The Assault of Project 2025 and the National Conservatives.

]While the Trump Interregnum Blitzkrieg seems to be spastic and random, and frankly more than a little insane, with the attempt to lure Federal employees into quitting with a dubious offer to be bought out of their employment, blaming DEI for a tragic air accident, and the apparent intent to gut the Federal workforce, it does serve to bring into focus what was already starting to be clear and something we already knew would occur.

Somebody, and we can assume it isn't Trump, who is too dense and lazy to really focus on it, is advancing Project 2025.  

Oh, Trump, aware of the meaningless nature of his life to date is backing it and advancing it, in hopes to be "great", these aren't Trump's ideas.  What is Trump's idea is that associating himself with him will reform the nation, which it will, and he'll be associated with its reformation, which he will be, for good or ill.

Project 2025 is radical.  So radical that Trump disavowed any association with it when he was a candidate, but like much he promised, he lied.  Project 2025 is clearly the blueprint for the Trump interregnum, and it will be for the Vance Presidency once that occurs in 18 months or so.  The thing with Trump is that Trump is not an intelligent man, and therefore a ready made blueprint, to the extent he pays any attention to it at all, is ideal for him.  Vance, however, is the real deal.  He believes in it.

Project 2025 was created by the Heritage Foundation. That entity dates back to 1973 and was influential during the Reagan era. There had been far right movements before that, but coming out of the Second World War both parties moved to the middle.  The Vietnam War, however, started the disintegration of that, with the Democratic Party moving to the left and the GOP to the right.  Now virtually worshipped as a conservative hero, Ronald Reagan encouraged extremism in the GOP, thinking he could harness and control it, which he largely did during his administration.

We've gone into the rise of the far right before, but forces that Reagan had under control have really become malignant since that time.  Now they're in control.

They're not dumb.  They largely know that they have to drive Trump like a plow mule or encourage him to diddle at Mara Lago while they run amok for a year and a half. That's all they really have, and they know it, before the electorate, which will now be sick of a wrecked economy, come back on them.

The National Conservatives behind 2025 regard bureaucracy with contempt, the way that many conventional conservatives did before.  Career civil servants, in their view, and an entrenched enemy of efficiency and are, moreover, lazy.  I was once a third party witness to a real argument between a private businessman and a career civil servant, both of whom are ardent Trump supporters, in which the businessman held the civil servant in contempt just because he was a civil servant.  All government employees, in his view, were lazy who would have benefitted from being in the rough and tumble of business.

This view of things has been around for a long time in various forms, and often expresses itself in contempt.  It's, basically, the Protestant Work Ethic and while a lot of the key figures in National Conservatism today are not Protestant, they're Protestantazed in their view on this.

They're also basically trying to bring into creation a United States that Rod Dreher would approve of.  Dreher wrote The Benedict Option but he didn't really mean it.  Enamored with authoritarians who claim to hold conservative values, they're ready to impose their version of them upon the country.  That country would be insular, cut off from the world, and very Orthodox in the Byzantine sense.  Think Russia under the Czars, France under Petain, or Spain under Franco.

The irony of all of this is that on some things real conservatives, such as myself, are sympathetic with the goals of National Conservatives.  I'm not a fan of divorce, abortion, transgenderism, and the like.  But the radicalism that Project 2025 seeks to undertake goes far beyond that, including basically axing the Federal government to the extent possible, wiping out regulation as much as possible, and removing the Federal government from much of what it now does.  In that view they don't really believe in an environment and they feel that human suffering will simply be addressed as it once was, eons ago, by the Church and private parties.  This fits into their world view as well, which sort of is Medieval England before King Henry VIII.

This is going to be a disaster.  Petain and the French far right couldn't bring about a French version of this without force. Franco had to swim in a sea of blood in order to impose this on Spain.  In France, Spain and Portugal the net result was the result of a resurgent left and the ultimate destruction of the right for decades.

All evidence suggest that Trump's initial success, in 2016, was due to his adoption of certain issues that the American middle class felt left out of.  Somehow, however, he converted his base, about 25% of the GOP, into radical worshippers who feel he is incapable of doing wrong.  25% of the GOP is less than half of the electorate.  National Conservatives know that, and they have to, therefore, recreate the United States from a center left/center right republic into Francoist Spain in eighteen months.

They're hard at work trying.

Last edition:  

The Harrying. The opening days of the Trump interregnum

Labels: Antipresident, Central Intelligence Agency, Colombia, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy Assasination, Lies, Martin Luther King, Sedevacantism, The 2021 Insurrection, The Liz Cheney Maxim, The Second Trump Administration

Woke v. Weird? The race we should have had (and still could save for Republican cowardice and populist subversion).

By The logo may be obtained from Socialist International., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5214135

I don't really think J. D. Vance is weird.

I think Trump is pretty weird.  I'm concerned that he has accelerating dementia.  His press conference the other day was jammed packed with gibberish.  A rational GOP, which doesn't exist, would at this point show him the door.  Rather than a rational GOP, however, we have the Populist masses and a collection of forces with agendas, such as the National Conservatives, Christian Nationalist, etc.  Some adore his meandering gibberish as they are unthinking or actually quit thinking about what's going on years ago.  Some tolerate it as they know that when he's in office they can basically shove him aside and run the bus.  Some, I strongly suspect, figure that if elected, which they were planning on, age and the 25th Amendment or a pine box will take him out the back door of the White House and put them in the leather upholstered executive chair.

I think J. D. Vance was in that last category.  By supporting Donald Trump, I suspect, he and people in his obit, were figuring that that Trump would play the same role that the Ghost plays in Hamlet. . . departed and out of power.

If that's what Vance was figuring, that's not weird.  It's probably correct in terms of the expiration of Trump's mortal coil or his cerebrum.  The latter would be, of course, slightly more problematic than the former, but in a pinch, would likely work just as well, save for some disruptions from the Maga Militia crowd.

Anyhow, Trump is getting weird, but neither Harris or Vance are weird. What they are is poles apart in existential views, and they both really have one.

Harris is a politician of the political left, which has gone increasingly leftward since the mid 20th Century.  Indeed, it's final descent into the far left is what sparked, in part, the populist counter reaction.  It's adopted lifestyle politics with lifestyle's that were regarded as "weird" until fairly recently, and frankly many still are.

At the same time, the full bore assault on culture that commenced in the 1960s was hugely successful, normalizing behaviors regarded as immoral at the time, but which now are not. That's why, in no small part, people are proclaiming J. D. Vance as "weird".  As I noted here earlier, Vance isn't of the populist line of thought, he's an actual conservative, but a National Conservative of the Rusty Reno, Patrick Dineen, Kevin Roberts, type.  Vance expresses cultural views that have in varying degrees been under attack since the 1960s, but which have remained all along in some sectors of the culture and are attempting to stage a comeback, or even more, gain entry and acceptance for the first time.

That race, if it were on the surface, would be a really interesting existential one.

Chances are high that the country isn't really comfortable with it.  Certainly the unwashed populists who see nothing inconsistent about proclaiming themselves Christian while admiring the Hailey Welch or Sydney Sweeny wouldn't really be all that comfortable with the views of Roberts and Vance.  But for that matter, a lot of suburban moms or the now lauded/condemned "cat ladies" are probably not all that comfortable with the views of Sanders and Harris.

That contrast would serve a purpose in and of itself.

The race, however, we actually have is a national embarrassment due to the figure leading the GOP.