Trans-radicals: Commissars who adopt radical personas to trigger their own desire for suppressing dissent

Would you cancel me? I'd cancel me.
I'd cancel me hard. I'd cancel me so hard.

During this time of realigning political coalitions, many of those who had presented themselves as radicals have revealed themselves to be supporters, and even hardcore enforcers, of the status quo.

Before, their false nature remained hidden, with no real opportunity to shake up the system. Now that that chance has finally arrived for the first time in 40-odd years, they have decided to double down and intensify the status quo, rather than do something fundamentally new and different.

In particular, they want to keep the political coalitions exactly the same -- they are against the very hallmark of realignment, when a major chunk of one side defects to the other side, upsetting the existing balance of power, and resulting in a newly negotiated compromise on how the society is to be run.

The casual analysis of these pseudo-radicals is that they are cosplayers or LARP-ers -- play-acting as something cooler and more impressive than their everyday reality. They put a rose emoji in their online profile, but they belong to no organizations that are making solid gains toward whatever socialist system they're imagining themselves to support.

The truth, though, is that they are more like a different category of false-presenters -- the transgenders, especially men who pretend to be women. The characters of cosplay and LARP-ing are usually from the world of fantasy or a bygone past, with no current true examples that could challenge the cosplayers and LARP-ers for status in such roles. In politics, however, there really are realigners who want to shake up the system and rearrange the membership of coalitions to hammer out a new agreement about the social order. These figures directly challenge the radical cred of the enforcers of the status quo, who only present as something novel.

A material and structural analysis could look into what role these trans-radicals play in the economy, and where the realigners are coming from, to see how this tension reflects their opposing material motives. But the similarity to trannies calls also for a psychosexual analysis of what motivates these trans-radicals, and why they treat the true realigners the way they do.

For male-to-female transgenders, their primary type is the "autogynephile," or a man who gets sexually aroused from imagining himself as a woman. There's a link to narcissism, since no existing woman could possibly satisfy his sexual desires -- only he himself, the supreme human being, could do so, if only he were female. Hence the drive to become sexually female.

Note that they do not try to become female in other ways, including the defining way of becoming pregnant, giving birth, and nurturing children, or even the related way of being domestic and like a housewife. Nope: their only focus is on the woman's role as a sexual arouser, and their attempt to become female is to become more seductive, slutty, and bangable.

Their goals of altering biology involve only getting a pair of fake tits, crafting a fuckhole between their legs, and maybe taking hormones to make their features softer. They aren't looking to build an artificial womb, to deliver an artificial baby through an artificial birth canal, or to nurse real or artificial infants with artificially enhanced mammary glands.

Their desires are egocentric -- sexual self-stimulation -- rather than social -- nurturing babies. Their desires are non-productive -- masturbatory thoughts and actions -- rather than constructive and productive -- raising children. If anything, they dismiss and often denigrate real women's reproductive function as being "breeders," sexually bland and undesirable. They viciously compete against real women, whether in sports, in fashion, or some other gender-segregated domain.

Because no real woman is good enough to arouse them, they dial up the sluttiness to 11, presenting an utter caricature of "the sexually arousing woman" -- the clown-like make-up and hair, the costume clothing, the exaggerated sexual aggressiveness, and so on.

To sum up, there is an activity (sexual pursuit) with a subject (the man) and an object (the woman). The subject wants to become the object as well -- the man wants to sexually pursue himself-as-a-woman, who provokes his sexual drive like no real woman could. The desire is egocentric and non-productive, bordering on anti-social.

For the trans-radical, the activity is suppressing realignment, the subject is the commissar, and the object is the realigner, who is truly a radical bold new thing on the political scene.

The commissar's libidinal desire to suppress dissent and police the boundaries of coalitional membership leads him ever in search of targets -- and yet, none of the existing radicals could trigger his cop instincts as much as if he could do it himself. Step aside, you so-called system-changers, and make way for the super-duper revolutionary -- who, however, does not want anyone new to join the team, lest their entry destabilize the longstanding order of things within the coalition.

By adopting the skin of a radical, he can act as both commissar and dissident, punisher and criminal. Which is fundamental? The role that he fervently engages in, not the one that he invests little energy, resources, and time in. Trans-radicals are always cracking the whip on political criminals, and rarely bringing new members on board from the other side in order to tip the balance of power in their favor to get radically new things done. The cop is their fundamental role, the dangerous rebel their affected role to trigger their own desire to punish deviants.

And like the autogynephiles, the trans-radicals don't merely mimic the true realigners -- they present an extreme caricature of someone so far away from the ideological center. Anarcho-communist, literal white nationalist, whatever. "Economic populist" just doesn't sound extreme enough, and would not so intensely trigger the commissar's desire to crack down. If the commissar really wants to get off on suppressing dissent, it has to be "far to the left of Bernie" or "far to the right of Trump".

Nor do the trans-radicals mimic all aspects of the true realigner -- or even the key feature, namely, that the realigners are open to shaking up the agreement of how to run society, in order to cause mass defections from the other side, to gain political capital that is sorely needed to make real changes. That is the realigner's other-directed and constructive role in realignment, whereas the trans-radical is focused on the egocentric and the non-productive (leveling up their own status points for how out-there they are ideologically).

Indeed, the trans-radicals are as dismissive of the realigner's crucial feature of shaking up the coalitions, as the transgenders are of women's reproductive function. If you bring about mass defections from the other team, then you're polluting the purity of our existing in-group with the filth coming from the out-group -- that's tantamount to treason, aiding the enemy in a hostile takeover of our own team.

Just as sexual arousal holds no relation to reproduction, for the transgender, so too for the trans-radical do radical positions hold no relation to realignment. They are pursued for themselves, to satisfy individual libidinal urges.

For the realigner, a radical position is meant to spark realignment, which will require shaking up the coalitions' membership. Realigners will therefore be open to compromising on other issues that are not central to the realignment -- either they share those positions with the potential defectors from the other side, or they do not but are willing to bury the hatchet on those issues, while more pressing issues are pursued.

That is a defining aspect of realigners, without which they could not accomplish their pro-social constructive goal of forging a new coalition to implement bold new changes to the social order. And that is what most angers the trans-radicals, as though it were a total misallocation of resources -- just as the transgender thinks reproduction is a total waste of a woman's time that ought to be spent on amping up the sexual arousal factor.

And in much the same way that Buffalo Bill carries the tranny's competing-against-women bias to an extreme -- serially killing women for their skins, the better to pass himself off as sexually female -- so do the big commissars not only try to stifle dissent, but to run the dissidents entirely out of existence, then appropriating some of their radical positions, the better to pass themselves off as politically radical. Just as Buffalo Bill was not interested in the women's wombs, neither are the trans-radicals interested in the realigners' ability to forge a new coalition.

Something greater is going on than the straightforward policing of dissent by the powers that be, understood for material and structural reasons. Why go through all the trouble of adopting a radical persona? Most literal prison guards and wardens don't style themselves as prison abolitionists, Black Panthers, anarchists, etc. There's some deep psychosexual pathology that's feeding into this political phenomenon of trans-radicals.

In fact, it may only be one member of a broader class of trans phenomena. Future posts may look into trans-racial and trans-queer cases, to establish more general principles.

In the meantime, be alert around the caricatured radical -- there could be an intersectionally means-tested Medicare plan tucked between her legs.

Demographics are never destiny in a world of negative feedback mechanisms

Leftoids love to triumphantly brag about how urbanized the American population has become, and at the supposed demographic destiny that will ripple throughout the political world. Sorry, non-urbanites, you've been canceled. Lotsa luck staying alive.

Right-wingers love to parrot the same narrative, only with the emotional value reversed -- it's a sick, cruel joke of the universe that our societies keep getting more and more dominated by urban centers. Cities never sleep from hunting down a nearly extinct species -- the non-urbanite.

In reality, cities have been around for literally thousands of years, and they have never reproduced their own populations. They are endogenous population sinks, as high population density leads to greater epidemic disease burden, higher crime rates, and lower fertility rates. The material standard of living is far lower on average, although with far greater variance -- a few super-wealthy people who cannot be found in rural areas, but teeming hordes of quasi-slaves, who are worse off than their rural counterparts who toil in fields (disease, crime, etc.).

Cities only reproduce and grow their populations from exogenous sources -- migration from country to city, internal to the nation, or immigration of foreigners.

If those external sources dry up, or if there is higher migration out of cities for any reason, then the demographic destiny turns in the other direction -- a supposed future of depopulated cities, ever to be ruled over by country bumpkins and suburbanites. The emptying out of cities has already happened once in recent history -- during the rising-crime period of 1960 to 1990 -- and it will happen again during the next crime wave. Today's return to cities is in no small part due to falling crime rates from around 1990. But crime rates go in cycles, not in one direction.

And the same is true for other forces that affect the degree of urbanization, such as status-striving (pro-city) vs. restrained ambition (anti-city). They move one way for decades, then the opposite way for decades.

These various negative feedback loops keep civilization from heading off in one direction only toward further and further extremes. At most, there is logistic type growth that saturates at a certain level, without going further, such as urbanization resulting from an agricultural economy -- it got more and more urbanized after we adopted farming, but only to a certain point.

In fact, the more common dynamic is an oscillating one -- decades or centuries in one direction, then a reversal for decades or centuries. That prevents a triumphal narrative for either the country or city cheerleaders. The only constant over the long term is tension between the two, not steady erosion of one by the other.

See also: long-term tension between sedentary crop farmers and nomadic livestock herders, where either one could be in the ascendant position for decades and even centuries, only to surrender those victories over the following decades and centuries.

The same is true for the supposed demographic destiny of multi-racial migration. It's possible that diversity will beget diversity, up to a certain point anyway -- that happened when the Indo-Europeans invaded the dark-skinned natives of the Indian subcontinent. And it's apparently happening now in Brazil ("apparently" because of the shorter time scale there, compared to thousands of years in India).

Notice, though, who has maintained dominant status ever since the beginning of those migrations -- not the darker-skinned and tropical-adapted groups, but the lighter-skinned and temperate-adapted groups. So, be careful about wishing for demographic destiny involving racial or ethnic diversity.

But it's also possible that diversity will show oscillatory behavior, whether like an ongoing pendulum or a one-time rise-and-fall. It doesn't look like whites will be returning to Zimbabwe or South Africa anytime soon, after being driven out in the post-Apartheid era.

The Germanic migrations of the medieval period left minimal genetic or cultural traces outside of their original homeland, including where they had been the rulers of the post-Roman period (Spain, Italy). The longstanding genetic and cultural roots of those places proved resistant to even large-scale and centuries-long migrations of foreigners.

Nor did the North African diversity within Moorish-occupied Iberia continue on and on forever -- they got expelled back to where they came from.

And of course the diversity that arrived in North America with the Europeans did not sustain itself -- one group largely wiped out the other, eliminating the temporary diversity of the initial colonial period. Before the Europeans, the Athabaskan wave of Native American migration wiped out the much earlier Amerindian wave in large swaths of Western North America.

This quick overview has left aside the adaptive nature of the political coalition system, which adds yet another source of oscillation to the dynamics. In one period, rural and urban may team up against upstart suburbanites (like the New Deal). In another, rural may side with suburbanites to team up against out-of-control mega-cities (like the Reagan era).

A follow-up post will look at what would happen, just within the left or liberal side of the system, if urbanites determined the future. The black-humor punchline is that the Democrats would only ever nominate Hillary Clinton, and never Bernie Sanders. But stay tuned for a more in-depth discussion.

Crunk was the black dance-punk: Post-9/11 end of the world party music, with no revival today

A recent post looked at the lack of a dance-punk revival during the current vulnerable phase of the 15-year cultural excitement cycle. That genre was one of the distinguishing features of the early 2000s vulnerable phase, and yet there's hardly anything like it today, unlike all the other similarities between pop music styles from both periods.

That made me think of another distinctive genre of the early 2000s that felt too fun and danceable to belong to such a mellow phase -- and yet still channeled the dark tone and aggro attitude of the emo phase that it came from.

This genre, too, has not been revived during the late 2010s, when the similar zeitgeist should allow it to be reborn. The only major difference from dance-punk is that it was from the black rather than the white side of the production world.

Crunk music exploded from out of nowhere in 2003 and '04, far too early to be explained by the decadent and dance-crazy atmosphere of the late 2000s, which was a classic warm-up phase of the cycle, akin to the disco late '70s and the neo-disco early '90s. The early 2000s should have been too oppressively emo and low-energy to produce such bounce-heavy party-people music.

Like dance-punk, crunk appealed to girls, as well as guys, despite the dark aggro tone that turns most girls off in other cases. The aggressive tone is less of a whiny cry for help, and more like a team of drill sergeants chanting orders that the girl's inner submissive hoe wants to obey, after locating the nearest random hot guy. Listening to these songs, I still feel two or more cuties surrounding me to get their grind on. Such a wilder time.

Also like dance-punk, crunk did not suffer from the spastic rhythms and grinding-to-a-halt bridges that characterize dance music from a vulnerable phase. And it was not over-produced and multi-layered, unlike the dream pop style characteristic of a vulnerable phase. The beat was driving and easy to follow, and the instrumentation stripped down to garage-band levels, with a few simple riffs to keep you engaged the whole way through. The shouted chorus did not come off as emo screaming that might put individuals into a downward spiral, but more like chants at a pep rally to keep the group's energy levels high.

I attribute an anomaly like crunk to the same cause of the anomalous dance-punk -- the response to 9/11, which put people in a more apocalyptic mood, discounting the future and emphasizing living in the now. If we have no idea when the next major spectacle of terrorism is going to strike, we might as well party it up and enjoy each other's company while we still can, though preferring a dark brooding tone to remind us of how ominous the climate has suddenly become.

In the old post on the cultural headiness after 9/11, I wrote mostly about dance-punk, but also mentioned that crunk has always been a guilty pleasure. I was dancing in rock-oriented clubs in 2004 and '05, and didn't hear much crunk when it originally came out. But when I started branching out into hip-hop clubs during the late 2000s, it was still popular enough to come on every weekend, even if it was 5 years old by then (an eternity in club years). It also had major crossover appeal, and broke into the playlists of rock and electronic dance clubs.

The fashion of both scenes overlapped as well, with girls wearing a white t-shirt or tank-top and American Apparel athletic shorts or dark skinny jeans with a contrasting white belt -- simple, bright, skin-baring, and easy to dance in. Guys had a more put-together look as well -- no baggy pants or basketball shorts or sweatpants, but slim / skinny jeans, a belt, and perhaps some eye-catching shoes (light-colored, to contrast with dark jeans).

Unlike the dance-punk post, I don't have a handful of exceptional examples of crunk to point to during the current phase, since I don't listen to rap stations. If you know of a lone counterexample that might be out there -- something that sounds like a buried Ying Yang Twins track from 2004 -- let us know in the comments.

Otherwise, we'll end with some of the original dark, brooding hoe anthems of the post-9/11 climate.

"Get Low" by Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz (2003):



"Salt Shaker" by Ying Yang Twins (2003):



"Shake That Monkey" by Too Short (2003):

Realignment in Australia / NZ will come from the right, since neoliberalism came from the left

In a recent episode of the What's Left podcast, Aimee Terese mentions in passing why she rarely discusses Australian politics, despite hailing from down under. She says there's nothing going on, that their politics are stuck in the 1990s, and there's no entry point for a genuine left-wing movement. She means populist left or socialist left, obviously the elitist and neoliberal left have plenty of power.

Why is there nothing like the Bernie movement in America, or the Corbyn movement in Britain? Because Australia is like the Mediterranean countries -- France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece -- in that the neoliberal realignment circa 1980 came from the left, which has remained the dominant coalition in politics ever since. And before that, the egalitarian and populist Midcentury era was overseen by a dominant coalition from the right.

Overturning the status quo comes from the opposition's coalition, after they get enough of the dominant coalition to defect. The dominant coalition just keeps on going in one direction, no matter how sclerotic and catastrophic their governance becomes. They are too invested in the system that they themselves built and of which they have been the primary beneficiaries.

So there will never be a realignment beyond neoliberalism that comes from the left in the Mediterranean -- it has already begun with Salvini's right in Italy, and will happen in France when Le Pen wins in 2022. Nor will any such thing happen in Australia or neighboring New Zealand. Realignment from the left will only happen where the neoliberal era has been dominated by the right (America, Canada, Britain, Denmark, etc.).

See the Appendix below for a concise overview of the history of left vs. right dominance during several political eras in both Australia and New Zealand.

No matter how much the blinkered partisans want to make "left" and "right" refer to "good" and "evil" (or vice versa), they are merely variations on a common theme, which is determined by the material laws of history. The wholesome and egalitarian Midcentury came in two variations -- a left version in the Anglo-Atlantic countries, and a right version in the Mediterranean and Anglo-Pacific countries. Likewise the neoliberal hellhole since then has come in two variations -- a right version in the Anglo-Atlantic, and a left version in the Mediterranean and Anglo-Pacific.

So, too, will the post-neoliberal system come in two variations -- left in the Atlantic, right in the Med / Pacific.

Resistance to these laws is futile. The moribund dominant parties of the neoliberal era will be in the impotent opposition status during the post-neolib era, while the opposition parties of this era will shake up their membership and become the new dominant parties. And neoliberalism has destroyed the industrial-scale manufacturing basis of the modern welfare state, as well as destroying the central banks of all major nations. So something new is going to take its place as a whole system. Whether the new order comes from the left or right makes little difference, and boils down to who is currently dominant but fading, vs. who is opposition yet rising.

Concretely, if you're a populist and want to see the replacement of neoliberalism, you must work on forging a realigned left party in the Anglo-Atlantic countries, and a realigned right party in the Mediterranean and Anglo-Pacific. See this earlier post on Brexit and the disbanding of the EU relying on a realigned left in Britain and a realigned right in France (and Italy) -- Corbyn and Le Pen (and Salvini), against Merkel in Germany.

As a pleasant side effect, anti-woke left women like Aimee will find better boyfriend material when they begin allying with the nascent populist right in their countries. Such women constantly complain about what limpdick killjoys the male leftists and libs are, and tell other leftists not to hold it against them if they seek to satisfy their desires with red-blooded guys, who are more culturally conservative -- the personal is not political. And the red-blooded guys aren't going to hold it against women if they happen to be culturally liberal, provided they aren't wokescolding feminazis. It's just the right union as Me Too runs out of steam this year, and guys and girls look to mix it up with each other again.

Appendix

The neoliberal era began in Australia with the ministry of Bob Hawke (Labor) in 1983, and in New Zealand with David Lange (Labour) in 1984.

Currently, the opposition right is in power in Australia (Scott Morrison, Liberal), meaning the dominant party has yet to enter its ineffectual, disjunctive phase that immediately precedes realignment. That means the earliest that the disjunctive phase could begin would be after the 2022 election, if Labor wins and proves unable to handle the massive economic crisis headed our way (everyone's way). That would leave realignment until 2025, if the Liberal party provides a right-wing alternative to the neoliberal status quo.

In New Zealand, the dominant party is back in power (Jacinda Ardern, Labour), so they could be ripe for realignment if she proves disjunctive. Her party already had to form a coalition government with the populist, immigration restrictionist New Zealand First party (a kingmaking third party last time). Still, in most places, it looks like the big realignment elections won't begin until 2022 or later, so I'd expect New Zealand to enter disjunctive status after their 2020 election, if Labour remains in power, and then realignment to strike in 2023 or 2026, bringing the National party to new dominant status, after they commit to some system other than the neoliberal status quo.

Before neoliberalism, the proto-socialist Midcentury began in Australia with Joseph Lyons (United Australia, forerunner of the Liberal party, both of which were the main right-wing party). They came to power in 1932 after the Great Depression discredited the formerly dominant Labor party, which split in 1931 and delivered a large defection to the newly dominant United Australia / Liberal party, including the trailblazing Lyons himself. Their counterpart to FDR -- the long-serving, tone-setting leader, though not the founder of the system -- was Robert Menzies (Liberal). Their counterpart to Jimmy Carter -- the ineffectual disjunctive leader during the crisis of the 1970s -- was Malcolm Fraser (Liberal). During this 51-year period, only 11 years were governed by opposition prime ministers from Labor.

The story is a little more complicated for New Zealand. Before the Great Depression, from 1890 to 1930, the left was the dominant party (Liberal, then United from its remnants), while the right was opposition (Reform). During the depths of the Depression in the early '30s, the center-left and center-right formed a grand coalition (United-Reform), in order to stave off the further-left Labour party. This meant both the center-left and center-right bore the blame for the Depression, and since the further-left Labour party was the only alternative, they came to power to pull the country out of the Depression, from 1935 to '49. Perhaps if the dominant left (United) had been the sole party in power during the early '30s, their disjunctive phase would have given way immediately to a newly dominant right (Reform).

However, Labour's rule was not a realignment but more of an interregnum, a temporary emergency to get out of the Depression. Realignments are defined by a big chunk of former rivals defecting to the new dominant party, and Labour did not gain massive defections from either the center-left or center-right, despite instituting the Keynesian policies that ended the Depression. Rather, the realignment was the formal merger, not just an alliance of convenience, of the center-left and center-right parties into a single non-Labour party. United and Reform merged into the National party, the right-wing party that began their period of dominance in 1949, which lasted through their disjunctive phase until 1984. The longest-serving dominant prime minister was Keith Holyoake, and its disjunctive ineffectual leader was Robert Muldoon.

The Labour party changed from being a further-left third party, before and during the Depression, to the center-left second party during the Midcentury, an opposition party that only controlled the government for 6 years between 1949 and 1984.

To re-cap New Zealand: the late 19th / early 20th century was dominated by the left, and dominance switched to the right during the Midcentury, with a further-left interregnum during the Depression itself. As of the mid-1980s, dominance has swung back to the left.

Reviving the Big Labor - Wall Street alliance of the New Deal

In the comments to a post below, there's some discussion of how the Democrats can bring the working class back onto their side and become the dominant rather than opposition party.

In this comment, I review the argument I've been making for awhile here about how the next New Deal phase of the cycle is still a ways off.

But as for nearer-term solutions, I'll just cut-and-paste the comments here. The first is about how de-industrialization has destroyed the upper tiers of the finance sector, as well as the labor unions and working class, giving them a common cause to unite around. The second is about de-escalating the arms race within the finance sector itself, which was begun by the lower and middle-tier finance orgs circa 1980, not the Wall Street investment banks at the top of the pyramid, who only deregulated as a reaction to those below, 20 years later.

If you want to comment, do so to this post, as the other one is old by now and has a moderated comment section.

* * * * *

Concretely in the short term, unions and populists should highlight to the big banks and central bank how unfair it is that the manufacturers have moved so much production outside the country, where it can't be taxed, leaving Wall Street and Silicon Valley to have to pick up more of the tax tab for funding our government.

And aside from current spending, our government has taken on enormous debt since 1980, compared to surpluses under the New Deal, because mfg owners and their vast working class can no longer be taxed to pay immediately for govt, leading to debt instead.

All that debt will wreck the finance sector -- either by them having to monetize that debt, or by defaulting, either one ruining the credit score of our central bank. Their financial assets become worth a whole lot less (they're denominated in dollars, which become funny-money under such printing schemes).

Also, with less and less real production being done here, the central bank has had to fill the void by injecting more and more monetary stimulus in order to "keep the economy going". But since it's just a bankers' bubble, it's not real, and will pop. That's not an emergency, "lender of last resort" function -- they're being used as an emergency every day for 40 years.

De-industrialization is to blame for that, since industrial-scale manufacturing is an organic and endogenous source of job creation with good wages. No need to stimulate constantly -- only now and again when the credit cycle tightens. (There was not a single bubble during the New Deal era.)

And of course, finance cannot provide the jobs themselves -- they are not labor-intensive, and will never be hiring in large numbers. Only labor-intensive employers can fill the void -- but with de-industrialization, that means shitty service jobs.

Industrial mfg has high profits margins, meaning if employers compete for workers, they have to pass along a lot of that profit to workers in wages. Retail, food, etc., are very low-margin activity, and leave little for employers to pass on. Only industrial mfg is both high-profit margin, and labor-intensive / high employment numbers. That alone can sustain a modern welfare state and economy.

There's likely more to the story, but that's the basic pitch. De-industrialization has thoroughly compromised the finance sector, all the way to the top, in stark contrast to the stable finance system of our industrial mfg heyday under the New Deal.

* * * * *

As for concrete solutions in finance, the increasing precariousness was caused by deregulation since 1980. And that did NOT benefit the big Wall Street investment banks -- they did not get deregulated until the late 1990s.

Rather, early neolib deregulation was about "liberating" the middle and bottom tier financial orgs to claw their way up the pyramid to take on the stodgy old investment banks. Regional banks like Continental Illinois, the entire Savings & Loan sector, hedge funds, private equity (leveraged buy-out, corporate raiding), barely existed before 1980, let alone were they running riot.

That's who was soaring off the charts during the '80s and most of the '90s. It was all fake, so they kept going bust, but for awhile the investment banks did not have to bail them out. Continental Illinois was bailed out by the FDIC, the whole Savings & Loan sector by a special act of the federal government.

But when a big hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management, went tits up in the late '90s, it was the Wall Street investment banks who had to bail it out. Imagine that -- this new breed of finance animal has been unshackled and eating your lunch for 15-20 years, and then when one of them kicks the bucket, it's YOU who has to pay for their enormous end-of-life services and funeral costs!

Immediately after LTCM's blow-up and bail-out, the investment banks demanded that they, too, be deregulated. If the middle and lower tier were unshackled, then the top tier had to be unshackled, too, in order to keep from going extinct at the hands of the upwardly mobile breeds.

It was only then that Glass-Steagall was repealed, and investment banks allowed to form into mega-banks.

That mega-ness directly caused them to blow up and need bailing out, in 2008. One didn't even make it -- Lehman Brothers. Think of it: every fly-by-night S&L from the '80s got bailed out, and now it was clear the upstart hedgies would always get bailed out. But one of the oldest investment banks on Wall Street? Sorry, don't count on it.

Now our central bank has gotten too big to fail, after jumping on a nearly 5 trillion-dollar grenade in order to "save the economy" after 2008. But it still has 80% of the shrapnel embedded in its body, meaning it can't absorb another blast -- and the next blast will be much bigger than 5 trillion. When the current bubble pops, the Fed will have a whole new order of magnitude of liabilities on its balance sheet, in the 10s of trillions of dollars.

And there is no higher bank to bail out the central bank that prints the world's reserve currency. No central bank of Planet Earth. No central bank of the solar system. No central bank of the Milky Way. No intergalactic central bank. No central bank of all parallel dimensions. This is, at last, the end of the line for bubble-blowing.

In order to de-scale the Wall Street mega-banks, we have to level the middle and lower tier of the finance world. That's where all the problems started. Impose regulations that put those actors back where they belong, where they're not challenging the investment banks at the top. Once its safe, the mega-banks can shrink back into Glass-Steagall style investment banks.

Big labor and their workers will have no problem with any of that. They don't thrive from the S&Ls, corporate raiders, and hedge funds -- if anything, they've gotten downsized into oblivion by them (private equity).

It can be sold as "all actors in the finance sector will be taking on a smaller role, and reining in their deregulated free-for-all behavior". But the real action will be caging up the sub-investment bank tiers, who started the arms race in the first place. De-escalation of the finance arms race -- a nice way to sell it to populists.

Again, only Dems can pursue that -- they're controlled by the Wall Street mega-banks and central bank, while the GOP was controlled by the formerly low/mid-tier finance orgs who wanted to take on the big boys from Wall Street (S&L, private equity).

No dance rock or garage rock revival during this vulnerable phase, unlike early 2000s, since no 9/11 this time

Earlier posts have covered the similarities between the music of the late 2010s and previous mellow, vulnerable phases of the 15-year cultural excitement cycle. First, dream pop as an indie phenomenon. Second, dream pop's influences going mainstream. And third, the dissonant and spastic turn that dance music takes.

The last mellow, vulnerable phase was the early 2000s, so you might expect to see another incarnation of garage rock revival bands such as the Strokes, or dance rock bands like Franz Ferdinand. But so far -- and there's only 6 months left in the current vulnerable phase -- those two have not materialized.

Why not?

Well, they were not staples of other vulnerable phases either -- the late '80s and the early '70s were not distinguished by these genres. To the extent that there was a mixture of dance and rock, it was dark, emo, down-tempo, and brooding -- glam rock of the early '70s, goth rock of the late '80s, and electroclash of the early 2000s.

That's distinct from the bouncy, upbeat genres of dance rock and garage rock revivals that started in 2002 and lasted into the late 2000s. They weren't as unreservedly upbeat as the music of the manic, invincible phase of the cycle, though. They were clearly marked by the brooding, emo zeitgeist of a vulnerable phase, creating an unusual fusion of brooding and bouncy.

You wouldn't expect to find something that body-moving and carefree during a refractory phase, so there must've been something unique to the early 2000s -- and that was the psychological reaction to 9/11.

I've covered that topic before here, detailing how the 5 years or so after 9/11 looked in some key ways like a rising-crime culture, a la the 1960s through the '80s, rather than the falling-crime culture that had prevailed since the '90s. That post discusses the "postpunk revival," as these genres were called back then, as evidence.

It was not rising violent crime rates from opportunistic individual criminals, but something similar -- a perceived rise in the risk of violence due to organized terrorism. Rising uncertainty about the safety of the near-term future makes us discount the future and want to live more in the moment. That really has an effect when the cause is a decades-long rise in violent crime rates, but 9/11 was such a spectacle that you couldn't help but be affected by it, at least for 5 years or so, until we didn't get any more spectacles and wrote off those risks.

And while there has been no widespread phenomenon or social scene around garage rock and dance rock this time around, there are still isolated songs that have taken a stab at it. They just can't find a broader resonance, since there's been no 9/11-like event to put people in a mood of "the end of the world is coming, might as well party while we still can".

Here's one that sounds like the Strokes reincarnated as a girl band, and another that could be a lost track from Franz Ferdinand's first album (maybe alluded to by "this fire" appearing in the lyrics).

"I Dare You" by the Regrettes (2019):



"Lash Out" by Alice Merton (2018):

When GOP replaces Trump as nom, Dems will implode since their focus is 100% Trump

At the Democrat debates tonight and tomorrow, 100% of the focus will be on the single individual named Donald J. Trump -- his evil nature, his coarse tone, his collusion with Russia, his treason, his far-right authoritarian subversion of American democracy, his love of similar far-right dictators (callback to Putin), and so on and so forth.

None of it will have to do with substantive issues. They could focus on healthcare, a major concern for voters, but that would heighten the people's awareness of Bernie being the only one who wants a single-payer system, while everyone else either outright rejects that proposal or dissimulates their opposition. The liberal media will be sure to rush right through that rabble-rousing topic.

Bernie's student debt jubilee is another topic that they'll allow five seconds of discussion on before rushing on -- it's too rabble-rousing, and too unconnected to Trump. The most important issue is to defeat Donald Trump, and restore American democracy to how it used to be.

These braindead morons are in for the shock of their lives when the GOP replaces Trump with literally anyone else (aside from a highly polarizing culture warrior like Ted Cruz). They will wait until late in the electoral season, to maximize the element of surprise. Suddenly, all of the Democrats' appeals to voters will go up in a puff of smoke.

"Vote for us in order to rid the White House of Trump! Wait, what's that? He's leaving after one term, so he won't be in office in 2021 no matter who wins the election? Uh, well, problem solved, I guess, but still... vote for us in order to... uh, prosecute Trump after he's already gone!"

They've been constructing their whole narrative based on the continuing threat that Trump poses in his role as the president -- so, once he voluntarily leaves in 2021, that threat vanishes. They cannot switch their message to one of pure vindictiveness, since that does not present some big common problem that we Americans must all unite together in order to solve. Acting like a bunch of petty vindictive middle school girls is not going to motivate anyone to show up to the voting booth.

After the GOP has preemptively neutralized Trump Derangement Syndrome as a potential GOTV issue, the Democrats will not have the monumental turnout that they did in the 2018 midterms. The seething rage will have no clearly defined target, and they will lose both attentional and emotional energy. There will be even more demoralized voters who stay home than in 2016. No high stakes, no point in leaving the house.

That collapse in Democrat turnout, more than a surge in favor of the Republican -- very unlikely since Trump has failed on his major 2016 themes -- will keep the Rust Belt states still very much in play for the GOP. Trump's replacement does not need to win all of them again -- just enough to clear 270. Ohio and Florida are already in the GOP column at this early stage (and North Carolina is not a blue state). If they get just Pennsylvania, it's over.

Only after the Democrats suffer total shock as the GOP snatches the rug out from under them, and they wake up from their concussion to discover that Trump's replacement has won the election, will they be forced to focus on populist material issues. Targeting individuals leaves the campaign completely helpless if that individual is no longer present, whereas targeting institutional and structural problems makes a campaign robust against the changing of particular individuals in the enemy's leadership.

That will also de-fang their obsession with fascism, Nazis, dictators, far-right authoritarianism, etc. Those systems all rely on a highly centralized command structure, and if we really faced such a threat, why would the purported dictator retire voluntarily after four short years? It's a retarded theory that makes no sense of the world and its problems, and it will lose any resonance that it might have enjoyed, once the so-called dictator bows out.

As usual, the technocratic geniuses behind the Democrat Establishment have absolutely no Plan B, and are blithely certain that Trump will be their rival. They are not even having a big debate over it and deciding overtly that Trump will be their rival, they're simply taking it for granted. And of course the clueless Left has been primarily focusing on the same issues as the neoliberal status quo Establishment -- far-right dictator, Nazi menace, etc. They will be of no use either during the campaign. It will truly be the blind leading the blind.

Only the people who are economically populist and morally conservative seem to have any hint of what is possible, and how to build a campaign that is robust to the potential major shocks. And they are marginalized by their supposed comrades on both the Left and Right, whichever they affiliate more with. It'll be a case of I Told You So after the 2020 election, and then a real effort to forge a real realignment after 40 years of neoliberalism.

I've decided not to rehearse my argument for why Trump will not be the GOP nominee, in the interest of space, but you can read my comments to a recent post beginning here. The evidence is extensive and plain to see, both historical parallels and current events (like the GOP refusing to endorse Trump as the next nominee during their meeting earlier this year).

Aside from all that evidence, just check your intuition -- does Trump right now strike you as someone who's preparing for the electoral fight of his life, or someone who's thoroughly checked out and only looking to save as much face as he can on his way out the door?

Bernie surrenders to Biden's comparative advantage - fake Nazi hunting - against his class-first appeal

Way back in February 2016, before Super Tuesday, I correctly predicted the end of the Bernie campaign based on his shift from class-first socialism to identity politics and intersectionality as he went to South Carolina, where most Democrat primary voters are black. He did not go full libtard on phony racial issues, but he did begin talking more about the incarceration rate, police brutality, and other issues that especially affect blacks.

It was the attempt to "do both" -- socialism and identitarianism -- that scuttled his challenge to Hillary Clinton. Any mention whatsoever of identity groups plays directly into the hands of the Establishment neoliberals like Clinton, whose entire appeal is identity politics -- either alone, or mixed with left-ish economic promises (that never materialize, which is the whole point of distracting with id-pol).

Bernie's comparative advantage was class politics, not id-pol, and who knows how well he could've done with Southern blacks by focusing like a laser on how materially poorer they've gotten over the past 40 years, including under Obama.

And lest anyone doubt how much I had predicted that far in advance, go read that post and see that I correctly called Trump as the GOP nominee, Trump as winner of the general election, the main issues being economic populism and party realignment, Trump leaving aside GOP id-pol (which Cruz took up instead, and massively failed even with GOP primary voters), demoralized Sanders supporters not turning out for Hillary in the general, defection of Sandernistas to Trump (10-15% of Bernie voters ended up voting Trump), and the Rust Belt states of Wisconsin and Michigan being central to this upset victory.

It didn't take a genius to figure all of that out so far in advance -- it just took someone who wasn't a complete retard, and someone who has not been a braindead partisan masturbater their entire life. That's why the events that unfolded during that electoral season took the Very Serious Thinkers all by surprise -- most of them barely have 3-digit IQs, and the rest are emotionally crippled partisans who produce and consume punditry as a form of therapy.

So now it saddens me to see these events happening all over again leading up to 2020, arguably in a worse form than four years ago. Bernie himself, his political circle, and the Democrat electorate in general, have only further minimized the class politics of his 2016 campaign and ramped up the id-pol hysteria that only favors the status quo candidate, now Biden instead of Hillary.

A socialist like Bernie can only halfass id-pol and intersectionality -- if voters are primed to want that, they will go with the unadulterated real deal, the neoliberal Establishment. Nazi hunting benefits CIA liberals for whom that is their specialty -- Jake Tapper, Evan McMullin, and their political vehicles like Clinton and Biden. That is not anywhere close to Bernie's specialty, so such voters would never choose him over Biden.

In a way, Bernie has already entered the concession stage of the campaign, and moved beyond advancing his own distinctive brand of politics, to re-purposing that branding in the service of the themes that will dominate the Establishment's general campaign.

This shift was decisively signaled by Bernie's speech on democratic socialism this week, although the changes have been building for awhile. Back in 2017, Bernie's speeches would only deliver a throwaway line about Russia / Putin / Mueller, another throwaway line about bigotry, and still made sure to emphasize the need to reach out to and convert Trump voters, who were not Nazis but desperate people whom the neoliberal economy had utterly failed.

By now, those speeches are unrecognizable, and would get him instantly canceled by the entire Democrat base -- moderates, libs, leftoids, and anarcho-LARPers, all of whom are shrieking about Trump and his administration representing a sudden and uniquely fascistic threat to the very foundations of America as a nation and to the democratic form of government.

To cater to this demand from the emotionally broken voters themselves, Bernie's campaign has subordinated the class politics of socialism to the neoliberal goal of distraction by Nazi-hunting. In the dem-soc speech, the entire dramatic tension comes from the sudden, rising threat of far-right authoritarianism not only in the US but all over the world. That is the main faultline that separates good from evil, light from dark, Us from Them. It's just like it was in the 1930s. Will humanity save itself as it did back then, or will we lose the war and perish for good as democratic nations?

In this narrative, the whole populist economic appeal is merely a means to a Nazi-hunting end -- just as FDR implemented the New Deal and beat Germany in WWII, so too can we only rely on a New New Deal implemented by Bernie to defeat the worldwide neo-Nazi menace. The improvement to our material standard of living and social solidarity is just a pleasant side-effect of the far more existentially crucial battle against far-right authoritarianism. This is the antifa-cation of Bernie's message over the past several years.

First, the history is completely wrong. Nazi Germany was not a sudden out-of-the-blue threat -- Prussia had been an expansionist nation since it became a kingdom in 1700, after Central Europe had recovered from the Thirty Years War. In the 18th century, they were led by an Enlightened absolutist monarch (Frederick the Great), and had clearly reached major power status by 1870, when they quickly knocked out France in the Franco-Prussian War, and unified the formerly fragmented German states. After reaching their peak around the time of Bismarck, they lost WWI and suffered devastating punishment by the victors. The Nazis were just the last desperate attempt to salvage Prussia's former greatness, and they lost even more decisively than they had in WWI, and were now de-militarized and indefinitely occupied by the military of the main victor (the US).

That centuries-long geopolitical expansion is the whole reason that the Nazis were a threat to anyone outside of Germany. Nobody cared about right-wing authoritarians in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and the Slavic Balkans because none of those nations had been expanding for centuries. The only other source of fear at the time was the Empire of Japan -- another state that had been expanding geopolitically for centuries.

So in the early 21st century, where the hell are these expansionist empires who might actually threaten Americans or others, supposing that far-right authoritarians were to take over their government? Nowhere in Europe, nowhere in the Americas -- other than the US itself -- nowhere in Africa, nowhere in Central or Southern Asia, and nowhere in Eastern Asia. China has been ruled by the left, not the right, since the Communist era, and they are not expansionist -- and even if they were, that would only threaten mainland Asian nations, not America. Its economic miracle is entirely the gift of Western manufacturing cartels using it as a cheap labor colony for off-shoring, as they have de-industrialized their own economies.

The only expansionist nation that is run by religious and militarist right-wing authoritarians, and that continues to pose a threat not only to their neighbors but to the American people -- is Saudi Arabia, expanding since circa 1750, but clearly past their Mid-20th century peak (just like us). In fairness, Bernie's speech does mention Mohammad bin Salman as one of the far-right authoritarians who threaten the world, and who Trump has allied himself with (as has every American president since the Cold War).

But unlike Nazi Germany vs. Europe or the US, the Saudis are a client state of the Pentagon, so all we need to do with them is cut them off as part of the unwinding of the impotent American empire. Socialism is neither here nor there for countering the radical Islamic threat of the Arabians.

Nor was socialism integral to defeating Germany in WWII. It wasn't only the US that had a proto- or quasi-socialist government that arose during the Great Depression -- so did Britain and France, and yet they were powerless to stop Germany. Yugoslavia had an effective Communist-led resistance to Nazi occupation, but they were not crucial in defeating Germany outside of the Balkans. It was the Soviets who did the heavy lifting to defeat Germany. It was not their Communism that helped them defeat Germany, but the fact that they were a large-scale expanding state themselves, as were the Americans. It was geopolitical trends of expanding vs. contracting states, not their internal control by the socialist left or the conservative or fascist right, that determined the outcome.

And of course, the US mostly sat out WWII in Europe. Bernie's speech reinforces the Cold War-influenced Boomerism that America joined the Allies in WWII to defeat the Nazis on account of their being violent racists, and that we were mainly responsible for their defeat. Back on Planet Earth, we only joined WWII after Japan -- not Germany -- attacked one of our Pacific Island colonial outposts. Japan's expansion in the Pacific was on a collision course with our own westward expansion toward the Pacific.

We were not expanding into Europe, so the Germans posed us no imminent geopolitical threat -- and so we let the Europeans fight amongst themselves, swooping in to the power vacuum afterwards to make it a colony (NATO, Marshall Plan, supporting EU, etc.). We infamously turned back boats of Jews fleeing the Holocaust, sent our military very late during the rise of the Nazis, and played a minor role in the West compared to the Soviets' major role in the East. Right after the war ended, we helped install the right wing in power in Germany and Italy, since they were preferable to the social democrats who might be sympathetic to the Soviets.

With Germany out of the expansionist picture, it was only Russia who posed us any geopolitical threat as we expanded into occupying Europe. Just like that, we went from attacking Nazis to attacking the Nazi-attackers. It had nothing to do with right vs left, identity politics, or anything like that -- only cold hard geopolitical matters of who was expanding in a region in which we were also expanding, and who we would be on a collision course with.

Bernie's speech glorifies militarism and imperialism, keeping American Boomer brains ever focused on the one war where we played a decent role, and ignoring the other wars that America fought under the New Deal Democrats. Why doesn't Bernie hype up the Korean War, Vietnam War, support for the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, etc.? Not only because those wars all failed to bring the regions under the US sphere of influence -- and so would painfully remind Boomers that the US military is past its WWII peak -- but because they would discredit his speech's premise that we can somehow contain a "socialist militarism" to only the good wars. If we subordinate socialism to militarism, it will be utilized even where we are clearly the evil ones -- as the Great Society president did in Southeast Asia -- because militarism is amoral, looking only at geopolitical expansion and contraction, not what any of the state actors stand for.

By fundamentally miscasting the sources and results of the New Deal, Bernie's speech fails to re-ignite support for it with today's voters. The triggering event was the Great Depression, not the German invasion of Poland. The forces leading up to the triggering event were laissez-faire economics, not Prussian geopolitical expansion. The elites who ushered in those forces were the robber barons, not the Nazis. The main victory of the New Deal was a rising standard of living, increased solidarity, a more stable economic system and business cycle, and a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, not German military defeat and occupation. And the main losers were the industrialist elites, not former Nazis.

In the ham-fisted attempt to stitch together these two entirely separate narratives, the speech does mention the latter-day robber barons (oligarchs) who dominate our 21st-century society, but casts them as villains primarily for allying with the supposed far-right authoritarians who are on the rise across the world, and only secondarily for their policies of bailouts for the rich, austerity for everyone else. In the speech, it is the far-right authoritarians, not the oligarchs, who represent the imminent apocalyptic threat -- so the robber barons are reduced to the role of fascism-enablers. Hardly the ringing endorsement that the neoliberals would give to the Jeff Bezoses and Walton families of the world, but still minimizing their role and obfuscating about who and what are the real threats to the common good in 2019.

At the big-picture level, Bernie's speech was hardly different from Hillary's speech about the Alt-Right and right-wing authoritarians led by Putin, which was a reliable sign of her demise at the polls a few months later. Bernie's speech only differs on the proposed solution to the threat, not what the major threat is. And again, if he portrays far-right authoritarianism as the major threat and campaign theme, voters will rush right into Joe Biden's creepy embrace. Being the global policeman for liberal values is the Establishment's specialty, not Bernie's.

Normal people understand that there are no far-right authoritarians in power anywhere, other than perhaps Saudi Arabia, that no such movement is even afoot in the US, and that a handful of right-wingers posting anti-Jewish memes on Twitter doesn't matter. Even the occasional mass shooting of a synagogue is not enough to make normal people assess the threat as equivalent to radical Islam, responsible for orders of magnitude more deaths in recent memory (9/11). Mass shootings in general get attention, but there are too many to keep track of, and most do not involve identitarian motives.

With the antifa-cation of his message, Bernie's campaign has boxed itself into advocating for the 1% rather than the 99% -- the 1% of the population who are deranged libtards that binge-consume Rachel Maddow (if Boomers) or blue-check Twitter (if Gen X or Millennial). And by casting Trump as a far-right authoritarian, and by casting socialism as a prophylactic against far-right extremism, he's implicitly condemning a big chunk of Trump voters as fascist enablers. No different from Hillary's "basket of deplorables" speech about what voting for Trump amounted to, whatever their motives may have been.

You cannot run on such a polarizing message and fight for the great majority. Instead, the main source of divisiveness has come from the insane liberals and leftoids. Trump united a large coalition thought to be impossible for a Republican to unite by 2016, whereas the Democrats were then, and sadly still are now, railing against any end to the pointless culture war.

Most of Trump's crucial voters (distinct from kneejerk GOP voters) are ready to defect, in the wake of his utter inability to get anything done in office (indeed, everything has gotten worse that he promised to make better). The only candidates who Tucker Carlson is even remotely excited about are Bernie, Tulsi, Yang, and Warren -- all Democrats, and those whose economic values are left rather than right.

But they aren't going to go through all the costs of yet another seismic campaign unless it's at least as good as the last one they joined. And one that subordinates economic populism to global-scale Nazi goose-chasing is not that campaign. I'm still sticking with Bernie, because he's still the best choice in 2020, but he's not going to get the same level of sympathy from Independents and Republicans that he did in 2016, if he keeps up this antifa-cation bullshit. Nothing short of a total overhaul on these issues will improve his campaign's already dim prospects.

The Bernie movement's goal always had to be sidelining the hysterical freaks and converting Trump sympathizers -- conservative GOP-ers looking to abandon the sinking ship of Reaganism, as well as Independents who hate both parties -- and signing up and organizing those who normally just sit out the primary or general election. Otherwise, the same ol' Democrat voters would nominate the same ol' neoliberal candidate like Clinton or Biden.

They have chosen partisanship and left purity above getting contaminated by ritually unclean Trump voters or disaffected non-voters, and they are getting shellacked by the Establishment because of it. Bernie struggles to crack 20% in polls, while Biden does not fall below 30%, and that gap has only gotten worse since Bernie rolled out his campaign in February. Their realignment will not happen until at least 2024, and if they continue to refuse alliances with those necessary to win, they can forget about '24 too.

The only glimmer of hope is that the upcoming recession will be a Great Depression-level catastrophe, so painful that it forces the libtards to stop masturbating to their Nazi-hunting fantasies, and train their sights squarely on the real-world threats of laissez-faire, oligarchy per se, and inequality, uniting the great majority of the country in that fight to bring back order after decades of teetering neoliberal chaos.

Their fantasies are luxuries that can only be afforded during comfortable times, and so far the current economic bubble has yet to fully burst. If they were working-class, they would have been mired in hard times for awhile now, but they are all professional-class strivers who have benefited massively from Obama's re-inflation of the info-economy bubble.

Once the global central banks are no longer running the printing presses, the venture capitalists who fund their online media outlet will cut them off, and they will have to move back in with their parents in flyover country, bye-bye Brooklyn. Only when they are materially forced to re-join the human race will they be able to pursue a humanizing political project like socialism.

Brexit requires Corbyn - Le Pen (and Salvini) alliance of realigners to defeat status quo Germany

Britain's decision to leave the EU has so far turned out to be as successful as America's decision to build a wall on the southern border, exit Afghanistan, and narrow the trade deficit.

That's because the intended vehicle for these changes was the very party that started the mess in the first place -- the Conservatives in Britain under May and the GOP in America under Trump, each the disjunctive descendant of neoliberal pioneers Thatcher and Reagan. Like bloody hell a systemic realignment would come from the party that has benefited the most from the status quo, by founding and sustaining it all along.

These regime dynamics are what's missing in the recent discussion of Brexit on the What's Left podcast. Aimee Terese and Benjamin Studebaker correctly point out how Britain is in no position to take on the entire rest of the EU -- they're a far larger bloc than even a major member like Britain. So no matter who is sent to negotiate on behalf of the Brexiteers, they will never receive favorable terms from the EU.

The Conservatives, or any Brexit party that amounts to a spin-off of the Conservatives, is guaranteed to fail because their own party has benefited the most from neoliberalism, including EU integration. Labour, once realigned under someone like Corbyn (a Eurosceptic from the left), would face less headwinds from their own party's elite sectors.

But the point remains that Britain cannot take on the big bad EU all by itself. However, this assumes that the EU is monolithic and without its own tensions, especially the potential or actual realignments among its major members, all of which are pointing toward disintegrating the EU and trying to salvage economic nationalism (proto-socialism) from the Mid-20th century.

Italy is already on its way toward such a realignment. The dominant coalition during the neoliberal era there -- and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, including France -- has been the left, whereas the dominant coalition during the more egalitarian Midcentury was the right. (In Italy, it was more centrist, but when the opposition is the Communists, the centrist coalition is the relatively more right-wing of the two.)

Salvini hails from the right, but has struck a deal with the left on the welfare state -- agreeing to a wealth transfer from the prosperous North to the poorer South, in the form of a "citizen's income," in return for pursuing a more nationalist program on immigration and EU membership.

Most would dismiss Italy as a partner in an anti-EU coalition along with a Labour-led Brexit movement, because it is so heavily indebted and not in a strong position to dictate terms. Still, its GDP is 4th among Europe (after Germany, Britain, and France), and its population is also 4th behind those countries. It is not a minor country, but its debt levels leave it more at the mercy of its peers, especially the German banks. But Corbyn should still pursue an alliance with Salvini, even if it will not by itself deal the fatal blow to the EU.

That would require pitting the two other major, not-so-indebted countries against each other -- France and Germany. There is currently almost no Eurosceptic political movement in Germany, and it's not surprising since that country has benefited more than any other from the EU system. Why radically alter what has been working so well for you? They are a distinct 1st place by GDP in Europe, and much of that is real productive output -- industrial-scale manufacturing, not only financial services. That massive weight and ability to make its own real stuff gives it an outsized advantage over the other countries.

So, that leaves France as the nation to partner with for the Brexiteers. Studebaker mentions this possibility, but doesn't pursue it to the logical conclusion -- that Corbyn must form an alliance with Le Pen. As a Mediterranean country, France has been led by the left during the neoliberal era, in contrast to being led by the right during the proto-socialist Midcentury. That points to the right being the coalition that will realign the system away from the current regime, and clearly that will be the National Rally led by Le Pen, which unlike the other right-wing parties of this era, has decided to defend and expand the welfare state, in return for a more nationalist approach to immigration and EU membership.

There is a national election in France due for early 2022, and already the opinion polls show that Le Pen has closed the gap with Macron by 20 points compared to the last election in 2017. Back then, the status quo left candidate Macron won by 66 to 34, while recent polling shows him only winning 56 to 44. There is a major recession or even depression that will strike in the early 2020s, so we can expect those numbers to flip in favor of Le Pen by election day.

Even if the central bank of the US holds off on triggering the recession until after the 2020 US election (far from a certainty), that still leaves over a year for it to impact the 2022 national elections in France, Britain, and Germany.

In Britain, that would mean the end of the Conservative dominance during the neoliberal era. Already opinion polls show Labour + Brexit at about a 50% majority outright. The major trend there is the Brexiteers splitting off from the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats splitting off from Labour. If Corbyn can get those who have left the Conservatives over the single issue of Brexit, then the realignment will be a done deal.

They will need some reassurance, though, and partnering with Le Pen and Salvini will convince them that he's not just a partisan do-nothing, but serious about transforming the system with bipartisan support. Such an alliance would also convince voters that Corbyn could actually deliver the goods on Brexit, unlike the Conservatives, who would not be caught dead partnering with Le Pen or Salvini (UK Conservatives are the status quo party, not the realignment party).

Only by partnering with like-minded leaders in France -- and Italy for good measure -- could Corbyn pull off a Brexit deal with favorable terms, since his delegation would not be facing a monolithic EU delegation, but one fragmented into Germany on one side and Britain, France, and Italy on the other.

"Like-minded" leaders in France and Italy will not be from the left, who are the dominant status quo party in the Mediterranean. In the southern countries, Corbyn must partner with Eurosceptic populists from the right -- the only option to choose from in that region. He might like it if realignment were coming from the left in France, but it is not. Quite the opposite, the left is the source of the disjunctive defense of the status quo, namely Macron.

"Left" and "right" are only minor variations on the theme of the zeitgeist. Neoliberalism has been implemented equally by the right (in the Anglo countries) and the left (in the Mediterranean). Before that, proto-socialism was implemented equally by the right (in the Med) and the left (Anglos). As we transform the system, realignment will come equally from the right (Med) and the left (Anglos).

That is what the task at hand is -- major realignment of the system, not just switching from one variation to another within the same regime. The Corbynites' job is to find other Eurosceptics who will be the ones in charge of the new regime in their countries over the course of the 2020s, whether they are on the left (the Bernie people in America) or the right (in the Med).

I've already predicted that realignment in the US will have to wait until 2024, since the Democrats are not ready to surrender their braindead partisanship and pick off the populist Trump voters (ewww, disgusting contamination from ritually unclean scum). That is true for both the Democrat elites as well as the common voters, both of whom are poised to pick Biden over Bernie during the primary. This is like the two terms of disjunctive rule that preceded our Civil War, the only other time in our nation's history when polarization has been this intense.

I'm sure polarization is also bad and rising in Europe, but it cannot be as awful as it is here. The proof is that Italy has already kicked off its realignment -- and Italians can rarely agree on anything, especially regarding wealth redistribution from the North to the South. The Yellow Vests protests in France have been bipartisan or nonpartisan, and the original Brexit campaign was similarly bi/non-partisan. If they can forge the alliance by the 2022 elections, that will allow a cascade of realignments to be set off in Europe ahead of our election in 2024, which ought to be when we realign under a Bernie-style Democrat party.

Partisan self-indulgence will not only derail any attempt to become the new dominant coalition in one's own country, it will also prevent the international alliances necessary to wield enough collective leverage against the status quo.