promoting lies. In the Secretary of State's office the current interim occupant is another election denier, and in January Chuck Gray, who based his campaign on nothing else, is going to be elected to an office he shouldn't be holding. The state's GOP, meanwhile, is led by an extreme right wing Trumpite.
Democracy, truly, is in peril.
How did this happen?
We've dealt with this before, but if we really look deeply at this election, what we're seeing is 1) a hardcore group of Americans who feel their culture is being attacked, and not without merit for that belief, and 2) a group of fellow travelers who would probably, quite frankly, join in any political movement as they either don't think their claimed beliefs through or they want to be on what seems to be the winning side.
Note that I didn't say that it was because people believe the election was stolen. Some do, but what is really the case for most of those people is that they want to believe the election was stolen.
And they want to believe that, as they want to believe their nation was stolen.
Was it?
The culture wars have been going on in the US for a lot longer than pundits would have it. Indeed, the United States has always had some sort of culture war going on, and It's always had more than one culture. But by and large, its culture as a whole has been a Western European Christian one.
And by and large, it still is.
Attacks on that go back quite some time as well. Indeed, one way it is sometimes dated is to go October 31, 1517, when Monk Martin Luther ostensibly nailed his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Cathedral door. In doing that Luther, who temperamentally should really never have been a cleric, unintentionally ushered in the age of individualism, which is always an attack on a culture as it ultimately must mean that an individual can define a culture himself, and sooner or later that leads to a sort of rampaging societal narcissism.
Which we have now.
Which means the 1517 date isn't a bad one from which to track the decay of Western European society, of which we are part.
Whether that's correct or not, we see larger, more radical attacks coming about in the late 18th Century. The celebrated French Revolution, a massive failure, was one such example. The following of Communism and Communist Revolutions, which were ideologically and historically children of the French Revolution, are more recent examples which did real damage.
But through it all, the basic tenants of society remained. Two genders. Conventional relationships. Marriage. A broad Christian concept of society, held even by non Christians. All of this was part of Western European, and more particularly, American, life.
That's been under attack since at least the 1920s, and very much under attack since the 1950s.
And that's what people are reacting to, albeit, much too late, and often on an instinctive level that ignores their own hypocrisy.
We just ran an item entitled Cis. That doesn't explain it all, but in the conversion of the GOP into a sort of Populist-Fascist Party, we see part of the reaction to that. When people say the 2020 election was stolen, what they really mean, on an instinctive level, is that they want their culture back as the cultural norm, and any result contrary to that is a species of theft, as it's illegitimate.
Put another way, they don't accept that homosexuality is normal. They aren't accepting the damage done to marriage. They don't want a multicultural society of any kind.
They also want Detroit of the 1950s back, and American industry back. They want Dayton Ohio back before it was modern Dayton. They want blue collar jobs that you work at all day long without a lot of thought, and when you knock off at 5, you go to the bar with your buddies, hit on the bar maid, and then go home to your wife.
They want to set the dial back.
But they don't want to set it all the way back, and that's what's so ironic. Only parts. They probably just want to set it back to maybe 1985. Not 1885, or 1485.
And they don't want to impose the societal rules that apply to themselves personally. That is, other people should not be openly acting on self identified sexual concepts, but the disgruntled voters, assuming their inclinations are conventional, doesn't really want to return to a day when Playboy was still capable of being banned in some places, divorce required fault, and living in sin was heavily frowned upon. Going back, in other words, is fine for me, where I like it, but shouldn't have to bind me otherwise.
And, in setting things back, you have to really honestly ask what you are setting them back to.
This isn't going on just in the United States. It's going on elsewhere in the Western World. Hungary and Poland provide two such examples, and they're not alone. Just the other day, Sweden elevated to power a party that has its roots as a recent Neo Nazi movement.
So do they really believe the election was stolen?
I don't think they care. And if they do mean that, they probably really mean that the election was stolen when Teddy Kennedy's immigration reforms became law in the early 1970s, and when the results of the Stonehill Riot didn't come out as expected.
Getting here was a long road. Part of it was an American inability to really restrain the negative implications of technology that started to come in during the early 20th Century. Film, in particular, brought a leveling impact on society nationwide, but it also brought in a depressing one. Prior to the initial introduction of movies, a person might be able to indulge in their prurient interests, but it wasn't a very safe thing to do, and it'd become widely known, or risk becoming widely known, and condemned. After movies came in, it was at first easy to indulge in that just by going to them. There were no laws that precluded anything from being shown on film, and some early silent movies were outright pornographic. That brought in the Hayes Production Code, but the influence of money meant that was only able to hold back the tide.
Even while the production code was in effect, the improvements in film of all kinds, and in medial production, meant that leaps and bounds were taken in regard to the portrayal of women in society, and not in a good way, by the 40s and 50s. Playboy broke the door down, and the Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s did what all wars do, destroy.
The Great Depression of the 30s played its role by bringing in the Federal Government in ways it had never operated before, and by effectively destroying the American System of economics, which had always blending government assistance with private, and often localized, economics. Even by the mid 30s some were complaining about the impact of The New Deal on localized economies and cultures, such as "The Southern Agrarians" in I'll Take My Stand. It was a losing battle, however, due to the great crisis, which was followed by a second great crisis; World War Two, and a third great crisis; The Cold War. A nation that had to engage in that sort of struggle, or rather ongoing struggles, for a period of sixty years was one that was going to be geared towards economic magnitude and emphasize it above all else.
It had to.
This was also the glory years, truly, for American industry and therefore for American blue collar workers. European industry had been destroyed by the Second World War. The British and French Empires collapsed. The Soviet Union was our only contender in the world, but it wasn't that much of an economic contender.
So no harm in relaxing the standards a bit, eh?
Legal standards certainly relaxed. A Supreme Court which had taken the Lochner view prior to Franklin Roosevelt's threat to pack it relented and then, during the long Democratic period in power, followed by Republicans who were economic conservatives but were in the middle of the road, became effectively a third branch of government in the way it never had been before. And again, at first this was necessary, as the Supreme Court smashed through the vestiges of legal color barriers and forced the country to live up to its founding documents of the Revolutionary and Civil War period for the first time since the 1870s.
All that was necessary, but like most things, if the first helping is good, a second or third is warranted. The large size of the government did not abate at any point. The Court, having addressed concerns that it really needed to, went on to things which it neither had a need to nor really had any legal ability to address. The ever expansion outward of the economy was never reigned in, and Americans were converted from people into consumers. And, finally, a Democratic Party that had struggled between liberalism and reaction, freed itself of its reactionary wing but launched into first its New Deal wing, and then following Watergate, it's very liberal wing. While the latter occurred, the Republican Party largely stood by the wayside until the mid 1970s, when the reaction started.
The party reaction started then, but there had been reactions all along, and they spread and changed during the 1960s. It was also during the 1960s that the Baby Boomer generation, all over the Western World, enjoying economic largess on an unprecedented scale, began to adopt in a large way the more radicalized, in every sense, features of the 1950s. This eroded social institutions from below while the Courts eroded them, in the US, from above. Governments in the West attempted to address this, but largely post 1968 by accommodations. Social institutions of all types began to try to react during the 1960s as well, with many that had traditionally been very conservative in their outlook moving towards the left.
The reaction didn't begin to develop until the mid 1970s, but by that point so much had changed that finding a point on the compass was difficult. In the United States, Reagan came in and moved the needle back towards the right. In the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher did the same. But even as that occurred, most of the progress, if viewed that way, was fairly limited in real terms to economic matters on a large scale, with very little on the small scale. Social conservatism rose in the late 70s and early 80s, but not enough to really disrupt the overall direction of things, and the Court moved only from left to left center.
Given this, real systemic and social problems that set in soon after the end of the Vietnam War never ended up being addressed. Industry began to flood overseas without any effort to arrest it. Social changes brought about by the courts continued on. Social change at the local level was adopted wholesale by certain "elites" and the entertainment industry, to some degree in ways that would be regarded as shocking today. Damage to social structure was ongoing. Immigration reform brought in by Ted Kennedy and his fellow Democrats that reflected a concept of global social justice and 1950s style unabated economic opportunity set in so much that it's never been capable of being addressed.
While this occurred, the hard hat class lost their jobs. Men who had provided incomes for their families no longer could. Man and women had to go to work to support their families. The concept of simply abandoning women and children to the support of the government fixed in. Institutions long held sacrosanct were attacked.
So, in essence, Baby Boomers who grew up in their parent's 1950s and early 1960s (with the early 1960s really being part, culturally, of the 1950s) and then attacked it, looked back to that past and hoped to live in it, finding they could not. But not just that, the "Greatest Generation" that fought World War Two, looked back at the glory of the 40s and 50s, and the social support of the 1930s, and couldn't figure out how this had happened.
The World War Two Generation, once condemned by the Boomers and now universally praised by them, has largely passed away. But the Boomers, elderly though they now are, has not, and many of them are irate. And their children, who grew up in the broken world the Boomers created struggle as well, kept down in various real ways by the Boomers, but also looking for a raft in the flood.
And then entered Donald Trump.
Like Adolph Hitler of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Trump has a message to deliver to his followers and it is that you can go back, and that this is not your fault. Hitler told the Germans that losing World War One was not their fault, even though it certainly was, and that they'd been betrayed by the Jews. He would take them back, and not back to Imperial Germany, but to a Germany far beyond that which existed only in myth, when the Germans were rising out of the forest to conquer the world by right.
Trump promises to take Americans back, to Make America Great Again, and to take it back as well. Back to an era when we were the only power on the globe, the only one making things, and when all was right in the neighborhood. And, implicitly, just as Hitler promised to restore German greatness to the exclusion of all others whom the Volk had to deal with, Trump implicitly does the same. Trump's America is a white, male, Protestant one.
This narrow view of the United States doesn't reflect a country that actually ever existed, but it does completely buy off on two foundational myths of the country, one being the country was founded in much the same way betrayed in The Patriot, and the other being the less Puritan one of the 1950s. As odd as it may seem, Trumpist Americans see the country as a combination of strongly endowed with Puritan heritage while enjoying the pinups on the wall at a working class bar.
You cannot, of course, have both, which is the further irony. Every Trumpite who wants to "make America great again" and sees the country, as many strongly do, as a result of Manifest Destiny, would need to first consider that those early forebearors would be horrified by much personal conduct exhibited by average Americans today. Trump himself is basically a serial polygamist, something that up until recently was regarded as beyond the Pale for public figures outside of the entertainment industry. Divorced and remarried Americans who are populist standard-bearers are bearing a standard which, at its core, would not sanction that. We could go on.
Much of this is, we'd note, a failure of Conservatism. This all should have been something that Conservatives addressed, but they failed to effectively do so. Perhaps at least through Reagan they simply lacked the power to do so. They do lack the power to do so now, which explains the abandonment of democracy by a surprising number. But make no mistake, Conservatism and populist, let alone espousing Illiberal Democracy or fascism, are not at all the same thing. Conservatives are failing right now, as they have not taken on the illiberalism of the Trump forces that have stolen their banner.
We should hope they recover the courage to do so. Otherwise, large sections of the American public are falling into delusion, and the fate of the country rides on them being awakened from it.
Conservatives have good and valid points about the antidemocratic nature of the left that got us here. Only recently, it seems, have American progressives woken up to the need to support democracy. Before that, rule by a legal aristocracy was fine with them. But resorting to exclusion and denial of the vote, and the will of the voters, will not be the long term answer to anything. Rather, it sews the seeds of ultimate destruction, first to the true Conservative cause, and secondly to democracy itself.
Monday, October 31, 2022
The Agony of being a Catholic Voter in 2022
Catholics, according to the Church, are obligated to vote, and to do so in an informed manner.
And, I'll add to that, those who like to say that religion should stay out of politics are grossly misinformed, at least to the extent they mean that religion should be held personally and not influence a person's vote. A truly held set of religious beliefs ought to inform everything a person does.
This year is simply agonizing for the well-informed, thoughtful, Catholic voter.
In my area, where I will vote, two women contest for the position of Congressman.
The Republican expresses pro-life views, and views which suggest that she holds traditional views on the definition of marriage, two positions which are taken very seriously, even definitively so, by serious Catholics.
She also holds a mix of conservative views on various other issues, some of which I agree with, and some of which I do not, but none of which are moral issues, or at least not closely so.
The Democrat holds pro abortion and "progressive" views on the definition of marriage, and a host of other liberal views, some of which I agree with, and some of which I do not, but none of which are moral issues, or at least not closely so.
So, no dilemma, in weighing the voting scale, eh?
Well, the Republican has also expressed the view that the election was stolen, and her entire campaign was basically a stab in the back on the incumbent who stood by principals. In order to advance her campaign, she went from doubts, to being certain of election theft, and is now expressing views regarding the current administration which might charitably be described as nutty, even going so far as to suggest that inflation is a Democratic plot designed to bring about a liberal "Utopia". If I'm to take her asserted positions as actually held, it would mean she's believing in wild flights of dangerous fantasy, thereby making her a scary potential office holder. If I am to assume that they're taken for the purpose of being elected, she's lying and an enemy of democracy.
And there are no viable third party choices, really. One is from the far right, and the other from the Libertarian Party.
The far right candidate, running on the Constitutional Party ticket, is probably every bit as far right as the Republican, but with a very obvious Protestant Evangelical bent to her campaign. She doesn't say the vile things that the Republican does, and to the extent that her positions sound nutty, they sound nutty in the way that a position expressed by a person with little experience in the world and little education might voice them. Innocently, in other words.
Maybe I haven't listened enough to her, however. Frankly, I've disregarded her all along as a candidate that will obviously make no impact in the current election. (I subsequently listed to the debate she was in, and it's relatively clear that she's in the "coup didn't happen camp", although as noted, she probably genuinely feels that way, as opposed to Hageman, whom may not).
The Libertarian is a Libertarian, and there's no point in even going there.
A person could protest vote for the Constitutional Party candidate, but that's all it would be, a protest. But then, in order to make that protest, a person ought to know what she really believes. Perhaps I should go back and listed to her in the recent debate, which the GOP candidate skipped out on.
The only realistic hope of defeating the candidate that's either lying or coming off the rails is to vote for the Democrat, which is voting for a position which is normally gravely morally objectionable.
And then we have the Secretary of State's office, where a co-religious is running unopposed based on a stolen election theory along and is otherwise not a candidate which I'd prefer to consider. A protest is surely mandated there, but it'll have to be a write-in protest.
And so the state's politics have come to this. It feels like being a German going to the polls in 1932.
Friday, September 2, 2022
Defining the terms 1. Yes, we're a democracy (and a republic as well).
The American system of government is democratic. We are a democracy
There's an odd objection in some quarters that arises from time to time to calling the US a democracy. At other times, we're proud of it. During World War One we became, for instance, the Arsenal of Democracy. Not the Arsenal of Republics.
Here's the deal.
Let's define democracy.
Merriam-Webster states the following:
Some might say, well so what, but that's about as good of set of definitions as any.
Given as we're discussing, principally, the means of choosing our leaders, we can probably exclude topics 3, 4, and 5, for the most part.
That leaves categories 1 and 2.
Some people, on this topic, like to say "we're a republic, not a democracy". That displays, however, an erroneous understanding of what a republic is.
Let's go to the same source. It states:
Definition of republic
1a(1): a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president(2): a political unit (such as a nation) having such a form of governmentb(1): a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law(2): a political unit (such as a nation) having such a form of governmentc: a usually specified republican government of a political unitthe French Fourth Republic2: a body of persons freely engaged in a specified activitythe republic of letters3: a constituent political and territorial unit of the former nations of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, or Yugoslavia
We can obviously exclude 2 and 3 here.
Categories 1(a)(b) and (c) apply to the United States.
We choose our national legislature through democratic means. We vote for them. That makes us a democratic republic.
We're a democracy and a republic, just as the United Kingdom is a parliamentary democracy.
The United States has always been a democracy, but over time, its democratic nature has expanded enormously. Only men could vote originally. Indeed, in some colonies only propertied men could vote. Native Americans and the enslaved couldn't vote, no matter where they were born, either. Now all of this is in the past, and the voting age is 18, which it was not originally.
Also, we directly elect Senators, which was at one time not the case. They were originally chosen by State Legislatures, although some case can be made that this might have worked better than the current system.
Operating against this, as the government has expanded enormously, certain legislative functions have been turned over to regulatory bodies, which do not function democratically, although they are required to take public input for their decisions. And the Court started acting extra judicially in the 20th Century, which isn't democratic. Both of these things have recently been scaled back, which has been a subject of controversy.
And we're not a "pure democracy". No modern nation is. A pure democracy is one in which the citizens vote on everything. Examples of that are rare, with only ancient Athens coming to mind. A pure democracy wouldn't work, for obvious reasons, for any sizable nation, or perhaps any modern nation of any type.
Before closing, we should note that we're a federal republic. I.e, a system that brings in regions into the larger government. So, once again, our national legislature is based upon regions, i.e., states. We're not the only nation to have such an arrangement, by any means. Many do, and the varieties of that vary enormously.
Before we depart, the United States has traditionally been a "Liberal Democracy", which doesn't mean what it might at first seem to mean. The Collins Dictionary defines a Liberal Democracy as follows:
a democracy based on the recognition of individual rights and freedoms, in which decisions from direct or representative processes prevail in many policy areas
Pretty broad, but other definitions get quite lengthy.
Recently we wrote on Illiberal Democracy. Wikipedia defines Illiberal democracy as the following:
An illiberal democracy describes a governing system in which, although elections take place, citizens are cut off from knowledge about the activities of those who exercise real power because of the lack of civil liberties; thus it does not constitute an open society.
Proponents of illiberal democracy, and it does have proponents, would not define it that way. They'd probably define it as a system of government in which leaders are chosen democratically, but within an overarching set of agreed to principals and values which supersede and override democratic impulses, and control what can legitimately be debated.
Helpful? Probably not much, but keeping in mind the deeper meaning of the terms is useful.
Basically, if people get to vote, and the vote determines the government, it's a democracy. If people get to vote, but that doesn't matter, it isn't.
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