Since it seems inevitable that amnesty will be granted to the DACA people, whether or not it's also given to the voluntary grown-up illegals, the populist-nationalist Trump supporters should begin thinking about contingency plans to minimize the damage.
The overall goal is to prevent the enablers of illegal and legal immigration from burdening ordinary Americans with the costs of immigration while enjoying none of the benefits, which instead have gone to the wealthy in the form of cheap labor (business employment, or domestic servants).
Our goal is simply to make the elites have skin in the game regarding demographic replacement.
The political landscape is shifting in a populist direction, so that when Democrats become the realigning party for the next several generations (after decades of Reaganite Republican dominance), it will be Bernie-style politicians and activists who shape society.
These populist Dems feel sympathy for DACA people not only because of multiculturalism (their main difference with populist Trump supporters), but because of their being relegated to second-class citizenship despite being brought here involuntarily, akin to the slaves of the antebellum plantation South.
As a sidenote, a pact must be made between the Bernie and Trump populists to repatriate as many of the voluntary illegals as possible -- that solves the problem of their being second-class citizens here (they will become first-class citizens in their home countries), and does no one an injustice who was brought here involuntarily.
Populist Dems will eagerly support a Trumpian program to make the elites shoulder the costs of illegal immigration, whereby the DACA people would become permanent legal residents and workers -- but only on the condition that they receive affordable housing and employment in 1% zip codes, within the state that they're currently residing in, and that these two needs will be paid for by the municipal governments of these 1% zip codes. Monthly rent under, say, $1000 for a family of four, and a $25 minimum wage. All numbers indexed to inflation.
That prevents mass population transfers to places with low immigrant populations, and gives the DACA people better roots. The state they're living in is "the only place they've ever known" -- not some state with low immigrant populations to which they might be moved.
White people in California, Texas, and Florida will not like this -- but that's tough shit for them for living so close to Latin America.
White people in the Midwest and the non-coastal Northeast will be fine with this -- and that's their reward for not abandoning their roots just to chase fleeting yuppie career prospects in the Sun Belt.
For that matter, African-Americans will be fine with this, perhaps outside of Georgia, where there might be a real fight between DACA people and longtime black residents of the state.
Even within the state, it ensures that working and middle-class Americans will not be paying the price of immigration -- assuming they don't work in 1% zip codes, they won't be competing with the DACA people for employment, and they won't be competing with them in the housing market either, as they live in bottom 99% zip codes. Cultural and demographic replacement would be confined to the groups who have enabled and benefited from immigration -- the elites, not the middle or bottom of the class pyramid.
And by restricting the funding of these programs to municipal governments, middle and working-class Americans would not have to foot the bill for immigration's effects either. Worst-case scenario, levy a national-level tax on the 1% to pay for DACA assimilation programs.
One-percenters who don't want to live next to DACA people can slum it in a 10% zip code, and it won't be the end of the world.
Whatever the particulars shake out to be, the overarching goal is to team up with the rising populists of the Left in order to prevent Americans below the elite stratum from having to pay the many costs of the mass immigration of the past couple decades.
Among themselves, populists on the Right can say things like "demographic replacement" or "cultural homogeneity," but it's probably better to keep quiet about that in mixed company. Definitely do not use alienating phrases like "shithole countries" that will torpedo any chance of achieving the main goals -- which are not to trigger the libs with politically incorrect taboo words, but to improve the material and cultural conditions of the American people.
March 24, 2018
March 23, 2018
Can Bolton last through summer before getting purged?
He is the worst pile of garbage that Trump could have chosen to replace the already dismal McMaster with. Interventionist hawk obsessed with regime change and totally ignorant of history, making him charge all the more recklessly into disaster.
Even the personality cultists aren't bothering to argue that he's ackshually a good choice -- only that the God-Emperor will use his magical powers to prevent Bolton's toxic waste from contaminating anything of consequence, so don't worry.
Why not pick someone good, then? Or someone who's merely crappy? Why the worst possible cartoon choice?
Here, it's not the Deep State twisting Trump's arm -- maybe that was true when they railroaded Flynn out of the WH, to be replaced by a standard-issue general from the Pentagon. But neither General Kelly nor General Mattis were pushing Bolton onto Trump -- if anything, they'll resist his nutjob extremism.
For that reason, it's possible that he'll get railroaded out in short order. The Deep State could leak damaging private conversations he has, or they could just let him make a fool out of himself before a national audience like the Mooch did (not a tall order for a nutjob), and use that as the pretext for Kelly to shove him out the door.
Naturally his replacement won't be a non-interventionist, given the pattern of who they let stay in the NSA position, but it would be an interventionist who isn't as insane as Bolton -- which opens the job to just about anybody.
Several commentators on MSNBC last night wondered whether the appointment of Bolton would trigger the departure of Mattis and/or Kelly ("moderating forces"), but it's really the other way around. Somehow I think the Pentagon generals have more political capital than some psychotic flunkie from the Bush Jr. admin.
That doesn't mean that he can't fuck all kinds of things up in the meantime, and it's not to excuse Trump from royally fucking up such a key appointment. Still, I'd be surprised if he lasts through the summertime feuding season of hot tempers.
Normally we don't root for Deep State purges, on principle, but I can't think of anyone objecting to this one getting shown the door sooner rather than later by the generals who he's bound to make enemies of.
Even the personality cultists aren't bothering to argue that he's ackshually a good choice -- only that the God-Emperor will use his magical powers to prevent Bolton's toxic waste from contaminating anything of consequence, so don't worry.
Why not pick someone good, then? Or someone who's merely crappy? Why the worst possible cartoon choice?
Here, it's not the Deep State twisting Trump's arm -- maybe that was true when they railroaded Flynn out of the WH, to be replaced by a standard-issue general from the Pentagon. But neither General Kelly nor General Mattis were pushing Bolton onto Trump -- if anything, they'll resist his nutjob extremism.
For that reason, it's possible that he'll get railroaded out in short order. The Deep State could leak damaging private conversations he has, or they could just let him make a fool out of himself before a national audience like the Mooch did (not a tall order for a nutjob), and use that as the pretext for Kelly to shove him out the door.
Naturally his replacement won't be a non-interventionist, given the pattern of who they let stay in the NSA position, but it would be an interventionist who isn't as insane as Bolton -- which opens the job to just about anybody.
Several commentators on MSNBC last night wondered whether the appointment of Bolton would trigger the departure of Mattis and/or Kelly ("moderating forces"), but it's really the other way around. Somehow I think the Pentagon generals have more political capital than some psychotic flunkie from the Bush Jr. admin.
That doesn't mean that he can't fuck all kinds of things up in the meantime, and it's not to excuse Trump from royally fucking up such a key appointment. Still, I'd be surprised if he lasts through the summertime feuding season of hot tempers.
Normally we don't root for Deep State purges, on principle, but I can't think of anyone objecting to this one getting shown the door sooner rather than later by the generals who he's bound to make enemies of.
March 22, 2018
Fake trade war to protect white-collar info sector, not blue-collar manufacturing
A key element of the supposed realignment of the GOP is the inclusion of blue-collar workers from industry and manufacturing -- courting their votes, to flip crucial Rust Belt states, in exchange for dramatic policy shifts away from the Reaganite orthodoxy of de-industrialization and globalization.
Over a year into the would-be realignment presidency, the White House and Congress have very little to show for it. I sounded the alarm in a post last summer, right after the list of US priorities was released for the re-negotiation of NAFTA. There was nothing in it about manufacturing and re-industrialization, but only intensifying the benefits to agribusiness and perhaps getting the finance and info-tech sectors a slice of the action by entering the Mexican market, which they did not get the first time NAFTA was negotiated.
Today Trump will announce tariffs against China as punishment for their theft and coercive measures regarding intellectual property developed by American companies. Whether they steal it outright, or insist on handing over source code, trade secrets, etc. as the cost of doing business in their large market, China has been sapping the revenues of the developers of intellectual property for decades now.
The tariffs are intended to correct that form of bad behavior, and will only be lifted once China eases up on its parasitism of American IP developers.
Unfortunately, that does nothing whatsoever to help out blue-collar workers in manufacturing or industrial commodities like steel, and it does nothing to help re-industrialize our economy. It is entirely aimed at economic activity that is informational rather than material and productive. And those whose jobs are endangered by Chinese bad behavior on IP are white-collar professionals with already handsome salaries.
As our manufacturing companies have off-shored their production to countries where the cost of materials, labor, and regulation is cheap, they have kept in this country the informational tasks like design and marketing, as well as the organizational tasks carried out by senior management.
Informational tasks are not so labor-intensive -- you only need a certain amount of designers working a certain number of hours to design the thing you're going to produce, whether the production levels will be in the tens, thousands, or millions. So there's little benefit to sending these tasks out of the country to cheap-labor hot-spots.
Plus, if the cheap-labor country also gets ahold of the design and other informational secrets, what's to stop them from taking over the entire process from design to production -- leaving the American originators to only market and distribute the off-shored product? That would imperil the jobs of high-level professionals and executives, not middle managers or assembly-line workers -- and American executives are not about to commit career suicide en masse.
So, support for this form of "trade war" against China (or whoever else) fails to qualify as realignment toward the interests of blue-collar workers and the re-industrialization of our economy. It only benefits the elites of the two parties -- corporate managers from the manufacturing sector on the GOP side, and the IP professionals on the Democrat side (including not only the developers but the lawyers who defend it). And it only leaves in place the de-industrialized nature of our economy, striving instead to protect info-tech and globalist management careers.
True realignment will be signaled by a trade war aimed at re-shoring the material production of industrial commodities like steel and finished manufactured goods like clothing, electronic devices, and cars.
On that front, so far the evidence is that the Trump admin (and obviously the cuckservative GOP Congress) have surrendered.
The US Trade Rep Lighthizer, despite being more of a hawk, has already said that they have given up on trying to get a higher American-made content into cars made in the NAFTA countries, which was the only fig-leaf item they began asking for, regarding re-industrialization.
Contrast that with campaign-Trump's promise to "put a 35% tax on every car, truck, and part" coming in from Mexico, so that it wouldn't make sense for American car companies to keep their factories in Mexico, and would bring them back here to avoid the tariff.
Lighthizer and others on the White House economic team have also said that Trump's initial announcement of steep tariffs on steel and aluminum have been totally neutered, as all major exporters of steel into the US will be granted exemptions.
Reflecting this sabotage of the plan to re-industrialize, the stock price of US Steel had risen by a few percent during the week that Trump made the initial announcement, but has since fallen by 20% as it has become clear that the Establishment continues to veto Trump and his trade hawks on re-industrialization -- and as it has become equally clear that Trump continues to show no desire to actually fight the Establishment when they veto his announcements, preferring to focus instead on the theatrics of the announcements themselves.
As the Establishment's co-optation of the "America-first" insurgency proceeds, now we can add "economic nationalism" to the list of subverted plans. It began meaning re-industrialization of the US economy, to benefit blue-collar workers in the Rust Belt (and in the case of industrial commodities, the company owners as well). Now it means keeping our economy de-industrialized, but struggling to protect the yuppies by keeping the white-collar professional and managerial jobs here.
We've seen this co-optation already succeed in the domain of foreign policy and war, where "America first" now means the same ol' false song of globalism, and failing to prop up our crumbling empire, only with different rationalizations -- from championing democracy and human rights, to who gives a damn if our #1 ally is Medieval jihadists who blew up the World Trade Center on September 11th?
We've seen the same co-optation on immigration as well, going from a campaign that pledged to deport millions of illegals, end sanctuary city policies, question birthright citizenship, unapologetically use the term "anchor baby," curtail legal immigration especially for guest-worker visas, and end for good Obama's executive amnesties -- to an administration that will end up not even putting a dent in the illegal population numbers, does nothing to sanctuary cities, refuses to even bring up anchor baby citizenship, ramps up guest worker visas, and trades a massive greater-than-DACA amnesty in exchange for no change in legal immigration until 10 years (i.e., never).
Oh, and building The Wall -- which has now, for the second year in a row, been reduced to pathetic funding to extend existing fencing for 30 miles. That's not what the mobs chanted at the Trump rallies -- "Extend, existing, fencing! For only, thirty, miles!" And who was going to pay for that wall? Mexico -- through all manner of executive branch actions (increasing fees on visas from Mexico, taxing remittances into Mexico, tariffs on Mexican goods, etc.) that did not require a single assenting vote from the cuckservative Congress. Trump doesn't even bother adding that part in when he gets heckled by his own crowds about building The Wall.
Devotees of the Trump personality cult may not notice any of these developments, but they are most definitely being noticed by the small sliver of cautious Obama voters who decided the election in Trump's favor.
That's why all the momentum has swung in the Democrats' direction since roughly the end of last summer, when General Kelly purged the populist-nationalists from the White House on behalf of the Establishment. Decisive Trump voters figure if they aren't going to get realignment from the GOP, they'll try their luck with a realignment from the Dems -- and so far, the winning Dems have been those who walked away from multicultural liberalism, focusing on quasi-populist economics instead of liberal social issues.
The realigning Dems have come out against Nancy Pelosi being the Speaker the next time the Dems take back the House, unlike the ossified Republicans who have not pledged to kick out Ryan and those like him if the GOP were to keep the House. Sadly that included Trump himself, who was happy to keep on Ryan as Speaker after getting showered with empty flattery from the notorious brown-noser.
The labor unions and steel country are a natural Democrat base, so when the Bernie-style Dems take over the government, there will be real advances toward re-industrialization. Realignment has never taken place from within the party that set up the orthodoxy to begin with, and this time will be no different -- the Reagan regime will be undone by a realigning figure from the opposition party, such as Bernie Sanders.
Over a year into the would-be realignment presidency, the White House and Congress have very little to show for it. I sounded the alarm in a post last summer, right after the list of US priorities was released for the re-negotiation of NAFTA. There was nothing in it about manufacturing and re-industrialization, but only intensifying the benefits to agribusiness and perhaps getting the finance and info-tech sectors a slice of the action by entering the Mexican market, which they did not get the first time NAFTA was negotiated.
Today Trump will announce tariffs against China as punishment for their theft and coercive measures regarding intellectual property developed by American companies. Whether they steal it outright, or insist on handing over source code, trade secrets, etc. as the cost of doing business in their large market, China has been sapping the revenues of the developers of intellectual property for decades now.
The tariffs are intended to correct that form of bad behavior, and will only be lifted once China eases up on its parasitism of American IP developers.
Unfortunately, that does nothing whatsoever to help out blue-collar workers in manufacturing or industrial commodities like steel, and it does nothing to help re-industrialize our economy. It is entirely aimed at economic activity that is informational rather than material and productive. And those whose jobs are endangered by Chinese bad behavior on IP are white-collar professionals with already handsome salaries.
As our manufacturing companies have off-shored their production to countries where the cost of materials, labor, and regulation is cheap, they have kept in this country the informational tasks like design and marketing, as well as the organizational tasks carried out by senior management.
Informational tasks are not so labor-intensive -- you only need a certain amount of designers working a certain number of hours to design the thing you're going to produce, whether the production levels will be in the tens, thousands, or millions. So there's little benefit to sending these tasks out of the country to cheap-labor hot-spots.
Plus, if the cheap-labor country also gets ahold of the design and other informational secrets, what's to stop them from taking over the entire process from design to production -- leaving the American originators to only market and distribute the off-shored product? That would imperil the jobs of high-level professionals and executives, not middle managers or assembly-line workers -- and American executives are not about to commit career suicide en masse.
So, support for this form of "trade war" against China (or whoever else) fails to qualify as realignment toward the interests of blue-collar workers and the re-industrialization of our economy. It only benefits the elites of the two parties -- corporate managers from the manufacturing sector on the GOP side, and the IP professionals on the Democrat side (including not only the developers but the lawyers who defend it). And it only leaves in place the de-industrialized nature of our economy, striving instead to protect info-tech and globalist management careers.
True realignment will be signaled by a trade war aimed at re-shoring the material production of industrial commodities like steel and finished manufactured goods like clothing, electronic devices, and cars.
On that front, so far the evidence is that the Trump admin (and obviously the cuckservative GOP Congress) have surrendered.
The US Trade Rep Lighthizer, despite being more of a hawk, has already said that they have given up on trying to get a higher American-made content into cars made in the NAFTA countries, which was the only fig-leaf item they began asking for, regarding re-industrialization.
Contrast that with campaign-Trump's promise to "put a 35% tax on every car, truck, and part" coming in from Mexico, so that it wouldn't make sense for American car companies to keep their factories in Mexico, and would bring them back here to avoid the tariff.
Lighthizer and others on the White House economic team have also said that Trump's initial announcement of steep tariffs on steel and aluminum have been totally neutered, as all major exporters of steel into the US will be granted exemptions.
Reflecting this sabotage of the plan to re-industrialize, the stock price of US Steel had risen by a few percent during the week that Trump made the initial announcement, but has since fallen by 20% as it has become clear that the Establishment continues to veto Trump and his trade hawks on re-industrialization -- and as it has become equally clear that Trump continues to show no desire to actually fight the Establishment when they veto his announcements, preferring to focus instead on the theatrics of the announcements themselves.
As the Establishment's co-optation of the "America-first" insurgency proceeds, now we can add "economic nationalism" to the list of subverted plans. It began meaning re-industrialization of the US economy, to benefit blue-collar workers in the Rust Belt (and in the case of industrial commodities, the company owners as well). Now it means keeping our economy de-industrialized, but struggling to protect the yuppies by keeping the white-collar professional and managerial jobs here.
We've seen this co-optation already succeed in the domain of foreign policy and war, where "America first" now means the same ol' false song of globalism, and failing to prop up our crumbling empire, only with different rationalizations -- from championing democracy and human rights, to who gives a damn if our #1 ally is Medieval jihadists who blew up the World Trade Center on September 11th?
We've seen the same co-optation on immigration as well, going from a campaign that pledged to deport millions of illegals, end sanctuary city policies, question birthright citizenship, unapologetically use the term "anchor baby," curtail legal immigration especially for guest-worker visas, and end for good Obama's executive amnesties -- to an administration that will end up not even putting a dent in the illegal population numbers, does nothing to sanctuary cities, refuses to even bring up anchor baby citizenship, ramps up guest worker visas, and trades a massive greater-than-DACA amnesty in exchange for no change in legal immigration until 10 years (i.e., never).
Oh, and building The Wall -- which has now, for the second year in a row, been reduced to pathetic funding to extend existing fencing for 30 miles. That's not what the mobs chanted at the Trump rallies -- "Extend, existing, fencing! For only, thirty, miles!" And who was going to pay for that wall? Mexico -- through all manner of executive branch actions (increasing fees on visas from Mexico, taxing remittances into Mexico, tariffs on Mexican goods, etc.) that did not require a single assenting vote from the cuckservative Congress. Trump doesn't even bother adding that part in when he gets heckled by his own crowds about building The Wall.
Devotees of the Trump personality cult may not notice any of these developments, but they are most definitely being noticed by the small sliver of cautious Obama voters who decided the election in Trump's favor.
That's why all the momentum has swung in the Democrats' direction since roughly the end of last summer, when General Kelly purged the populist-nationalists from the White House on behalf of the Establishment. Decisive Trump voters figure if they aren't going to get realignment from the GOP, they'll try their luck with a realignment from the Dems -- and so far, the winning Dems have been those who walked away from multicultural liberalism, focusing on quasi-populist economics instead of liberal social issues.
The realigning Dems have come out against Nancy Pelosi being the Speaker the next time the Dems take back the House, unlike the ossified Republicans who have not pledged to kick out Ryan and those like him if the GOP were to keep the House. Sadly that included Trump himself, who was happy to keep on Ryan as Speaker after getting showered with empty flattery from the notorious brown-noser.
The labor unions and steel country are a natural Democrat base, so when the Bernie-style Dems take over the government, there will be real advances toward re-industrialization. Realignment has never taken place from within the party that set up the orthodoxy to begin with, and this time will be no different -- the Reagan regime will be undone by a realigning figure from the opposition party, such as Bernie Sanders.
March 14, 2018
Electoral death as admin becomes more Republican, less Trumpian
In case it's not clear yet to Trump supporters, let the Pennsylvania special election be a further reminder in a series of reminders since these elections have begun -- there are no other Republicans who will run on, let alone put into effect, the major issues that scored the president an upset victory.
That means: economic nationalism and re-industrialization, a non-interventionist military, restricting immigration, and leaving the social safety net in place -- if anything, adding single-payer healthcare into the mix.
The Republicans are only going to run on the zombie-Reagan agenda that ruined our nation in less than a generation, and that voters are sick to death of -- especially the post-Boomer generations who did not get in on the ground floor of the looting of our country. These Reaganites include Bill Clinton types who simply presented a mild pushback against the overall agenda, while inflaming voters with anti-American multiculturalism in the social domain.
There is no such thing as "the Paul Ryan GOP" or "the RINOs in the GOP" or "the GOP Establishment" -- that is the entirety of the party. Trump is totally sui generis, and that's why they savaged him so brutally during the primaries of 2016, and why they continue to obstruct his anti-GOP agenda on tariffs, trade, war, and so on.
The GOP is not "going to learn" from the lessons where "Trump taught them how to win". They are an ossified party at the terminal stage of hegemony. How long can they be given to learn how to win? Trump destroyed their vision back in 2016. If they're still ignoring his winning platform, they will not be pursuing it anytime soon. "Give them another year, two years, three years" is not going to convince a normal person. More realistic is 15-20 years, when they will be the mild pushback party under a new Bernie-style paradigm that will last for several generations.
Indeed, the only party showing signs of learning from bruising losses is the Democrats. Bernie has 16 co-sponsors for a single-payer healthcare bill, most of whom endorsed Hillary and painted him as too pie-in-the-sky just a couple years ago. They flipped deep red seats (Alabama Senate, PA-18) by running white guys who talked about social obligations to the bottom 80% of the class pyramid, rather than SJWs. And the only elected officials who are openly in favor of Trump's tariffs and trade war have been Dems.
The Republican party's vision for the future has been utterly rejected by voters as too bleak, too anti-American, and too Social Darwinist. Voters want radical change, now, and they threw their weight behind Trump in order to thoroughly transform the party from within. Since dominant parties at this late desperate stage are too ossified to reform themselves, next time the voters will go for more of a firebrand from the opposition party (Bernie or someone like him).
The alienation of the voters from the GOP will only accelerate in the next years of the Trump administration, as the personnel continue to shift in a more neocon direction.
Some populists and nationalists were hopeful when the Bannonites were in the government -- they got mostly purged last year, with only a few trade hawks remaining (and they aren't promoted to the top, or allowed to see their policies become implemented without dilution).
Some moderates were hopeful when the Manhattan Democrats in the Javanka faction looked like they could influence policy. They are getting purged and demoted as we speak.
That removes any source of heterodox, unconventional, breath of fresh air politics coming from a GOP administration, which will only get more and more typically Republican as General Kelly consolidates his influence on behalf of typical Republican power groups like the Pentagon.
Nobody who took part in a "change election" wanted to see the outcome be George W. Bush: The Resurrection, but that is largely where things are going. Remember: even W got steel tariffs. And remember: the Iraq War didn't kick off until his third year.
As bad as people like Tillerson and Cohn have been, just wait until it's Pompeo and Kudlow. If you hated McMaster, wait till you get John Bolton. It's a final desperate attempt to shock the corpse of Reaganism back to life -- supply-side economics, Cold War interventionism and proxy wars, and austerity on social spending at home (unless you work for a defense contractor or Wall Street bank).
Most of this is beyond Trump's control, as he's only one guy with minimal political capital. Whenever Trump does some firing, the GOP does the hiring. But as time goes on and he goes along with their agenda rather than fight for his own agenda, against his own party, he too will lose some of his luster in the eyes of formerly hopeful voters. We wanted someone who would fight the Republican Establishment, not become their enabler and rubber-stamper.
But regardless of how much voters blame Trump personally, they will give up on the hopeless GOP.
All the action is taking place on the Democrats' side, and since the shake-up and re-alignment is just getting started, Trump supporters can get in at the outset and make a real difference. Unlike the hardened fossil of the GOP, which cannot be reshaped, the Democrats are more like a pile of wet clay that has not been shaped, let alone baked, just yet.
If one of your pet issues is not represented there, it's because you're wasting your time on Republican business fags. The only major Trumpian issue not being championed, yet, by the Dems is restricting immigration -- but then, neither is that being delivered by the Republicans, who control the entire government. Unlike the locked doors of the inward-looking GOP, the gates of the Democrat party have been left open and unattended -- so just invade their territory and dig yourself in as the immigration restriction camp of the Dems.
Like it or not, you're going to have to modulate your anti-immigration message if you want to reach a national audience. Make it less about the threat of violent crime, which is a typical losing Republican theme. Would it matter if we're demographically replaced by hordes of docile Chinese drones rather than gang members from El Salvador? Make it more about cheap labor, and sheer numbers -- the country is full, with too many Americans already struggling to make ends meet. Much more in line with Democrat themes than failed Republican themes about violence, crime, and death.
That means: economic nationalism and re-industrialization, a non-interventionist military, restricting immigration, and leaving the social safety net in place -- if anything, adding single-payer healthcare into the mix.
The Republicans are only going to run on the zombie-Reagan agenda that ruined our nation in less than a generation, and that voters are sick to death of -- especially the post-Boomer generations who did not get in on the ground floor of the looting of our country. These Reaganites include Bill Clinton types who simply presented a mild pushback against the overall agenda, while inflaming voters with anti-American multiculturalism in the social domain.
There is no such thing as "the Paul Ryan GOP" or "the RINOs in the GOP" or "the GOP Establishment" -- that is the entirety of the party. Trump is totally sui generis, and that's why they savaged him so brutally during the primaries of 2016, and why they continue to obstruct his anti-GOP agenda on tariffs, trade, war, and so on.
The GOP is not "going to learn" from the lessons where "Trump taught them how to win". They are an ossified party at the terminal stage of hegemony. How long can they be given to learn how to win? Trump destroyed their vision back in 2016. If they're still ignoring his winning platform, they will not be pursuing it anytime soon. "Give them another year, two years, three years" is not going to convince a normal person. More realistic is 15-20 years, when they will be the mild pushback party under a new Bernie-style paradigm that will last for several generations.
Indeed, the only party showing signs of learning from bruising losses is the Democrats. Bernie has 16 co-sponsors for a single-payer healthcare bill, most of whom endorsed Hillary and painted him as too pie-in-the-sky just a couple years ago. They flipped deep red seats (Alabama Senate, PA-18) by running white guys who talked about social obligations to the bottom 80% of the class pyramid, rather than SJWs. And the only elected officials who are openly in favor of Trump's tariffs and trade war have been Dems.
The Republican party's vision for the future has been utterly rejected by voters as too bleak, too anti-American, and too Social Darwinist. Voters want radical change, now, and they threw their weight behind Trump in order to thoroughly transform the party from within. Since dominant parties at this late desperate stage are too ossified to reform themselves, next time the voters will go for more of a firebrand from the opposition party (Bernie or someone like him).
The alienation of the voters from the GOP will only accelerate in the next years of the Trump administration, as the personnel continue to shift in a more neocon direction.
Some populists and nationalists were hopeful when the Bannonites were in the government -- they got mostly purged last year, with only a few trade hawks remaining (and they aren't promoted to the top, or allowed to see their policies become implemented without dilution).
Some moderates were hopeful when the Manhattan Democrats in the Javanka faction looked like they could influence policy. They are getting purged and demoted as we speak.
That removes any source of heterodox, unconventional, breath of fresh air politics coming from a GOP administration, which will only get more and more typically Republican as General Kelly consolidates his influence on behalf of typical Republican power groups like the Pentagon.
Nobody who took part in a "change election" wanted to see the outcome be George W. Bush: The Resurrection, but that is largely where things are going. Remember: even W got steel tariffs. And remember: the Iraq War didn't kick off until his third year.
As bad as people like Tillerson and Cohn have been, just wait until it's Pompeo and Kudlow. If you hated McMaster, wait till you get John Bolton. It's a final desperate attempt to shock the corpse of Reaganism back to life -- supply-side economics, Cold War interventionism and proxy wars, and austerity on social spending at home (unless you work for a defense contractor or Wall Street bank).
Most of this is beyond Trump's control, as he's only one guy with minimal political capital. Whenever Trump does some firing, the GOP does the hiring. But as time goes on and he goes along with their agenda rather than fight for his own agenda, against his own party, he too will lose some of his luster in the eyes of formerly hopeful voters. We wanted someone who would fight the Republican Establishment, not become their enabler and rubber-stamper.
But regardless of how much voters blame Trump personally, they will give up on the hopeless GOP.
All the action is taking place on the Democrats' side, and since the shake-up and re-alignment is just getting started, Trump supporters can get in at the outset and make a real difference. Unlike the hardened fossil of the GOP, which cannot be reshaped, the Democrats are more like a pile of wet clay that has not been shaped, let alone baked, just yet.
If one of your pet issues is not represented there, it's because you're wasting your time on Republican business fags. The only major Trumpian issue not being championed, yet, by the Dems is restricting immigration -- but then, neither is that being delivered by the Republicans, who control the entire government. Unlike the locked doors of the inward-looking GOP, the gates of the Democrat party have been left open and unattended -- so just invade their territory and dig yourself in as the immigration restriction camp of the Dems.
Like it or not, you're going to have to modulate your anti-immigration message if you want to reach a national audience. Make it less about the threat of violent crime, which is a typical losing Republican theme. Would it matter if we're demographically replaced by hordes of docile Chinese drones rather than gang members from El Salvador? Make it more about cheap labor, and sheer numbers -- the country is full, with too many Americans already struggling to make ends meet. Much more in line with Democrat themes than failed Republican themes about violence, crime, and death.
March 13, 2018
If Lamb loses, blame Hillary outburst and her media amplifiers
After the Democrat candidate in Pennsylvania's special election has gone so far out of his way to distance himself from Nancy Pelosi, in order to win in a Trump district, Crooked Hillary Clinton rears her ugly head.
To share what brilliant insight with the rest of the world? That she won in the places that account for so much of the nation's imaginary stock market bubble wealth, and that everybody who voted against her wants to see black people back in chains.
Just when you thought she could not out-do herself in self-parodying a neoliberal corporate shill who clumsily tries to distract the angry masses with identity politics -- there she goes again.
Since the latest poll shows a slight advantage for the re-aligning Democrat, who is pro-gun and pro-union, if victory slips out of his hands at the last minute -- blame Crooked Hillary's latest deluge of toxic waste upon an electorate that wants nothing more than to see her shut up for good.
Even more importantly, blame the corporate liberal media for funneling her waste through their propaganda pipelines into everyday Americans' households. The journalists are so short-sighted, and so emotionally retarded, craving any fix they can get that says, "You're the best and brightest, and your enemies are scum."
They can't see five seconds into the future, where blasting that message is going to anger voters into lining up against the likes of Crooked Hillary, even if it means holding their nose and voting for another corporate globalist Republican.
The liberal media's job, if they want to help their party take back control of the government, is not to provide the Hillary Clintons of the world with a megaphone -- but to muffle her face with a pillow whenever she opens her big fat toxic wordhole.
To share what brilliant insight with the rest of the world? That she won in the places that account for so much of the nation's imaginary stock market bubble wealth, and that everybody who voted against her wants to see black people back in chains.
Just when you thought she could not out-do herself in self-parodying a neoliberal corporate shill who clumsily tries to distract the angry masses with identity politics -- there she goes again.
Since the latest poll shows a slight advantage for the re-aligning Democrat, who is pro-gun and pro-union, if victory slips out of his hands at the last minute -- blame Crooked Hillary's latest deluge of toxic waste upon an electorate that wants nothing more than to see her shut up for good.
Even more importantly, blame the corporate liberal media for funneling her waste through their propaganda pipelines into everyday Americans' households. The journalists are so short-sighted, and so emotionally retarded, craving any fix they can get that says, "You're the best and brightest, and your enemies are scum."
They can't see five seconds into the future, where blasting that message is going to anger voters into lining up against the likes of Crooked Hillary, even if it means holding their nose and voting for another corporate globalist Republican.
The liberal media's job, if they want to help their party take back control of the government, is not to provide the Hillary Clintons of the world with a megaphone -- but to muffle her face with a pillow whenever she opens her big fat toxic wordhole.
March 10, 2018
GOP will sabotage Trump-Kim summit and trade war, as with all other unorthodox proposals; Real change only after Bernie revolution
Regardless of their approval or disapproval of the announced summit between Trump and Kim Jung Un, most observers are still lost in their fairyland view of politics being a war of contesting individuals, rather than of institutions. Ditto for their takes on the recent announcement of tariffs on steel and aluminum. See, for example, this take about his staff shake-up, and this take about Trump playing by his own rules.
In both cases, Trump the individual has "gone rogue" against most of the White House staff, especially those whose role is to preserve the status quo from the would-be re-aligner. But more important than irking the individuals who occupy these status-quo-preserving roles, Trump is threatening the material interests of the institutions on whose behalf these individuals are acting.
With the GOP in control of the government, that means the material sectors of society that are labor-intensive -- the military, manufacturers (not their workers), energy, and agriculture. The senior member of this GOP coalition is the military, whose distinct leverage in the struggle among elite factions is their control of the use of force -- directing where it goes, in what amount, and toward what ends.
Lacking any institutional support from his own party -- indeed, drawing their ire -- has made Trump largely unable to carry out the major reforms he was elected to do. This is unlike the proposals that are more of the same for the Reaganite party -- such as corporate tax cuts and putting conservative judges in the courts -- for which he suddenly receives overflowing support from his party.
Let's look at the prospects for the two recent unorthodox announcements on tariffs and North Korea, while remembering the track record the GOP institutions have had whenever Trump attempted a major change to the status quo (pulling out of Syria and Afghanistan, forcing NATO to pay 2% GDP, making South Korea pay for THAAD, leaving the social safety net alone, talking up single-payer healthcare, immediately restricting immigration, building a border wall, and so on and so forth).
Trump has been able to refrain from joining new entanglements that we were not already involved in, such as leaving the TPP and the Paris Climate Accords before we actually signed the papers. But not getting into further messes is not the same as pulling out of those that we are already in. And the two recent announcements involve messes we have already been in for decades -- de-industrializing our economy, and occupying the Korean peninsula.
First was the announcement of stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum, which were watered down in less than a week. Now there are exemptions for Mexico and Canada, who are among the largest exporters of steel into our country, and there will be two weeks for the other major exporters to get exemptions, on the basis of being friendly allies who don't pose a major threat to us.
That makes it likely that exemptions will be won for the EU, based on Germany and Italy being NATO allies with major US military bases, even though those two are also among the top exporters of steel. Likewise exemptions for major steel exporters Japan and South Korea, the latter having already asked for theirs after setting up the Trump-Kim summit.
Perhaps there will be tariffs on the metals coming directly from China, but not much comes from them that way -- they "transship" their steel to other countries, who then import it into the US. While every little bit helps, watering down Trump's initial announcement of "no exceptions" will largely preserve the status quo on de-industrialization of our economy.
Trump was able to make the announcement because one of the main globalist saboteurs had recently been fired (Staff Secretary Rob Porter), and because Trump was hopping mad and looking to lash out after Hope Hicks had gotten fired. The trade hawks Ross and Navarro struck while the iron was hot. They did succeed in getting an announcement made of a major trade action, but within a week, the lawyers and other institutional actors clawed back most of the substance, leaving it largely symbolic.
Even symbolic concessions are unacceptable to the GOP, though, as they have all come out vehemently against the watered-down version. They see it as the first trip down a slippery slope, at least rhetorically but also substantively.
The only institutional support Trump has received has been from labor unions and Democrat politicians -- from the rival party, in other words. Producers of the industrial commodities are happy, of course, but they are not squarely within one party's coalition or the other. They get screwed by the manufacturers of the GOP coalition, who insist on cheap materials for the things they make (leading them to seek cheap foreign steel), and they are not an informational sector that naturally fits into the Democrat coalition.
But since the informational sectors that make up the Democrat coalition are not directly threatened by higher material costs -- as most of them don't make anything -- they would be more welcoming of the industrial metal producers, if they could help pack an extra electoral wallop. With the Rust Belt looking iffy for the Democrats, the informational sectors will be required to recruit the industrial commodities producers to win back Ohio, Pennsylvania, and perhaps Indiana (the #1 steel state).
Reflecting the de-fanged nature of the tariffs scarcely one week after their announcement, the stock market has continued to shoot upwards. They sense there is no coming trade war. Even within steel stocks, although they rose several percentage points on the initial announcement, they tumbled by several points on Friday when it became clear that we would be granting one exemption after another to the major exporters.
They'll probably be somewhat up for the year, with at least some tariffs going into effect, but it is not the re-birth of the steel industry as it initially appeared -- and that is all thanks to sabotage from the GOP. Only by throwing in with the Democrat coalition that is insensitive to the cost of metals, will steel be re-born during the Bernie revolution.
The military link to the gutting of the steel industry cannot be overstated. The major steel exporters have so much money sloshing around to invest in their steel and manufacturing industries because Uncle Sam provides so much of those nations' military needs, operating at a giant loss to our nation (aside from the military itself, for whom perpetual global occupation is an endless massive gravy train).
This again points to the Democrats being the future saviors of industry, as the senior sector of the GOP coalition will never permit the withdrawal of forces from major steel producers Germany, Italy, South Korea, and Japan. That is the only way to suck money out of their industries (as they must pay for their own militaries), and re-allocate American money into industry (as we transfer it out of the military budget after exiting those countries). Democrats are not beholden to the military-industrial complex, so they're the only ones who can make withdrawal happen.
Now as for the proposed summit between Trump and Kim, we see the same disconnect between the president's individual announcement and the actual implementation by institutional forces in the aftermath. Media figures obsess too much over the theatrical part of government, and Lord knows Trump is the master at that stuff.
But the Pentagon is not just going to sit idly by while Trump agrees to meet Kim without pre-conditions. Indeed, not even 24 hours later, Press Secretary Sanders repeatedly said that the summit would only take place once there were concrete and verifiable steps taken by NK toward de-nuclearization. No country would take those steps before talks even began, so this is the Pentagon's veto of the whole summit.
As with the watered-down tariffs, maybe there will be some minor symbolic action (not a face-to-face meeting with Trump and Kim), but the military-industrial complex will not permit talks or negotiations to proceed without pre-conditions about denuclearizing. Their goal is to wipe out the North Korean government just like they did with Saddam Hussein or Qaddafi, despite promising not to destroy them if they just gave up their weapons of mass destruction. If Kim agrees to unilateral surrender, of course the Pentagon is not going to pass up that opportunity. But that is not happening, so the Pentagon remains dug-in.
To the extent that any progress is made toward peace on the peninsula, it will be led by the dove faction in South Korea, who now have control over the presidency. That has allowed rapprochement to take place between the North and the South, but there must be a similar dove faction in control of the American government for the whole process to succeed. That means a Democrat government during the upcoming Bernie revolution, perhaps guided by Tulsi Gabbard as Secretary of State or Defense. It may also require a dove faction in control of Japan, which they do not have right now.
By "dove" faction, all this means is one whose material interests do not benefit massively from US occupation of the Korean peninsula. The American producers of industrial commodities fit the bill -- their interests have become decimated by our military occupying SK, which has freed up SK's government to spend money on their steel industry and manufacturing without having to spend money on their own national defense. Without these subsidies, South Korean steel would be much more costly and less competitive against American steel.
It doesn't matter if steel executives and manufacturing workers don't drive to work singing, "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair." They will support withdrawal of our military from Asia purely in pursuit of their own material interests. Leaving our military over there provides a gigantic subsidy to foreign steel.
So, regardless of how Trump the individual feels -- or how Bernie Sanders, the individual, feels -- it is these institutional forces that will continue to shape our policies at home and abroad. We will not expect a major change regarding North Korea until a Bernie-style revolution takes over, probably during the next electoral cycle, bringing with it a mandate to make good on the promises of populism and de-globalization that sent Trump into office -- only this time, with the institutional support, or at least the absence of obstruction, for the governing coalition to deliver the goods.
In both cases, Trump the individual has "gone rogue" against most of the White House staff, especially those whose role is to preserve the status quo from the would-be re-aligner. But more important than irking the individuals who occupy these status-quo-preserving roles, Trump is threatening the material interests of the institutions on whose behalf these individuals are acting.
With the GOP in control of the government, that means the material sectors of society that are labor-intensive -- the military, manufacturers (not their workers), energy, and agriculture. The senior member of this GOP coalition is the military, whose distinct leverage in the struggle among elite factions is their control of the use of force -- directing where it goes, in what amount, and toward what ends.
Lacking any institutional support from his own party -- indeed, drawing their ire -- has made Trump largely unable to carry out the major reforms he was elected to do. This is unlike the proposals that are more of the same for the Reaganite party -- such as corporate tax cuts and putting conservative judges in the courts -- for which he suddenly receives overflowing support from his party.
Let's look at the prospects for the two recent unorthodox announcements on tariffs and North Korea, while remembering the track record the GOP institutions have had whenever Trump attempted a major change to the status quo (pulling out of Syria and Afghanistan, forcing NATO to pay 2% GDP, making South Korea pay for THAAD, leaving the social safety net alone, talking up single-payer healthcare, immediately restricting immigration, building a border wall, and so on and so forth).
Trump has been able to refrain from joining new entanglements that we were not already involved in, such as leaving the TPP and the Paris Climate Accords before we actually signed the papers. But not getting into further messes is not the same as pulling out of those that we are already in. And the two recent announcements involve messes we have already been in for decades -- de-industrializing our economy, and occupying the Korean peninsula.
First was the announcement of stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum, which were watered down in less than a week. Now there are exemptions for Mexico and Canada, who are among the largest exporters of steel into our country, and there will be two weeks for the other major exporters to get exemptions, on the basis of being friendly allies who don't pose a major threat to us.
That makes it likely that exemptions will be won for the EU, based on Germany and Italy being NATO allies with major US military bases, even though those two are also among the top exporters of steel. Likewise exemptions for major steel exporters Japan and South Korea, the latter having already asked for theirs after setting up the Trump-Kim summit.
Perhaps there will be tariffs on the metals coming directly from China, but not much comes from them that way -- they "transship" their steel to other countries, who then import it into the US. While every little bit helps, watering down Trump's initial announcement of "no exceptions" will largely preserve the status quo on de-industrialization of our economy.
Trump was able to make the announcement because one of the main globalist saboteurs had recently been fired (Staff Secretary Rob Porter), and because Trump was hopping mad and looking to lash out after Hope Hicks had gotten fired. The trade hawks Ross and Navarro struck while the iron was hot. They did succeed in getting an announcement made of a major trade action, but within a week, the lawyers and other institutional actors clawed back most of the substance, leaving it largely symbolic.
Even symbolic concessions are unacceptable to the GOP, though, as they have all come out vehemently against the watered-down version. They see it as the first trip down a slippery slope, at least rhetorically but also substantively.
The only institutional support Trump has received has been from labor unions and Democrat politicians -- from the rival party, in other words. Producers of the industrial commodities are happy, of course, but they are not squarely within one party's coalition or the other. They get screwed by the manufacturers of the GOP coalition, who insist on cheap materials for the things they make (leading them to seek cheap foreign steel), and they are not an informational sector that naturally fits into the Democrat coalition.
But since the informational sectors that make up the Democrat coalition are not directly threatened by higher material costs -- as most of them don't make anything -- they would be more welcoming of the industrial metal producers, if they could help pack an extra electoral wallop. With the Rust Belt looking iffy for the Democrats, the informational sectors will be required to recruit the industrial commodities producers to win back Ohio, Pennsylvania, and perhaps Indiana (the #1 steel state).
Reflecting the de-fanged nature of the tariffs scarcely one week after their announcement, the stock market has continued to shoot upwards. They sense there is no coming trade war. Even within steel stocks, although they rose several percentage points on the initial announcement, they tumbled by several points on Friday when it became clear that we would be granting one exemption after another to the major exporters.
They'll probably be somewhat up for the year, with at least some tariffs going into effect, but it is not the re-birth of the steel industry as it initially appeared -- and that is all thanks to sabotage from the GOP. Only by throwing in with the Democrat coalition that is insensitive to the cost of metals, will steel be re-born during the Bernie revolution.
The military link to the gutting of the steel industry cannot be overstated. The major steel exporters have so much money sloshing around to invest in their steel and manufacturing industries because Uncle Sam provides so much of those nations' military needs, operating at a giant loss to our nation (aside from the military itself, for whom perpetual global occupation is an endless massive gravy train).
This again points to the Democrats being the future saviors of industry, as the senior sector of the GOP coalition will never permit the withdrawal of forces from major steel producers Germany, Italy, South Korea, and Japan. That is the only way to suck money out of their industries (as they must pay for their own militaries), and re-allocate American money into industry (as we transfer it out of the military budget after exiting those countries). Democrats are not beholden to the military-industrial complex, so they're the only ones who can make withdrawal happen.
Now as for the proposed summit between Trump and Kim, we see the same disconnect between the president's individual announcement and the actual implementation by institutional forces in the aftermath. Media figures obsess too much over the theatrical part of government, and Lord knows Trump is the master at that stuff.
But the Pentagon is not just going to sit idly by while Trump agrees to meet Kim without pre-conditions. Indeed, not even 24 hours later, Press Secretary Sanders repeatedly said that the summit would only take place once there were concrete and verifiable steps taken by NK toward de-nuclearization. No country would take those steps before talks even began, so this is the Pentagon's veto of the whole summit.
As with the watered-down tariffs, maybe there will be some minor symbolic action (not a face-to-face meeting with Trump and Kim), but the military-industrial complex will not permit talks or negotiations to proceed without pre-conditions about denuclearizing. Their goal is to wipe out the North Korean government just like they did with Saddam Hussein or Qaddafi, despite promising not to destroy them if they just gave up their weapons of mass destruction. If Kim agrees to unilateral surrender, of course the Pentagon is not going to pass up that opportunity. But that is not happening, so the Pentagon remains dug-in.
To the extent that any progress is made toward peace on the peninsula, it will be led by the dove faction in South Korea, who now have control over the presidency. That has allowed rapprochement to take place between the North and the South, but there must be a similar dove faction in control of the American government for the whole process to succeed. That means a Democrat government during the upcoming Bernie revolution, perhaps guided by Tulsi Gabbard as Secretary of State or Defense. It may also require a dove faction in control of Japan, which they do not have right now.
By "dove" faction, all this means is one whose material interests do not benefit massively from US occupation of the Korean peninsula. The American producers of industrial commodities fit the bill -- their interests have become decimated by our military occupying SK, which has freed up SK's government to spend money on their steel industry and manufacturing without having to spend money on their own national defense. Without these subsidies, South Korean steel would be much more costly and less competitive against American steel.
It doesn't matter if steel executives and manufacturing workers don't drive to work singing, "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair." They will support withdrawal of our military from Asia purely in pursuit of their own material interests. Leaving our military over there provides a gigantic subsidy to foreign steel.
So, regardless of how Trump the individual feels -- or how Bernie Sanders, the individual, feels -- it is these institutional forces that will continue to shape our policies at home and abroad. We will not expect a major change regarding North Korea until a Bernie-style revolution takes over, probably during the next electoral cycle, bringing with it a mandate to make good on the promises of populism and de-globalization that sent Trump into office -- only this time, with the institutional support, or at least the absence of obstruction, for the governing coalition to deliver the goods.
March 7, 2018
Would you self-defend me? I'd self-defend me: The crypto-tranny appeal of gun-nut girl propaganda
One of the major changes that the NRA has made in their propaganda over the past few years is to feature women rather than men as the empowered subjects. They've also made some of them black women, but the change is strictly on gender rather than race, as they have not featured black or Hispanic men wielding guns -- probably not the image the NRA wants to associate itself with.
At first I wrote these ads off as typical cuckservative appropriation of liberal frameworks -- true female empowerment, true women's liberation requires owning guns, or else you're easy prey for the predatory men always roving around out there.
But in the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting, and the deluge of gun nut messaging that kicked in to prevent any talk about gun control, I've noticed that their "girl with a gun" message is something different. It is not aimed at women, but at men.
First, the typical spokeswoman is attractive and portrayed in a highly sexualized and almost fetishistic way -- not a pretty girl in common everyday clothing, or a Plain Jane. The eroticized portrayal clearly appeals to men rather than women.
Second, the guns are typically large rather than the supposed handgun that a woman might realistically carry on her for protection. That appeals to men, who get off on bigger guns.
Third, women rarely indulge in elaborate revenge fantasies about those who have harmed them -- or self-defense fantasies, which are a sub-class of revenge fantasies, where the person fantasizes about preventing the harm that the offender was trying to do to them.
And to the extent that women do think about these scenarios, it does not involve guns, let alone assault-style guns featured in the gun nut propaganda -- maybe poisoning, character assassination, or hiring a hitman if guns must be used. Women do not get that psychically invested in direct violent confrontation. That's men, especially those who get picked on or are easily intimidated.
Fourth, men are overwhelmingly the customers for guns, and therefore also for gun-related propaganda. They are more likely to live in a household where there's a gun (37% vs. 29% for women, during the 2010s), and are more likely to own the gun in households where there is one (84% vs. 34% for women). Data are from the General Social Survey.
The number of guns owned is a heavily skewed distribution, where a very heavily armed 3% of the population owns 50% of the guns, and most of the remainder of gun owners only have a few. We can be sure the heavily armed are men. So, manufacturers will be targeting men (a certain kind of heavily armed man) when they seek to sell the most products, and club operators will be targeting men when they seek to recruit heavily armed enthusiasts.
Thus, ad campaigns that feature eroticized attractive women carrying AR-15s who are fantasizing about getting revenge or preventing the bully from beating them up, belong not to the genre of "We can do it!" feminism, but to the genre of "butt-kicking babe" masturbation material, where the guy fantasizes about being an erotic girl who gets off on violence in a male-typical fashion.
I call this type of sexual deviance "latent transgender" or "crypto-tranny," and detailed the profile at length here and here. They are similar to the autogynephile types of trannies, who are heterosexual but who don't want to get physically involved with women -- either from awkwardness or total narcissism -- and who therefore view themselves as the object of their own lust, requiring them to take on both male and female sexual attributes. Unlike overt trannies who cross-dress, wear make-up, and otherwise try to "pass" as women, these crypto-trannies do not, even in secret.
The explosion of the crypto-tranny phenomenon has not been appreciated or discussed much at all. If its symptoms are noticed, the observer tends to write it off as a woman who the guy fantasizes about fucking, rather than a woman who the guy fantasizes about being -- and perhaps also fucking, in that autogynephile way of thinking. They aren't just looking for a tomboy who can hang with the guys, and who happens to be sexy -- they are looking to be that sexy tomboy themselves, and play with themselves.
These are the kinds of guys who unironically confess to fantasizing about "If I were a girl, I'd stay at home all day and play with my boobs in front of a mirror," while feeling aroused in their male sex organ. In their fantasy, they have both huge tits and a hard dick.
Here is a typical example of gun-nut girl propaganda, with NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch:
The eroticized rather than a no-nonsense portrayal of the woman speaks for itself, and the large gun gives her a masculine persona. But more than that, they clearly portray the gun as a dick -- it could not look more phallic in the upright position with the base at hip level, nor could the eroticized way that she's holding it.
"Hands off my gun" would be a sexual double-entendre for a man, not for a woman: "This is my rifle, this is my gun; this is for shooting, and this is for fun." It does not represent some kind of sex toy that she would use on herself, since she would be using the gun on someone else. Getting a thrill from spraying bullets out of the tip is clearly more like an ejaculating dick than a toy that women might use on themselves.
What could make better bait for crypto-trannies? How about being a woman who had not just one but two big dicks to stroke while staring at her large breasts in the mirror as she fantasized about violent revenge against bullies?
Or the favored fantasy of crypto-trannies that involves someone other than themselves -- girl-on-girl, where the guy does not project himself into the place of a stand-in male, but into one of two or more babes:
Earlier posts here and here examined the rise of female bloodsports and butt-kicking babe roles in movies as a kind of pornography for the crypto-trannies. Now we can add "gun nut girl" propaganda.
A recent post showed that gun nuts are libertarians rather than conservatives, so it's not surprising to see that they are more likely than the average person to have sexually deviant fantasies -- certainly more so than the average conservative. Libertarianism implies tolerance of all forms of deviance, as part of the larger laissez-faire prohibition on prohibitions.
Like, as long as no one else gets harmed or defrauded by it, then go on ahead and fantasize about being a long, dark-haired babe with big boobs, rocking a red dress and stiletto heels, fondling your big black gun as you anticipate the cathartic thrill of spraying a stream of bullets from its tip. Especially if it's to get back at those bullies who keep messing with you.
Gun nuts never fantasize about vigilantism in the service of a conservative cause in the sexual domain, like shutting down a pornography studio, a brothel, a strip club, a dirty magazine / movie vendor, a sex toy shop, or a gay nightclub. That would fit into their overall fantasy of filling the void left by an ineffectual law enforcement system, only standing in for the police's role as vice squad enforcers. But then libertarians do not recognize the legitimacy of vice laws, so what is there to stand in for, in their minds?
The last popular persona of a gun nut who became a vigilante for a conservative cause was Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, who shut down a brothel and freed an underage prostitute. He was disgusted by cross-dressers and other deviants he saw every night -- he did not share their fantasies about being a woman or anything weird like that. He just wanted to be the nice protector-and-provider male for the alluring girl-next-door Betsy.
That was right as the gun nut culture was emerging, though, in the later part of the 1970s, when the libertarian approach to politics (deregulation of laws, including gun laws) and morality (consenting adults) began to take over.
We will know that the zeitgeist is returning to the conservative morality of the Midcentury when NRA ads return to themes of being a responsible provider-and-protector male, with scenes of hunting, confronting burglars, and patrolling the neighborhood with a posse when bad guys are on the loose.
Degeneracy will still prevail as long as the ads convey themes of solipsistic masturbation as you imagine yourself to be a babe staring at her own boobs in the mirror while fondling your dick-gun.
GSS variables: owngun, rowngun, sex, year
At first I wrote these ads off as typical cuckservative appropriation of liberal frameworks -- true female empowerment, true women's liberation requires owning guns, or else you're easy prey for the predatory men always roving around out there.
But in the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting, and the deluge of gun nut messaging that kicked in to prevent any talk about gun control, I've noticed that their "girl with a gun" message is something different. It is not aimed at women, but at men.
First, the typical spokeswoman is attractive and portrayed in a highly sexualized and almost fetishistic way -- not a pretty girl in common everyday clothing, or a Plain Jane. The eroticized portrayal clearly appeals to men rather than women.
Second, the guns are typically large rather than the supposed handgun that a woman might realistically carry on her for protection. That appeals to men, who get off on bigger guns.
Third, women rarely indulge in elaborate revenge fantasies about those who have harmed them -- or self-defense fantasies, which are a sub-class of revenge fantasies, where the person fantasizes about preventing the harm that the offender was trying to do to them.
And to the extent that women do think about these scenarios, it does not involve guns, let alone assault-style guns featured in the gun nut propaganda -- maybe poisoning, character assassination, or hiring a hitman if guns must be used. Women do not get that psychically invested in direct violent confrontation. That's men, especially those who get picked on or are easily intimidated.
Fourth, men are overwhelmingly the customers for guns, and therefore also for gun-related propaganda. They are more likely to live in a household where there's a gun (37% vs. 29% for women, during the 2010s), and are more likely to own the gun in households where there is one (84% vs. 34% for women). Data are from the General Social Survey.
The number of guns owned is a heavily skewed distribution, where a very heavily armed 3% of the population owns 50% of the guns, and most of the remainder of gun owners only have a few. We can be sure the heavily armed are men. So, manufacturers will be targeting men (a certain kind of heavily armed man) when they seek to sell the most products, and club operators will be targeting men when they seek to recruit heavily armed enthusiasts.
Thus, ad campaigns that feature eroticized attractive women carrying AR-15s who are fantasizing about getting revenge or preventing the bully from beating them up, belong not to the genre of "We can do it!" feminism, but to the genre of "butt-kicking babe" masturbation material, where the guy fantasizes about being an erotic girl who gets off on violence in a male-typical fashion.
I call this type of sexual deviance "latent transgender" or "crypto-tranny," and detailed the profile at length here and here. They are similar to the autogynephile types of trannies, who are heterosexual but who don't want to get physically involved with women -- either from awkwardness or total narcissism -- and who therefore view themselves as the object of their own lust, requiring them to take on both male and female sexual attributes. Unlike overt trannies who cross-dress, wear make-up, and otherwise try to "pass" as women, these crypto-trannies do not, even in secret.
The explosion of the crypto-tranny phenomenon has not been appreciated or discussed much at all. If its symptoms are noticed, the observer tends to write it off as a woman who the guy fantasizes about fucking, rather than a woman who the guy fantasizes about being -- and perhaps also fucking, in that autogynephile way of thinking. They aren't just looking for a tomboy who can hang with the guys, and who happens to be sexy -- they are looking to be that sexy tomboy themselves, and play with themselves.
These are the kinds of guys who unironically confess to fantasizing about "If I were a girl, I'd stay at home all day and play with my boobs in front of a mirror," while feeling aroused in their male sex organ. In their fantasy, they have both huge tits and a hard dick.
Here is a typical example of gun-nut girl propaganda, with NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch:
The eroticized rather than a no-nonsense portrayal of the woman speaks for itself, and the large gun gives her a masculine persona. But more than that, they clearly portray the gun as a dick -- it could not look more phallic in the upright position with the base at hip level, nor could the eroticized way that she's holding it.
"Hands off my gun" would be a sexual double-entendre for a man, not for a woman: "This is my rifle, this is my gun; this is for shooting, and this is for fun." It does not represent some kind of sex toy that she would use on herself, since she would be using the gun on someone else. Getting a thrill from spraying bullets out of the tip is clearly more like an ejaculating dick than a toy that women might use on themselves.
What could make better bait for crypto-trannies? How about being a woman who had not just one but two big dicks to stroke while staring at her large breasts in the mirror as she fantasized about violent revenge against bullies?
Or the favored fantasy of crypto-trannies that involves someone other than themselves -- girl-on-girl, where the guy does not project himself into the place of a stand-in male, but into one of two or more babes:
Earlier posts here and here examined the rise of female bloodsports and butt-kicking babe roles in movies as a kind of pornography for the crypto-trannies. Now we can add "gun nut girl" propaganda.
A recent post showed that gun nuts are libertarians rather than conservatives, so it's not surprising to see that they are more likely than the average person to have sexually deviant fantasies -- certainly more so than the average conservative. Libertarianism implies tolerance of all forms of deviance, as part of the larger laissez-faire prohibition on prohibitions.
Like, as long as no one else gets harmed or defrauded by it, then go on ahead and fantasize about being a long, dark-haired babe with big boobs, rocking a red dress and stiletto heels, fondling your big black gun as you anticipate the cathartic thrill of spraying a stream of bullets from its tip. Especially if it's to get back at those bullies who keep messing with you.
Gun nuts never fantasize about vigilantism in the service of a conservative cause in the sexual domain, like shutting down a pornography studio, a brothel, a strip club, a dirty magazine / movie vendor, a sex toy shop, or a gay nightclub. That would fit into their overall fantasy of filling the void left by an ineffectual law enforcement system, only standing in for the police's role as vice squad enforcers. But then libertarians do not recognize the legitimacy of vice laws, so what is there to stand in for, in their minds?
The last popular persona of a gun nut who became a vigilante for a conservative cause was Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, who shut down a brothel and freed an underage prostitute. He was disgusted by cross-dressers and other deviants he saw every night -- he did not share their fantasies about being a woman or anything weird like that. He just wanted to be the nice protector-and-provider male for the alluring girl-next-door Betsy.
That was right as the gun nut culture was emerging, though, in the later part of the 1970s, when the libertarian approach to politics (deregulation of laws, including gun laws) and morality (consenting adults) began to take over.
We will know that the zeitgeist is returning to the conservative morality of the Midcentury when NRA ads return to themes of being a responsible provider-and-protector male, with scenes of hunting, confronting burglars, and patrolling the neighborhood with a posse when bad guys are on the loose.
Degeneracy will still prevail as long as the ads convey themes of solipsistic masturbation as you imagine yourself to be a babe staring at her own boobs in the mirror while fondling your dick-gun.
GSS variables: owngun, rowngun, sex, year
March 6, 2018
Make them pay for their own militaries, and repudiate debt, if they escalate trade war (NATO, Japan, South Korea)
If the entire GOP-Koch apparatus is going to come out of the woodwork to subvert Trump's would-be trade war, then his only power is rhetorical. But that can still do a lot of good toward shifting us out of the Reaganite regime and into the Bernie regime.
Since he's already covered how much our working and middle classes are impoverished by free trade, which only benefits the very top of the class pyramid, the next major issue he should thrust into the national discussion is how our military is complicit in the de-industrialization program.
Wealthy countries like Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, and South Korea do so much manufacturing and heavy industry, making themselves net exporters rather than importers. Their governments have so much money to invest in their own domestic industries because they do not have to spend the tons of money it takes to operate a national military.
Why not? Because the empire-seekers among the Pentagon brass are only too happy to provide the military power for these nations, operating at a gigantic monetary loss for America, in exchange for getting to brag about how many squares they occupy on the global chess board.
Ordinary Americans do not benefit from the Pentagon occupying more rather than fewer chess board squares -- otherwise we would've seen those benefits a long time ago. It's not like the Pentagon just started providing the military for Germany and Japan yesterday. That goes all the way back to the aftermath of WWII.
Partly this was to prevent the Axis powers from re-militarizing, and partly it was to push back against the Soviets via NATO. Both reasons have evaporated in the meantime, so we ought to pull out entirely.
The Pentagon does not use its occupation of these chess board squares in order to send valuable stuff back to America, like the old system of using force to raid the resources of other countries. They don't even charge rent to the host nations!
The Pentagon provides us with absolutely nothing in return for our funding their global occupation to the tune of trillions of dollars, which will eventually bankrupt the nation as all endless wars have done.
Thus, our fruitless globalist military occupation worsens not only our fiscal deficit -- spending so much on the Pentagon's overseas operations and getting no return on our investment -- but also our trade deficit, allowing those nations for whom we provide the military to re-allocate what should be their military budget into domestic industries, and then importing from them all the things that we forgo manufacturing ourselves. After wasting so much on military occupations, we have nothing left to invest in our industries.
This presents us with two powerful trump cards in dealing with these nations during a trade war.
First, when they retaliate against our initial tariffs, we will pull out our military, and they will have to shift tons of money from subsidizing their industries into providing their own military for a change. That will instantly shrink our trade deficit with them -- they will be manufacturing and exporting less, and we will be manufacturing and exporting more, after we re-allocate that part of our military budget into industrial investment.
And second, we can repudiate the massive debt that we owe them. It is no surprise that these nations are also among the largest holders of our national debt (along with China). They convert their trade surplus with us into buy orders for US treasury bonds, which are a form of a loan that we agree to pay back with interest in the future.
Because our national debt has grown to such unsustainable levels, at first due to military imperialism but now also due to bailing out the financial system for the past 10 years, we will not be able to pay back all of it to every nation that we owe money to.
The natural targets for not paying back the debt we owe are those countries who have benefited so much and for so long from our provision of their military needs. The only reason they could invest so much in manufacturing, sell those goods to us at such high surpluses, and then convert that into US treasuries -- owning so much of our debt -- is that we gave them a free military.
Repudiating the debt we owe them is simply collecting on the unpaid debt that they have been running up with us for decades, by enjoying the benefits of the US military providing their national defense, while not having to pay what it costs. It is a settling of debts owed between two parties, rather than unilateral default.
We will do that also for the massive debt we owe to OPEC nations, as the Gulf jihadist monarchies have enjoyed the use of our endless military spending, without having to pay for it.
The only large holder of our debt who we cannot economically destroy by withdrawing our military, as we do not provide their military, is China. That will be more of a straight-up economic war, although we are still left with plenty of reasons to consider repudiating (at least a big chunk of) the debt we owe them to be settling a debt that they actually owe us -- such as their ripping off of our intellectual property, counterfeiting, adulterating substances they send us (like infant formula), and so on and so forth.
Trump came back to these themes over and over during the campaign, but nothing has happened on them since he took office. As with tariffs, the reason is that he would be directly attacking the material interests of the elites in those sectors of society that control the GOP -- manufacturing owners, energy companies, mega-farm landowners, and the globalist branches of the military.
The GOP is not going to let one guy weaken the party's own elite sectors, just to benefit the working and middle classes in America. Why would they? Just because he won an election? What a quaint idea!
As with tariffs, Trump may be able to pull off some small change here or there -- maybe getting the NATO countries to pony up the 2% of their GDP that they promised to compensate Uncle Sam for providing most of the military budget. That is still not happening for the main beneficiaries like Germany.
Maybe instead of polite dialog to beg Germany to pay 2% of GDP toward NATO, Trump simply holds a press conference or roundtable discussion where he "announces his intention" to pull our military out of Germany, saving us an absolute fortune while not affecting our own national security one bit. Then pointing out how we will re-allocate that military spending toward industrial spending, while Germany must do the opposite -- then let's see what happens to those trade deficits!
Whether or not that goes through (unlikely with the GOP in full control of the government), it at least shifts the Overton window in the anti-imperial, pro-industrial direction. That will tee up the full shift in policy for the upcoming Bernie regime, whose party is not beholden to manufacturing owners seeking to cut the cost of materials and labor, oil companies looking to do business in the Middle East, or the Pentagon looking to preserve its pointless global footprint just cuz.
The Democrats are beholden to the finance sector, tech companies, and media, but these do not have such vested material interests in running massive endless trade deficits through free trade. They won't get harmed by high tariffs on materials since they don't manufacture anything, and they have no need to provide the military for wealthy nations.
At worst, Facebook, Hollywood, and Goldman Sachs do not get unrestrained access to China's market -- but most of that is already bound to happen anyway. And those sectors will still make boatloads of money purely from the American market.
In the larger project to de-globalize American society, we cannot lose sight of the crucial role that our military brass play in entangling us within the great big over-extended global system.
Since he's already covered how much our working and middle classes are impoverished by free trade, which only benefits the very top of the class pyramid, the next major issue he should thrust into the national discussion is how our military is complicit in the de-industrialization program.
Wealthy countries like Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, and South Korea do so much manufacturing and heavy industry, making themselves net exporters rather than importers. Their governments have so much money to invest in their own domestic industries because they do not have to spend the tons of money it takes to operate a national military.
Why not? Because the empire-seekers among the Pentagon brass are only too happy to provide the military power for these nations, operating at a gigantic monetary loss for America, in exchange for getting to brag about how many squares they occupy on the global chess board.
Ordinary Americans do not benefit from the Pentagon occupying more rather than fewer chess board squares -- otherwise we would've seen those benefits a long time ago. It's not like the Pentagon just started providing the military for Germany and Japan yesterday. That goes all the way back to the aftermath of WWII.
Partly this was to prevent the Axis powers from re-militarizing, and partly it was to push back against the Soviets via NATO. Both reasons have evaporated in the meantime, so we ought to pull out entirely.
The Pentagon does not use its occupation of these chess board squares in order to send valuable stuff back to America, like the old system of using force to raid the resources of other countries. They don't even charge rent to the host nations!
The Pentagon provides us with absolutely nothing in return for our funding their global occupation to the tune of trillions of dollars, which will eventually bankrupt the nation as all endless wars have done.
Thus, our fruitless globalist military occupation worsens not only our fiscal deficit -- spending so much on the Pentagon's overseas operations and getting no return on our investment -- but also our trade deficit, allowing those nations for whom we provide the military to re-allocate what should be their military budget into domestic industries, and then importing from them all the things that we forgo manufacturing ourselves. After wasting so much on military occupations, we have nothing left to invest in our industries.
This presents us with two powerful trump cards in dealing with these nations during a trade war.
First, when they retaliate against our initial tariffs, we will pull out our military, and they will have to shift tons of money from subsidizing their industries into providing their own military for a change. That will instantly shrink our trade deficit with them -- they will be manufacturing and exporting less, and we will be manufacturing and exporting more, after we re-allocate that part of our military budget into industrial investment.
And second, we can repudiate the massive debt that we owe them. It is no surprise that these nations are also among the largest holders of our national debt (along with China). They convert their trade surplus with us into buy orders for US treasury bonds, which are a form of a loan that we agree to pay back with interest in the future.
Because our national debt has grown to such unsustainable levels, at first due to military imperialism but now also due to bailing out the financial system for the past 10 years, we will not be able to pay back all of it to every nation that we owe money to.
The natural targets for not paying back the debt we owe are those countries who have benefited so much and for so long from our provision of their military needs. The only reason they could invest so much in manufacturing, sell those goods to us at such high surpluses, and then convert that into US treasuries -- owning so much of our debt -- is that we gave them a free military.
Repudiating the debt we owe them is simply collecting on the unpaid debt that they have been running up with us for decades, by enjoying the benefits of the US military providing their national defense, while not having to pay what it costs. It is a settling of debts owed between two parties, rather than unilateral default.
We will do that also for the massive debt we owe to OPEC nations, as the Gulf jihadist monarchies have enjoyed the use of our endless military spending, without having to pay for it.
The only large holder of our debt who we cannot economically destroy by withdrawing our military, as we do not provide their military, is China. That will be more of a straight-up economic war, although we are still left with plenty of reasons to consider repudiating (at least a big chunk of) the debt we owe them to be settling a debt that they actually owe us -- such as their ripping off of our intellectual property, counterfeiting, adulterating substances they send us (like infant formula), and so on and so forth.
Trump came back to these themes over and over during the campaign, but nothing has happened on them since he took office. As with tariffs, the reason is that he would be directly attacking the material interests of the elites in those sectors of society that control the GOP -- manufacturing owners, energy companies, mega-farm landowners, and the globalist branches of the military.
The GOP is not going to let one guy weaken the party's own elite sectors, just to benefit the working and middle classes in America. Why would they? Just because he won an election? What a quaint idea!
As with tariffs, Trump may be able to pull off some small change here or there -- maybe getting the NATO countries to pony up the 2% of their GDP that they promised to compensate Uncle Sam for providing most of the military budget. That is still not happening for the main beneficiaries like Germany.
Maybe instead of polite dialog to beg Germany to pay 2% of GDP toward NATO, Trump simply holds a press conference or roundtable discussion where he "announces his intention" to pull our military out of Germany, saving us an absolute fortune while not affecting our own national security one bit. Then pointing out how we will re-allocate that military spending toward industrial spending, while Germany must do the opposite -- then let's see what happens to those trade deficits!
Whether or not that goes through (unlikely with the GOP in full control of the government), it at least shifts the Overton window in the anti-imperial, pro-industrial direction. That will tee up the full shift in policy for the upcoming Bernie regime, whose party is not beholden to manufacturing owners seeking to cut the cost of materials and labor, oil companies looking to do business in the Middle East, or the Pentagon looking to preserve its pointless global footprint just cuz.
The Democrats are beholden to the finance sector, tech companies, and media, but these do not have such vested material interests in running massive endless trade deficits through free trade. They won't get harmed by high tariffs on materials since they don't manufacture anything, and they have no need to provide the military for wealthy nations.
At worst, Facebook, Hollywood, and Goldman Sachs do not get unrestrained access to China's market -- but most of that is already bound to happen anyway. And those sectors will still make boatloads of money purely from the American market.
In the larger project to de-globalize American society, we cannot lose sight of the crucial role that our military brass play in entangling us within the great big over-extended global system.
March 2, 2018
Trumpism's enemy is still GOP mainstream, not Never Trump fringe; Way forward is alliance with Bernie
As the partisan reactions to Trump's potential trade war reveal, it is not the Never Trump fringe but the mainstream Republican party that is still the most formidable obstacle to carrying out the agenda that he campaigned on.
The Never Trumpers feel the same way as the mainstream GOP on policy, they just refused to flatter and court Trump the man, or endorse Trump the persona, in order to get out of him what they all want on a policy level -- tax cuts, deregulation, and the rest of the zombie-Reagan agenda.
When it comes to policy that cuts directly against the Reaganite agenda, suddenly we find out that the GOP has not "become Trump's party" as we continuously hear -- not one iota. They all immediately came out to slam the proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum, defending global elite investment and profiteering from cheap off-shored production rather than sticking up for the American working class.
We saw the same thing when Trump had his cabinet officials go out and say "We're not in the business of intervention anymore, so Assad's fate will be left up to the Syrian people". Just a few days later, the Pentagon vetoed that decision and plunged us into an indefinite occupation of yet another country in the Middle East, where we now have thousands of Americans, are amassing a private Kurdish army along the border of Turkey (a powerful nation and NATO ally who we may go to war against because of muh Kurdish freedom fighters), and provide air cover and propaganda for the jihadist militias that we were supposed to get out of bed with. Ditto for trying to get out at long last from Afghanistan.
And we saw the same pattern when the hardliners on immigration tried to use the GOP's unique opportunity to get through a real pro-American program to wind down legal immigration, deport illegals, all while throwing a major bone to the amnesty crowd by legalizing millions of DACA people. The GOP mainstream blocked even this weak solution -- you can imagine how outraged they would have been if the deal had been a moratorium on legal immigration, and amnesty for DACA people tied to deportations of non-DACA illegals.
These observations should temper the dismissive and triumphalist tone toward the Never Trump fringe, as in this column by Scott Greer at Daily Caller. Sure, the Never Trumpers per se have no mass support -- but then neither do most of the mainstream GOP-ers, and yet they're in power, controlling all three elected bodies of government, and running constant interference on the populist-nationalist agenda that won Trump the White House. The donors are the same way -- funding only the failed Reaganite policies that they've been funding for decades.
A party consists entirely in its politicians, its lobbyists, its party apparatus, its donors, and its sectors of society that use it as a vehicle to advance their material interests. Pundits and so-called influencers play little role, and since the Never Trumpers all come from this category, they are indeed ineffectual and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
But the fact that the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce are still major institutional players, sending armies of lobbyists, who will manipulate legions of GOP puppets in government -- that's why the GOP is never going to give up its war on Trump's tariffs, or on his preferred non-interventionist military policy.
As such, there are zero candidates being fielded by the party who support steep tariffs and trade wars, de-scaling our wasteful and failing global military footprint, and sealing the borders and deporting illegals. There will be zero in 2020 as well, other than perhaps Trump himself. There is no way for Trumpian Republican voters to vote for more of what they wanted in his 2016 campaign.
Maybe the party structure will be successful in ending these tariffs early, or killing them before they're even signed (remember, yesterday was only an "announcement" of the president's intentions). Or maybe they'll last through the 2020 election, at which point the GOP as a party will see no more use for Trump and his fellow travelers -- they'll be grateful that they extracted a massive corporate tax cut out of him in 2017, but that's not worth what they would perceive to be an endless trade war that would erode the profit margins of the material sectors of the economy that control the party.
That's when an old-guard giant of the party like Romney -- or, in a pinch, Kasich -- comes along to dethrone Trump during the 2020 primaries. "While we applaud his approach to taxes, sadly these gains will be dashed to pieces by the wrecking ball of a trade war, and no party can allow such a self-inflicted act of destruction." This attempt may be unsuccessful, as it was for Ted Kennedy when he tried to unseat Carter in 1980, but it will be enough to severely wound the incumbent president during his re-election.
This is what happens at the end of a political regime (the disjunctive phase, in Skowronek's model). The would-be reformer from within the party is frustrated by so much institutional inertia, as Carter was in his attempt to undo the New Deal that his Democrat party initiated and had coasted on for decades. True reform will come from the opposition party, a la Reagan taking a sledgehammer to the New Deal for real (the reconstructive phase). The formerly dominant party will now only be able to push back marginally from within the new framework set by the newly dominant party (the preemptive phase, a la Bill Clinton being a slightly less Reaganite follower of Reaganism).
In the present, that means there will be so much institutional obstruction from Trump's own party that he will be largely unsuccessful at carrying out his agenda. Like Carter, who deregulated the transportation sector but not much else, he'll be able to get something done here or there on trade and re-industrialization -- but nothing widespread. And yet even this small amount of decisive breaking with the received wisdom will prove too offensive to the old guard that they will want him ousted. See again all the GOP reactions to just one set of tariffs, from every section of the GOP spectrum (aside from voters, of course, but they do not govern).
Rather, it is the Democrats who are the most happy and supportive of the potential trade war, whether politicians or organizations who belong to the party's coalition (like labor unions). This sets up the Democrats as the successor to the Trump agenda on trade and re-industrialization, obviously under the reconstruction of a Bernie Sanders type leader, not a multicultural Reaganite like Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi (one of the few Dems to vote in favor of NAFTA -- not even Wall Street puppet Chuck Schumer voted for that free trade deal).
The same goes for Trump's plan to disentangle the American military from so many of our occupations all over the world. That gets only minimal GOP support, from libertarians like Rand Paul or Mike Lee, and is much more aligned with the Democrats.
All that remains is taking an entirely class-based approach to restricting immigration and deporting illegals, and the Bernie reconstruction will take over every major element of the Trump campaign. And single-payer healthcare, which Trump has favored for a long time on both moral and cost-efficiency grounds.
Trump supporters who came from a populist-nationalist background should reconcile themselves to these historical patterns of regime change. It will be Bernie-style Democrats who carry out most of the Trump agenda for real. The Republican party will get another chance within those new boundaries as a "slight pushback" party, akin to Eisenhower and Nixon during the New Deal era of Democrat dominance. The Republicans in a Bernie era would be just like him on economics and politics writ large, but differing in some minor way that would let them win a victory in between Bernie and his same-party successors.
It is only on that far longer time-scale that the Republicans will win back power over the government, and rule in a populist-nationalist fashion. First the Bernie-style reconstruction will get three or more terms (as all reconstructive phases get), and then the descendants of Trump will fill in for a few terms.
That's 15-20 years down the road, though. In the meantime, the most important job is to break up the current moribund GOP coalition, and to strengthen the Bernie takeover of the Democrat party. Vote in the Democrats' primaries for populist candidates (there being none on the GOP side), and then in the general election as well.
Trumpian Republicans will never be able to govern on their own terms when the institutional structure forces them to be perpetrators of Reaganism, but only when they are the "slight pushback" party in a regime dominated by Bernie-style Democrats.
The Never Trumpers feel the same way as the mainstream GOP on policy, they just refused to flatter and court Trump the man, or endorse Trump the persona, in order to get out of him what they all want on a policy level -- tax cuts, deregulation, and the rest of the zombie-Reagan agenda.
When it comes to policy that cuts directly against the Reaganite agenda, suddenly we find out that the GOP has not "become Trump's party" as we continuously hear -- not one iota. They all immediately came out to slam the proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum, defending global elite investment and profiteering from cheap off-shored production rather than sticking up for the American working class.
We saw the same thing when Trump had his cabinet officials go out and say "We're not in the business of intervention anymore, so Assad's fate will be left up to the Syrian people". Just a few days later, the Pentagon vetoed that decision and plunged us into an indefinite occupation of yet another country in the Middle East, where we now have thousands of Americans, are amassing a private Kurdish army along the border of Turkey (a powerful nation and NATO ally who we may go to war against because of muh Kurdish freedom fighters), and provide air cover and propaganda for the jihadist militias that we were supposed to get out of bed with. Ditto for trying to get out at long last from Afghanistan.
And we saw the same pattern when the hardliners on immigration tried to use the GOP's unique opportunity to get through a real pro-American program to wind down legal immigration, deport illegals, all while throwing a major bone to the amnesty crowd by legalizing millions of DACA people. The GOP mainstream blocked even this weak solution -- you can imagine how outraged they would have been if the deal had been a moratorium on legal immigration, and amnesty for DACA people tied to deportations of non-DACA illegals.
These observations should temper the dismissive and triumphalist tone toward the Never Trump fringe, as in this column by Scott Greer at Daily Caller. Sure, the Never Trumpers per se have no mass support -- but then neither do most of the mainstream GOP-ers, and yet they're in power, controlling all three elected bodies of government, and running constant interference on the populist-nationalist agenda that won Trump the White House. The donors are the same way -- funding only the failed Reaganite policies that they've been funding for decades.
A party consists entirely in its politicians, its lobbyists, its party apparatus, its donors, and its sectors of society that use it as a vehicle to advance their material interests. Pundits and so-called influencers play little role, and since the Never Trumpers all come from this category, they are indeed ineffectual and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
But the fact that the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce are still major institutional players, sending armies of lobbyists, who will manipulate legions of GOP puppets in government -- that's why the GOP is never going to give up its war on Trump's tariffs, or on his preferred non-interventionist military policy.
As such, there are zero candidates being fielded by the party who support steep tariffs and trade wars, de-scaling our wasteful and failing global military footprint, and sealing the borders and deporting illegals. There will be zero in 2020 as well, other than perhaps Trump himself. There is no way for Trumpian Republican voters to vote for more of what they wanted in his 2016 campaign.
Maybe the party structure will be successful in ending these tariffs early, or killing them before they're even signed (remember, yesterday was only an "announcement" of the president's intentions). Or maybe they'll last through the 2020 election, at which point the GOP as a party will see no more use for Trump and his fellow travelers -- they'll be grateful that they extracted a massive corporate tax cut out of him in 2017, but that's not worth what they would perceive to be an endless trade war that would erode the profit margins of the material sectors of the economy that control the party.
That's when an old-guard giant of the party like Romney -- or, in a pinch, Kasich -- comes along to dethrone Trump during the 2020 primaries. "While we applaud his approach to taxes, sadly these gains will be dashed to pieces by the wrecking ball of a trade war, and no party can allow such a self-inflicted act of destruction." This attempt may be unsuccessful, as it was for Ted Kennedy when he tried to unseat Carter in 1980, but it will be enough to severely wound the incumbent president during his re-election.
This is what happens at the end of a political regime (the disjunctive phase, in Skowronek's model). The would-be reformer from within the party is frustrated by so much institutional inertia, as Carter was in his attempt to undo the New Deal that his Democrat party initiated and had coasted on for decades. True reform will come from the opposition party, a la Reagan taking a sledgehammer to the New Deal for real (the reconstructive phase). The formerly dominant party will now only be able to push back marginally from within the new framework set by the newly dominant party (the preemptive phase, a la Bill Clinton being a slightly less Reaganite follower of Reaganism).
In the present, that means there will be so much institutional obstruction from Trump's own party that he will be largely unsuccessful at carrying out his agenda. Like Carter, who deregulated the transportation sector but not much else, he'll be able to get something done here or there on trade and re-industrialization -- but nothing widespread. And yet even this small amount of decisive breaking with the received wisdom will prove too offensive to the old guard that they will want him ousted. See again all the GOP reactions to just one set of tariffs, from every section of the GOP spectrum (aside from voters, of course, but they do not govern).
Rather, it is the Democrats who are the most happy and supportive of the potential trade war, whether politicians or organizations who belong to the party's coalition (like labor unions). This sets up the Democrats as the successor to the Trump agenda on trade and re-industrialization, obviously under the reconstruction of a Bernie Sanders type leader, not a multicultural Reaganite like Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi (one of the few Dems to vote in favor of NAFTA -- not even Wall Street puppet Chuck Schumer voted for that free trade deal).
The same goes for Trump's plan to disentangle the American military from so many of our occupations all over the world. That gets only minimal GOP support, from libertarians like Rand Paul or Mike Lee, and is much more aligned with the Democrats.
All that remains is taking an entirely class-based approach to restricting immigration and deporting illegals, and the Bernie reconstruction will take over every major element of the Trump campaign. And single-payer healthcare, which Trump has favored for a long time on both moral and cost-efficiency grounds.
Trump supporters who came from a populist-nationalist background should reconcile themselves to these historical patterns of regime change. It will be Bernie-style Democrats who carry out most of the Trump agenda for real. The Republican party will get another chance within those new boundaries as a "slight pushback" party, akin to Eisenhower and Nixon during the New Deal era of Democrat dominance. The Republicans in a Bernie era would be just like him on economics and politics writ large, but differing in some minor way that would let them win a victory in between Bernie and his same-party successors.
It is only on that far longer time-scale that the Republicans will win back power over the government, and rule in a populist-nationalist fashion. First the Bernie-style reconstruction will get three or more terms (as all reconstructive phases get), and then the descendants of Trump will fill in for a few terms.
That's 15-20 years down the road, though. In the meantime, the most important job is to break up the current moribund GOP coalition, and to strengthen the Bernie takeover of the Democrat party. Vote in the Democrats' primaries for populist candidates (there being none on the GOP side), and then in the general election as well.
Trumpian Republicans will never be able to govern on their own terms when the institutional structure forces them to be perpetrators of Reaganism, but only when they are the "slight pushback" party in a regime dominated by Bernie-style Democrats.
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