Much has been made of the divisions in the Democratic Party with the fringe left making life difficult for Joe Biden. But what of the dissatisfaction in Republican ranks with Donald Trump? The number of non-endorsements grew beyond Larry Hogan of Maryland and Nikki Haley’s refusal to fall in line, and now includes Mike Pence’s rejection of Trump (watch below). Biden and Trump must be some of the most detested candidates ever to be foisted on the American public. 2024 is proving to be an election of the abhorrent.
Biden is sliding off into senescence as he flails ever further left. Trump can’t help being repellent. Both parties and their candidates are pandering in ways that sacrifice the country’s fortunes. Biden attaches himself to a toxic cultural revolution, works to bury the country in greenie central planning, is busy driving the economy into the ditch in a flurry of tax/spend/regulate, and in a bumbling incoherence that strives to rescue Hamas in ceasefires as it calls for its defeat. Whew, what a cognitive mess.
Trump isn’t any more intelligible. He’s quite prepared to unleash Putin on Europe after stopping aid to Ukraine. He promises a “beautiful” settlement on abortion which can only mean more sanction of more death for the unborn. He complains of Biden’s contributions to the national debt while he guarantees an enlargement of it. He won’t touch entitlements; the two biggest – Social Security and Medicare – will soon be ballooning the debt to such an extent that servicing it, in times of high interest rates, will crowd out defense and most of the other normal functions of government. Of course, the payback for all the borrowing will fall most grievously on the young and yet-to-born. But who cares? Right? They don’t vote. The irresponsibility slaps you in the face.
He’s quite happy to trundle down the failed road of protectionism, corporate welfare, and coerced unionization. Welcome to the new “blue-collar” Republican Party, which is not much different from the “New Deal” Democratic Party, the party with the same combination of 1930’s policies that succeeded in turning a depression into The Great Depression. The thought of that prospect makes Trump seem appealing, as appealing as the next hit of methadone.
Mike Pence is a throwback to a time when the Republican Party made sense. Yep, some of that agenda didn’t cater to big business’s claim on the budgetary carcass, or big labor’s demand to rope workers to its chariot. Free market economics isn’t simpatico with featherbedding or the ladling of undeserved benefits to groups for no other reason than feeding their government-fueled bigness. Trump, though, is all-in with his tariffs and his groveling at union shops.
Pence represents the approach that gave us one of the longest, if not the longest, sustained period of economic growth. For decades after Reagan, subsequent presidents were surfers riding the big wave. Even a Democrat president, Bill Clinton, had to concede as much in his 1996 state of the union address, “The era of big government is over.”
Then, along comes the Obama and Biden Democrats to implement their hostility to success and resuscitate the cult of big government. Then, along comes Trump to hitch Republican fortunes to the cult. Big names in the Republican tent are keen to construct a welfare state for hopefully their newfound blue-collar constituency, and even to declare their conversion to unionization and dislike for right-to-work. The outspoken Sen. Josh Hawley (R, Mo.) burnished his about-face by joining striking UAW workers recently in Wentzville, Mo., and announcing his opposition to any federal right-to-work legislation. Heaven forbid that workers should not be forced into a self-serving, left-wing labor cartel. Nixon’s 1971 remark that “we’re all Keynesians now” could be updated to “we’re all for closed shops now” for the now “populist” GOP.
Funny thing, none of this big government agenda ever really worked. The illusion of success peaked in the 1950s when America’s foreign competitors were still clearing the rubble from WWII. America was never bombed or invaded so much excess was tolerated in a constricted market without economic rivals. Fat labor contracts and absurd work rules with much featherbedding larded American manufacturing and transportation. Hawley is happy to bring it back, with the stagflation of the 1970s tagging along.
Pence is a living reminder of what worked. There are a few people still breathing who don’t suffer from the amnesia. But amnesia is in vogue. Democrats remain hooked on the belief in a coterie of Harvard grads scattered in big government bureaus who will save us from ourselves, or, for some, Karl Marx’s scheme can be magically made to succeed. Come to think of it, it might be less amnesia than the sheer stubbornness that comes with ignorance.
For Trump partisans, amnesia remains as the lone explanatory contender. Either that or blatant opportunism of people who should know better. That’s the divide within the party: those with amnesia and those like Pence. Please watch Martha McCallum’s interview with Pence, about 5 minutes into it, for a reminder that there are people who remember Reaganomics.
What was Anheuser-Busch, Inc., thinking? For that matter, what was Disney, Inc., thinking? Dylan Mulvaney as the face of Bud Light? Add the bigs at MLB, the NFL, NBA, and NHL to the socially detached. The list of corporate heavies insulting their customer bases is quite long. They aren’t even aware that they have positioned themselves at the edge of a culture war. A beer brand strongly identified with the lunch-pail crowd decides to make a boy-turned-girl the face of its product. Did it occur to anyone in the c-suite that this could be a problem? I guess not. Why? The mediocrities at the helm of our big corporations are people completely out to lunch, out of touch, or what have you.
I suspect the disconnect has much to do with something identified by Charles Murray in his book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010”. An intensifying social nepotism among people of increasingly uniform background has created an insular managerial class ignorant of the world beyond their bubble, much like the nobility at Versailles. Thus, they are caught flat-footed when an advertising strategy that is broached at a wine soiree goes awry. It only sounds compelling to those similarly closeted. Outside, for the rest of us, it’s absolute looney tunes.
This is a girl, Alissa Heinerscheid, the vice president of marketing for Anheuser-Busch, with the monotonous social resumé of her class: the same elite schooling and social entanglements and experiences. They don’t drink the stuff but are identical to the other inhabitants of corporate headquarters. They have the sensibilities of the Harvard life but lack an acquaintance with regular life. I suspect that the same happenstance applies to every institution under the management of the socially privileged and cocooned.
Alissa Heinerscheid, Anheuser-Busch ad exec.Alissa Heinerscheid as a Harvard undergrad at one of her Isis Club’s bashes.
Credentials are no protection from the bumbling mediocrities who have such great power over livelihoods. We are living through a time when “elite” and “expert” makes one cringe, like watching the face of transgenderism become the face of Bud Light.
Be my guest and watch the Sky News report on the story.
Trump supporter and Antifa member confront each other, 2017.
“We are divorced, North from South, because we have hated each other so.” — Mary Boykin Chestnut from her diary at the onset of the American Civil War.
Today, one could substitute “urban from rural” for “North from South”. Please be cautioned, though, that some blowhards will manage to warp the nature of the divide. Marjorie Taylor Greene, that grand dame of unhinged hyperbole on the right, recently tweeted and repeated on Sean Hannity, “We need a national divorce.” She added, “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.” Her national divorce is incomprehensible since her blue/red dividing lines don’t neatly conform to state boundaries. It is more intrastate than anything, between a plethora of blue freckles against a sea of red across the entire national domain. That reality captures the essence of the current impasse. The root of our disjunction is cultural. A fundamental difference of ethos separates the blue dots from the red swaths.
The split consists of mutually incompatible mindsets with one being revolutionary and the other defensive of America’s founding. Both sides didn’t mutually move way from each other. One leaped from the other as if it had the plague. The key precipitating factor is the adoption of a radical cultural revolution by social, commercial and political elites in concentrated urban and academic nodes. Ronald Reagan once said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.” Well, America didn’t leave rural areas, but it certainly was kicked out of these nodes of concentrated power and influence. The separation is the logical outgrowth of the radicalization of our cultural elites.
The radicalization of the blue dots – what today makes them blue (actually red in its historical meaning) – consists in the adoption of a particular Marxist’s ideas on how to advance the revolution in spite of popular resistance to it. Antonio Gramsci in the 1930’s penciled out his grand strategy to advance the worldwide revolution. Karl Marx’s original idea was the organic development of a worker class consciousness which would culminate in the seizure of the means of production and set the world on the path to utopia. Others, including Lenin and Gramsci, noticed that it wasn’t happening as predicted. Lenin’s solution was a vanguard elite to precipitate the overthrow of the existing order. For his part, Gramsci advocated a “long march” through cultural institutions and civil society, the social elements that lie mostly between the people and government (civil society: churches, charities, social organizations, schools, businesses).
Antonio Gramsci
Lenin’s coup d’état expired with the implosion of the USSR in 1991 – speaking of internal contradictions that culminate in revolution (typical Marxist rhetoric). Gramsci, who died before he was set to be released from Mussolini’s jail in 1937, would posthumously succeed beyond his wildest dreams. He became the darling of the 1960’s New Left that would quickly morph into today’s progressivism. A hive of intertwined Gramsci acolytes dominates many of our important institutions such as the schools, the Fortune 500 c-suite, media, entertainment, foundations, charities, mainline churches, the administrative state, the Democratic Party, and of course higher ed.
The danger of this new Gramscian upper class to the rest of the country, so isolated as they are, was best expressed by Charles Murray in his book, Coming Apart:
“Many of the members of the new upper class are balkanized. Furthermore, their ignorance about other Americans is more problematic than the ignorance of other Americans about them. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers. It is inevitable that people have large areas of ignorance about how others live, but that makes it all the more important that the members of the new upper class be aware of the breadth and depth of their ignorance.”
Truckers descend on DC in 2022.
So ubiquitous are Gramsci’s ideas that you at least know them intuitively. They are everywhere. The notorious CRT is just the application of Gramsci’s Critical Theory to racial matters. It’s the same formula when considering gender, ethnicity, or mixtures of the host of identities (intersectionality) encompassed within the “other”, the so-called oppressed. Favoritism and oppression in the Gramscian hivemind are embedded in the culture, even if it has been superficially expunged from government. It’s systemic in the culture, they say. Real revolution won’t happen if the broader culture isn’t enlisted in the effort. Today, they succeeded for the most part.
The influence of the hivemind may be what John O’Sullivan had in mind in his law of organizational behavior: all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. The prevalent hivemind is too powerful to ignore. The evidence is all around. TV commercials are replete with representations of the “other” far beyond any reasonable relationship to their portion of the population. Those same ads are boosters for the ideology’s favorite products such as ev’s, as well as campaigns against the hated plastics and fossil fuels, alongside a push for the stakeholder corporate-management nonsense that threatens the health of my pension. MLB moved the Allstar Game; the NFL diluted the national anthem with the addition of an identity anthem; the kneelings; the black power fist thrusts. Popular entertainment and their awards extravaganzas are not without their ritual display of the putative threat of systemic racism and illusory attacks on the “other”. DEI and CRT are everywhere in curriculums, hiring, and admissions, with a baleful effect on standards and morale.
An entire industry has appeared overnight to cater and push the agenda on adults and their children. All of it is meant to bend the mind to accept the advantaging of one group at the expense of another, all of it based on race, gender, and ethnicity identity. We’re back to a new Jim Crow.
The assault on the minds of children is the most outrageous. Outright pornography is introduced to adolescents under the guise of furthering tolerance for the sexual “other” (transgendered, etc.). The distinction between mere tolerance and ideological recruitment won’t be fully appreciated on the part of the teacher-as-propagandist or obviously an impressionable high school sophomore, thereby artificially swelling the ranks of this new “other” in a social contagion. Behavior and language – if presented on radio or television, they would be eligible for a fine or loss of license – is now part of school and training curriculums, and the inventories of school libraries, for 8-year-olds in some places. Child abuse laws in states like California have been warped to shield children from parental interference in a minor’s choice to engage in essentially experimental sex-change interventions.
California has gone so far as declared itself to be the newest kind of sanctuary: a haven for a minor’s decision to break free of their parents’ influence, from any place, state, or country of origin. An underground railroad to the golden state for legally protected child sexual mutilation will soon follow.
A child’s newfound identity as a gender “other” will be reinforced by an absence of countervailing views, opposing opinions having been quashed by entrenched activists dominating society’s institutions. The struggle in the newsroom at the NY Times is instructive. Prior to 2021, the paper treated the issue of trans ideology as if there was only one side, the trans activists’ side. You know, it’s the same one given to your kids in their school: sex isn’t binary; denial of gender identity is bigotry; refusals to affirm a child’s self-diagnosis are akin to murder by suicide; a medical consensus exists in support of all things trans; the recent increase in teen trans self-identity isn’t evidence of a social contagion. Truth be told, a defensible counterpoint can be made to each one of these contentions, but it didn’t appear on the pages of the Times. Then, dissenters found other outlets like Bari Weiss’s Substack page.
After activists in the newsroom got opinion editor James Bennet to resign for approving a Tom Cotton op-ed, his replacements began to show some spine in not kowtowing to the radicals in their midst. Some opinion pieces questioning the newsroom orthodoxy began to appear. The hive was riled about having to face an opposing point of view. LGBTQ+ activist groups penned a letter to the paper condemning the openness. A group of contributors sent one railing against the simple recognition of another side in the debate. For them, there is no debate.
Their mind is closed and want to see everyone’s mind similarly clamped shut. In one of the letters, they declared, “. . . stop questioning science that is SETTLED.” Where have we heard that before? End a debate by simply issuing the fatwah of “SETTLED” without stooping so low as to prove their position.
The censorship makes the unproven and untrue seem plausible. At this point, the Gramscian “long march” sheds its cloak of tolerance to expose its true totalitarian nature. The philosopher Robert P. George has an eloquent description of the difference between an authoritarian and totalitarian:
“Ordinary authoritarians are content to forbid people from speaking truths. Totalitarians insist on forcing people to speak untruths.”
Cancel culture is forcing the gullible to speak untruths. We are running the danger of an entire generation being coaxed into believing contestable ideas are uncontestable. That’s dangerous. It’s one sure way for humaneness to disappear from humanity. People are frog-marched out of their jobs and free speech and conscience are suppressed. Public intellectuals, academics, and people of professional accomplishment who disagree are dismissed as “deniers”, “. . . phobics”, haters, and blocked from outlets.
The reigning neo-Marxists have, maybe forever, mutilated the meaning of words such as “consensus”. Their “consensus” – “the science is SETTLED” – is the wedge that is driving rural from urban. The blue nodes are the nexus of this Gramscian cultural revolution. Pardon people in the countryside for noticing this lurch into insanity. A good portion of the country doesn’t want to go where DEI consultants want to lead it.
Previously travelled routes to the socialist hyper-state have only led to misery. Now, will I be “cancelled” for saying it?
RogerG
Read more here:
* Charles Murray’s book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” is an excellent place to start research into our current predicament.
* “Biography of Antonio Gramsci”, Nicki Lia Cole, PHD, ThoughtCo.com, 8/14/2019, at https://www.thoughtco.com/antonio-gramsci-3026471
* An additional concise survey of the life and influence of Antonio Gramsci can be found here: “The Long March Back”, Nate Hochman, National Review Online, 2/16/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-long-march-back/
* A brief account of the philosophy of Princeton’s Robert P. George can be found here: “The Georgian Way”, Andrew T. Walker, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, National Review Magazine, 3/6/2023
* The struggle in the NY Times newsroom is captured here: “All the News That’s Fit to Debate”, Madeine Kearns, National Review Magazine, 3/20/2023
A mural by street artist PBOY depicting yellow vest protesters inspired by Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People. (photo: Philippe Lopez/AFP)
“The green dreams of urbanites spark outrage in rural areas.” – Joel Klotkin, executive director of the Urban Reform Institute, and respectively Presidential and Washington Fellow at Chapman and Claremont Universities
Joel Klotkin’s newest piece on the urban/rural divide would be a revelation for those comfortable in their biases and lifestyle in their insulated, well-to-do urban enclaves (see below).
Joel Klotkin
They control urban-dominated states like California and are conducting a Sherman-esque scorched-earth march through the hinterlands to make them “howl” in forced conformity to a dubious enviro ideology. Their William Tecumseh Sherman flanking strategy involves the annihilation of vast stretches of flyover country in windmill forests and blankets of solar panels in conjunction with attacks on the farmers’ products and production inputs. Make no mistake about it, it’s at least a cold war, and occasionally a hot one, on those who feed the world’s hungry and provide the material backbone for the cultural commissariat’s own luxurious lifestyle.
Ironically, it’s an attack on themselves if they only thought deeper than a star-struck Davos groupie totally consumed in enviro agitprop. Anyway, they’re relaxed because it’ll bankrupt others further down the wealth pyramid first. They’re like Rome’s patricians laughing at Nero fiddling as the flames slowly approach their villas.
It’s an ideological crusade centering on climate change and should not be mistaken for real science. Leaps of faith are required to overcome huge holes in logic and fact. Here’s some “What’s” to ponder. What’s the degree of human impact on climate to ascertain urgency? What’s the level of positive effect on climate from a sudden shackling of the U.S. population to unreliable and expensive energy? What’s the influence on other countries, or will it be ignored? No amount of computer modeling can overcome these holes in the train of logic since software has always been susceptible to GIGO – garbage in, garbage out. The model is only as good as its designer. Artificial intelligence isn’t immune. On this topic, ideology trumps scientific objectivity all too often.
One fact constantly escapes the synapses of this secular faith’s upscale adherents: energy density. No amount of “we’ll innovate our way through the problem” can mask this ugly reality. Their favorite sources for energy “sustainability” are the feebly dense wind and solar – they need an awful lot of space to be practical. These contraptions require vast state-sized stretches of landscape on the order of magnitude of Tennessee to Texas, depending on how close you want to get to “net zero” in carbon emissions. What does that mean? It means the consumption of huge swaths of open space, wilderness, and land devoted to food and fiber. A dystopian future awaits in the nerve-rending and constant hum of wind turbines and a consigning of small town and rural residents to a hellish view of much of their surroundings under expansive pavements of solar panels or intimidating chorus lines of giant towers extending over the horizon. Watch real estate values and quality of life plummet for rural, small town, exurban residents.
A wind project in Michigan farm area in 2013.A sea of solar panels in Portugal.
And guess what? You still need fossil fuel backup which adds to the cost misery of the whole scheme. If batteries are to be your lifeline around the problem of blackouts and having to fire up backup gas-powered steam turbines, remember, the law of tradeoffs isn’t suspended. More resources pumped into this black hole translates into lost investment in medicine, manufacturing technology, food production and distribution, water, etc. The alternatives sacrificed are too numerous to mention.
That’s the glory of free markets, though; the voluntary choices of thousands, if not millions, sort this out. The rule of bureaucrats and pandering demagogues in elective office, when given billions and trillions of dollars to play with, are more famous for boondoggles. Remember Solyndra or California’s train to nowhere, parts languishing and graffitied like a LA Stonehenge in the Central Valley? I don’t expect Millennials, Gen Z’ers, and those following to have an inkling of life in the old USSR under a vast bureaucracy’s central planning, given the sorry state of our schools. California is chugging full speed into this fog of ignorance.
California’s upper crust may be the most visibly intoxicated by the eco-jihad but the mania is evident worldwide. Farmers and rural and small-town residents around the world are about to be engulfed in a plundering of their spaces by the half-witted infatuations of zealots with money and influence. But a counterrevolution is kicking in. In Europe, French truckdrivers and farmers rose up in the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests) protests in November 2018 against the new greenie fuel taxes. Dutch farmers were brimming with hostility over crippling emissions and fertilizer regulations just last year. So devastating are the potential impacts of the new rules that a projected 3,000 Dutch farms may be lost in the next few decades.
Europe isn’t alone. African countries like Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa have registered similar protests to Davos flights of fancy. The path to the ecotopia is lined with appropriated farmland, farmers, and everyone else who provide the hands, backs, and brains for the jet set to live in luxurious isolation.
Yep, ecomania among the insular well-to-do is poison to blue collars and everyone outside a country’s super zips. Joel Klotkin is right to use the world “colonize” in describing the imperial designs of cultural power brokers for the areas of the country who don’t vote and live like them. Occasionally, colonists rise up. Does Lexington and Concord remind you of anything?
The yellow vest protests in Paris, November 2018.Farmers gather with their vehicles next to a Germany/Netherlands border sign during a protest on the A1 highway near Rijssen, Netherlands, June 29. They are protesting the Dutch Government’s nitrogen plans, which would eliminate a sizable number of farms. (photo: Vincent Jannink / AFP via Getty Images)
Please read Joel Klotkin’s piece below.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Much thanks to Joel Klotkin for his research in “Energy Colonialism Will Worsen the Urban-Rural Divide”, Joel Klotkin, National Review Online, 3/3/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/energy-colonialism-will-worsen-the-urban-rural-divide/
* “’Yellow Vests’: The elites talk about the end of the world, when we talk about the end of the month”, Le Monde, 11/24/2018, at https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2018/11/24/gilets-jaunes-les-elites-parlent-de-fin-du-monde-quand-nous-on-parle-de-fin-du-mois_5387968_823448.html
* “Farmers’ Protest in Netherlands Reflects Rise of Popular Revolts in Europe”, National Catholic Register, 7/29/2022, at https://www.ncregister.com/news/farmers-protest-in-netherlands-reflects-rise-of-popular-revolts-in-europe
The Great Awokening in the wake of George Floyd, and spurred on by Obama’s decade-long sermonizing, was actually The Great Disconnect for the Democratic Party. The Party is simply out of touch. No better example can be found of the Party’s separation from most people’s lives than the picture of a hard-working and dirty coal miner attending a University of Kentucky basketball game with his son (see below). This coal miner is as far removed from the funhouse/playhouse campus of Twitter as one can imagine – in ways more than geography. The picture captures the Democrats’ predicament.
The Democratic Party traded blue-collars for the pampered denizens of faculty lounges and white-collars sheltered in air-conditioned offices and free to be enraptured without consequences by gauzy ideologies. The hunt to combat climate change, an undefinable racism, and transphobia jumped to the front and center and over the concerns of people facing worsening family budgets, schools, and safety.
What do the Democrats have to offer? Nothing but misery. They’re after that guy’s job. Biden goes out on the stump and proclaims an end to drilling and the use of coal. The Party is all agog in fantasies of forests of windmills and vast expanses of solar panels replacing nuclear, coal, and natural gas. And why are they so enthusiastic about taking away that man’s livelihood? Answer: a climate-change hysteria that is as unscientific as it is illogical. It’s more religious than anything. It can only be entertained in the isolated and pleasant indoor climates made possible by the toil and sweat of people like that dirty miner in the stands with his son. The Party has become an institutional affront to most of working America.
Do you think that only he knows the dirty secret of the Party turning its back on him? To borrow from Biden, come on, man. Working America encompasses both sexes and all races and ethnicities. Work is color and gender blind. So, regardless of melanin count and genitalia, many are walking away from a party much more identified with techie billionaires, Antifa, and Sierra Club conferees. Thus, a rising GOP black and Latino vote.
For a Democrat, the picture below should hit you in the gut. What are you doing to that man and his son?
Michael McGuire covered in soot after a shift in the mines. He rushed to be with his son, Easton, for the first live basketball game together at the University of Kentucky. (photo: WKYT)
Macomb County Republican Party Convention from August of 2020.
Reporter Salena Zito, co-author of “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics” of 2018, has long been sensitive to the views of those in Red America and accurately diagnosed the problem of an America dominated by an out-of-touch bi-coastal elite that set the stage for Trump’s amazing win in 2016. We have moved on, but Trump hasn’t. The Trump of 2016 is now the Trump of “I was cheated”, constantly regaling his followers at rallies with his complaints about 2020. In this column, she reports that the Macomb County, Michigan, Republican Party has had enough. At their county party convention, important for choosing county party leaders and candidates, county delegates threw out the party leadership that was obsessed with re-litigating 2020. We’ll have to wait and see if the party across the nation is willing to dodge the bullets that Trump is firing at it.
I have long maintained that Trump is principally responsible for the loss of the two Georgia Senate seats to neo-Bolsheviks, of all people, in Georgia of all places! A dispirited post-election Republican electorate was further dispirited by Trump’s post-election grandiose and unsupportable charges. If there ever was a time for “Move On”, this is it.
Trump at April 2 rally in Michigan.
Macomb County Republican delegate Jamie Roe described the scene: “Last night [April 14], everyone who was focused on winning the election in 2022 had been pushed over the edge.” He added, “Fed-up activists and elected officials joined together to remove the Executive Committee and officers from office and replace them with a new group focused solely on winning in 2022 and not on the past.”
The Trumpers have long called disloyal Republicans – disloyal to Trump, that is – RHINOs. Yet, expressing fealty to a person is much more reminiscent of “in name only” than loyalty to a party. The pot calling the kettle black? Projection?
Macomb County may be a healthy bellwether for this year’s elections. It was your typical blue-collar Democrat bastion but was shifting red as the Democratic Party became a reflection of our brain-dead college faculty lounges. A blue-collar Republican Party doesn’t have to be equally as brain dead. At last, the party may be in the process of shaking off the personality cult just in time for the Democrats’ march into cultural Marxism.
Who’s dumber, a person without a college degree or a person with one? Additionally, who’s dumber, a person with a BA, MA, or PhD? Is it possible for a person to educationally advance and get dumber? A response might be to dismiss the questions as misleading for many reasons, but the common assumption is that a degree is a visa to smartland. Is it true? Recent voting patterns force us to confront the questions, and the answer may shock some of us.
I’m speaking of Tuesday’s NYC mayoral primary election. Boroughs heavily populated with blue collars, ethnics, and minorities – cohorts with few college degrees – are voting as if they have a dislike for socialism and affection for law and order. The lower the percentage of whites in the district, the lower socialist and woke vote. What? Yep!
Eric Adams greets supporters at a New York City primary mayoral election night party in New York City, June 22, 2021. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)
The pundit Kyle Smith put it succinctly: “The socialists just can’t seem to process enough white people through Oberlin to get themselves to a majority, even in their intellectual capital, New York City.” Middle and upper-income whites have moved left, along with their sheepskins. Everyone else likes cops and abhors the coddling of thugs and the government largesse for the pampering (like Andrew Yang’s mass mailing of checks). Now that’s some real cognitive dissonance for the ladies on The View.
Ex-cop and law-and-order candidate Eric Adams won 46% to 17% for MSNBC lawyer Maya Wiley in early voting in the Bronx. Blue collar whites and Hispanics dominate Staten Island and turned out 31% for Adams and 13% for the AOC darling, Wiley. Over all, Adams holds a 9% lead as of now.
Where do we find the enthusiasts of wokeness? It’s clustered in tony, hipster micro-districts in Manhattan and Brooklyn, any place with the highest concentration of whites.
Affection for socialism is my metric for gauging dumbness, which is popularly synonymous with stupidity. Simply put, the mental contraption doesn’t work. Its boosters – AOC, The Squad, Bernie, the activist core of the Democratic Party – cite countries, especially Scandinavian ones, who are in reality more free market than these zealots’ dream for America. Sweden, et al, dumped the nonsense long ago, and the demise of the USSR showed that Green New Deal central planning, as with all central planning, is a prescription for chronic depression. Non-whites have a gut instinct for the reality that escaped the geniuses from Oberlin, et al.
A degree hasn’t inoculated many upper and middle-class whites, and everyone else who grace these ivy-covered halls, from stupidity. Does a modern college degree befuddle the mind with inanities? I’m sure that it depends. But as of now, it would have been better for many of our degree-holders to skip the expensive indoctrination, and the 5-figure debt, and follow dad and mom into the work world.
Moving left is moving socialist and into forever oppressed/oppressor victimhood, and voting like it. It’s stupid and morally corrupting. Is that what is meant by the ‘burbs turning blue, ergo dumb? One has to wonder.
RogerG
*Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/eric-adams-probably-defeats-socialism-in-new-york-city/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=featured-writers&utm_term=third
*Also on my website: libertatevitute.com
*Today’s short comment is mostly based on the work of Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair of Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.
Our “experts”, the ones that grab the attention of the mathematically and scientifically illiterate in Big Media, are essentially bureaucrats in Big Government’s agencies of public health, corporate Big Pharma, and the university schools of public health. And all of them were asleep at the switch, the switch to throw the alarm on the catastrophic jump in working class “deaths of despair”: drug overdoses, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicides. Putting a number on it would be over 300,000 premature deaths from 1999 to 2015. And these are our gurus on all matters public health. With friends like these, do we need any enemies?
The disaster occurred under the noses of Clinton, Dubya, and the first term-and-a-half of Obama. Obama didn’t notice it, and maybe didn’t care. The alarm was tripped by Princeton’s Anne Case and Angus Deacon during Obama’s second term. Don’t forget that at this time, Obama was too busy lambasting the blue collars of western Pennsylvania as “bitter clingers” to their sky god and guns.
These same bureaucrats were the ones who fed the prejudices of the Big Government Left in the Democratic Party and the Party’s allies in Big Media during COVID. Fauci and company were elevated to sainthood. Behind the scenes, as our social and economic lives were castrated on the advice of these very same desk-jockeys, the death toll in “deaths of despair” accelerated.
Ryan Halligan, age 13, committed suicide by hanging on Oct. 7, 2013.Picture of Jo’Vianni. age 15, in the hand of her mother. She committed suicide in April of 2020.Bethany Palmer, age 17, of Greater Manchester, UK, committed suicide in April of 2020.Rally to raise awareness of deaths of despair in 2017.
These “experts” are said to be public servants. But which public are they serving? I can’t avoid the insights of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their famous work in public choice theory. They start with the simple premise of self-interest: it applies to everyone. It’s true every bit as much among GS-level employees and their politicized head honchos as it does for any budding entrepreneur. The cloistered ecosystem of the bureau, combined with occupational self-absorption, make for a unique animal who misses a whole lot.
Just think, with the Green New Deal and the jihads against “systemic racism” and for genderism, these same fools will be put in charge of nearly every aspect of our lives. If that doesn’t startle you, I don’t know what will.
*If you need something to steel your spine in the face of progressive authoritarianism, watch “Seabiscuit”.
Last night, as I routinely do, I watched the nightly news by flipping between CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. The first two infuriate me and the third revs up the infuriation about the other two. I normally break away from it by seeking something else as food for the soul. Lo and behold, from our downstairs rec room came the sounds of my wife and son watching “Seabiscuit”. I thought what a great idea since I haven’t seen it for a long time. So, I streamed the film from the beginning. It’s a great movie.
It is a perfect accompaniment for an escape from the discontents of our time, and a perfect lesson for us in our troubled times. The arc of the story has the additional advantage of being true . . . for the most part. The New Deal hero-worship by historian David McCullough’s voice-over was a bit much. The fact is, the New Deal made many people feel better as it kept them in misery. But the story, the story. The script artfully blended the lives of three broken people – Tom Smith, Charles Howard, and Red Pollard – brought together by a broken horse.
Trainer Tom Smith with Seabiscuit.
Seabiscuit wasn’t so much broken as rejected. He didn’t fit the expected profile for a racehorse – like many of us who don’t fit the expected mental profile of our rich, fashionable, insulated, and lacking in self-awareness “social betters” by rejecting their chic and foolish ideas. He lacked, as they say among horseracing connoisseurs, “conformation”. He didn’t look like a racehorse. He was short, had awkward legs with knobby knees, and was gimpy in his walk. To boot, he was lazy, temperamental, unpredictable in performance, and hated training.
And he became a hero to the “forgotten man” in a decade of troubled times. The “forgotten man” isn’t the one exploited by FDR in the 1936 campaign for political purposes: the man, in Roosevelt’s words, “at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” The real “forgotten man”, according to economist Amity Schlaes, was the working men and women who ended up paying for the largesse that was distributed to the constituents of FDR’s New Deal coalition, and beginning the political practice of using taxpayer money to build political power. Actually, both versions flocked to a horse who bucked the preferred look of the privileged class, as most of his fans did.
Seabiscuit with jockey Red Pollard.
The horse’s fan base is more like today’s “smelly Walmart shoppers” than the student bodies and alumni of prestige colleges with their fat trust funds. Princess Diana was garishly and undeservedly given the moniker of the “people’s princess”. In contrast, the “people’s horse” was a title rightfully earned by Seabiscuit. His following grew so much that by the time of his five-year-old season in 1938 he drew enormous crowds. In the seven years after his retirement to his death, he had 50,000 visitors.
Seabiscuit fans who came out to see him race.
The thing about Seabiscuit is that he had “fight”. It’s a word in disrepute among today’s self-appointed gatekeepers of thought after its use by their bogeyman Trump on January 6. The word simply means the well-spring to rise to a challenge. Some people call it grit; others associate it with courage and determination. Whatever it was, he had it, and it was admirable and inspirational. It’s something we’ll need to resist the hegemony of our malignant and politically-connected cultural elites.
Seabiscuit crossing the finish line ahead of War Admiral in the 1938 match race.
Trump is a special taste for a special political and social pallet. His ability to inspire didn’t reach beyond his tranche of the electorate. “Inspiration” isn’t a word that I can easily associate with him. “Dogged” and “fight”, yes. Seabiscuit had all three.
See the movie, even if it might be for the third time. It’s the perfect salve for those anxious about the gauntlet that the cultural left from their exclusive estates and seats of power are setting before us. Seabiscuit’s “fight” is a lesson for us 70 years later.
Are we irreparably divided? When deeply divergent cultural assumptions lie at the root, we could very well be heading for disunion. The only question is, will it be “soft” (peaceful) or “hard” (violent)? Terry Teachout, drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary, comes down on the side of disunion, but it’ll be a “soft” one to him. I’m not so certain, but I hope he’s right if we are to have one.
Terry Teachout
At work are two radically different notions of human nature. On one side lies the near perfectibility of us and our socio-economic-political arrangements. Indeed, a fixed nature is far from their imaginations. This leads to an endlessly meddlesome state. Space is left open in their intellectual firmament for all kinds of socialism: aggressive and velvet glove. In this social scheme, at the top of the governing pyramid is situated people like them, people whose status stems from paper credentials like college degrees and certifications. Today, this crowd increasingly comes with these ontological beliefs in tow.
Obama’s “pajama boy” from the 2010 publicity campaign to pass Obamacare.Steelworkers on a shift change in Braddock, Pa., 2008. (photo: Damon Winter/The New York Times)
On the other side of the cultural divide, we find those more traditionally inclined and the belief that human flourishing requires self-reliance and virtue. Yet, human nature is punctuated with a dark side. Therefore, all-powerful directorates will be populated with agents of a flawed nature like the rest of us. Spending 17-19 years in classrooms won’t change our basic makeup. Lord Acton’s famous quip about the possession of great power accessing our darker side is very relevant here.
Well, some of you might minimize the disagreement as only a difference of opinion. You’d be wrong to trivialize the estrangement. It’s fundamental to the difference between gun confiscation and a Second Amendment, abortion as infanticide and limiting it to the first trimester, free college and personal responsibility for your career path, environmental totalitarianism and environmental prudence, economic growth and the “new normal” of stagnation, religious liberty and state invasions of the pulpit, education freedom and the government classroom monopoly as a lefty finishing school, identity favoritism and equal opportunity, etc. Hardly trivial, this is existential.
In October 2015, Houston’s progressive mayor, Annise Parker, ordered the city’s district attorney to subpoena the sermons of selected pastors whom she suspected of using the pulpit for political purposes.
How did we get to this impasse? I think that the growth of government and its dependencies has seriously eroded the basis for our civilization. But also state-love has seeped into the subconscious of our media-saturated metropolitan areas. It began as a pervasive ethos in our faculty lounges. From there, it was evangelized to succeeding generations. I know of its prevalence as a 30-year teaching veteran in our public schools.
Unexamined lefty assumptions in our citified blue dots have provoked the chasm. Don’t be a bit surprised when you learn that people outside the blue dots have noticed. They have, and are justifiably horrified.
