As a rule, no American election means as much as the shouting immediately afterward might lead you to think. Every four years, with a regularity that clockwork rarely matches, the supporters of the winning party pile all their daydreams of Utopia onto their candidate, while the partisans of the losing side howl that this time the jackboots and armbands will show up for certain. Then the new president is inaugurated, and something close to business as usual resumes.
This time, granted, the yelling is unusually loud. Some of that is an unintended byproduct of the losing side’s demonizing rhetoric during the last weeks of the campaign. Having convinced themselves (if no one else) that Donald Trump is literally Hitler, many Democrats are quaking in their shoes, sure that he must now act out the role they assigned him and throw them all into camps. Those camps have featured so relentlessly in recent rhetoric that I’m starting to think that the people who babble about them actually want to be flung into some such institution, where Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, will personally spank them with a riding crop or something. The return of the repressed really can take strange forms.
Then there’s the Twitter campaign now under way to encourage Democrats never to use Donald Trump’s name in speech or print. In one sense that’s a reflection of just how terrified they are of our next president—am I the only one who remembers how the cowardly characters in the Harry Potter novels were afraid to speak Voldemort’s name aloud?—but it’s also revealing in a deeper sense. It speaks of the Democratic establishment’s desperate longing to return to the world before 2015, before the working classes found ways to speak up for their own needs and interests, in place of those it was convenient for wealthy liberals to put in their mouths.
I’m beginning to wonder, though, if the current example may be the exception that proves the rule. Get past the giddy excitement of the winners, the fainting fits and dismayed shrieks of the losers, whatever dubious longings might be shaping our national rhetoric around those vividly imagined camps, and the rest of it, and what remains is a sense that something may have shifted on a deep level in American life with Donald Trump’s comeback election. Partly, of course, he confounded the stereotypes by taking a commanding majority of the popular vote as well as a huge lead in the Electoral College. Partly Trump and his inner circle are promising sweeping changes in some of the core policies of the bipartisan consensus that, in recent decades, has done so much to run this country into the ground.
To my mind, though, the most striking aspect of it all is the curious fact that Kamala Harris did everything she was supposed to do, according to the playbook of early 21st-century American politics, and still crashed and burned. She had armies of pundits and talking heads on her side. She had a glittering list of celebrities eager to shill for her. She raised three times the money the Trump campaign did, and spent it so freely that her campaign ended the election millions of dollars in debt. Nearly all the big corporate media venues bent over backwards to promote her campaign, to the extent of suppressing news stories that might reflect badly on her while flogging every available story that could be used to assail Trump. She had all these things lined up on her side, and yet she got a world-class drubbing once voters went to the polls.
Some of that, it has to be said, was the candidate herself. I’ve never met Harris and have no idea what she’s like as a person, but the kindest label that can be applied to her political career is “undistinguished,” and she has an odd inability to speak coherently in public without a teleprompter telling her what to say. That might just be stage fright, but it does not give the rest of us any confidence in her ability to handle the pressures of one of the world’s most stressful jobs. Like him or not, Trump thrived in the high-pressure world of commercial real estate and handled his previous stint in the White House without undue signs of stress. At a time when the US is caught up in two intractable proxy wars and faces a rising tide of challenges around the globe, that in itself may have been enough to settle the matter for many voters.
Here again, though, I think there was more going on than this. All the way through the campaign, it felt as though the Harris campaign was off in a corner somewhere, talking to a small coterie of privileged liberals about issues that don’t matter to most other people, while the issues that do matter to most other people never entered the discussion When people tried to bring up those issues in Democratic venues, furthermore, they got ignored, shouted down, or told to their faces that things they themselves had experienced weren’t real and they should believe what they were told by the Democrats and their media allies instead. Meanwhile the Trump campaign was hammering night and day on the issues Harris’s people wouldn’t address.
It’s heartening to note that some Democrats have grasped this. Since the election, in fact, there have been a certain number of essays and talks in mainstream venues talking about why the Democrats lost, and bringing up some of the points just made. Social historian David Kaiser, in a post that ran through a litany of standard accusations against Trump, still took the time to notice that his rise was made possible because both parties had given up addressing the concerns of ordinary Americans in a time of increasingly serious crises. His was far from the only such sign of dawning insight among Harris supporters in the wake of her ignominious defeat.
Yet it’s the pushback fielded by such obviously sensible efforts that is, to my mind, the most revealing thing about our current political life. Nearly all that pushback has focused on finding something to blame for Harris’s failure other than the obvious fact that she never got around to addressing the issues that most Americans care about. Some of it has been predictably petty—I’m thinking here especially of the attempts by Harris allies to blame Joe Biden for what happened, and the corresponding efforts by Biden allies to push the blame back on Harris.
On a much higher level of discourse is this article by Michael Tomasky, which appeared in The New Republic on November 8. I encourage my readers to take the time to read it carefully before proceeding. As you’d expect from an essay in one of the premier liberal magazines in the country, it’s cogent, logical, and clearly written. It’s also stunningly obtuse. As with most examples of really high-grade cluelessness, its weakness lies not in itself but in the unstated preconceptions that underlie it, and the fact that Tomasky doesn’t appear to have questioned or even noticed these preconceptions is far and away the most fascinating thing about them.
Tomasky argues that the real cause of Trump’s rise and Harris’s fall was the ascendancy of right wing media over the last few decades. It was only when media venues began to slip free of the grip of the liberal consensus, he insists, that it was possible for a candidate like Donald Trump to attract any attention at all, much less the passionate mass support that saw him easily brush aside Republican rivals in two primary campaigns and spread his appeal widely enough to win the narrow victory of 2016 and the much more robust triumph of 2024. It’s plausible at first glance. Like so many examples of catastrophic cognitive failure these days, however, it suffers from a peculiar defect: it fails to ask the next obvious question.
How was it, after all, that the media venues that Tomasky lambastes as spreaders of right-wing misinformation clawed their way in from the fringes to become wildly popular among ordinary Americans? What caused people to listen to these insurgent voices? That’s not a question Tomasky addresses. The right-wing media appeared, and hey presto! All of a sudden, for no reason at all, people just started believing them.
The unnoticed ironies in Tomasky’s essay get an edge sharp enough to shave with when he proposes that back in the days when Edward R. Murrow was the most respected figure in broadcast news media, the rise of a figure like Donald Trump would have been unthinkable. Here again, let’s ask the next obvious question. Why was Murrow accorded the kind of respect that today’s media figures can only dream of having? Two key factors come to mind. The first was the fact that in those days all broadcast media in the United States was subject to the Fairness Doctrine—the rule, imposed on them as a condition of being licensed to use a share of the broadcast spectrum, that they had to present both sides of politically controversial news stories. The second was that Murrow himself was known as a man of integrity who wouldn’t distort news stories to fit a preconceived agenda.
The Fairness Doctrine went whistling down the wind long ago, however, and so did the standards of journalistic ethics that gave Murrow the reputation he had. It’s a source of bleak amusement that some of the journalists who have been quickest to scream “misinformation!” have been involved in spreading and covering up misinformation on the grand scale. Do you recall, dear reader, when Barack Obama insisted that if Obamacare was passed, you would be able to keep your physician, and your health insurance premiums would go down? Do you recall when Joe Biden insisted that once you got the Covid vaccine, you would not catch Covid? Both those statements were false; both of them misled and harmed millions of people.
If Edward R. Murrow had still been around when those statements were made and disproved, he’d have asked all the hard questions our media avoided, followed up the story no matter what pressures he faced, and crucified the government officials responsible on a cross made of newsprint and radio airtime. He was not the kind of man who would cover up a scandal just because it might hurt the party he favored. His epigones in today’s corporate media, by contrast, lack the ethics and the backbone that earned Murrow his reputation. They’ve earned a different sort of reputation, for which the phrase “partisan hack” will do as well as any.
Mind you, I freely grant there’s no shortage of partisan hacks in conservative media as well; the absence of the Fairness Doctrine and the collapse of journalistic ethics cuts both ways. Here again, though, we need to go deeper. Over the decades just past, conservative media venues have seen their viewership climb steeply upward, while liberal media venues have had their viewership plunge just as steeply downward. Tomasky never gets around to explaining why this happened. It’s as though he thinks that the mere appearance of right-wing media was all that it took to get voters to turn their backs on the wise and trusted pundits of the mainstream media and flock mindlessly to Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and ultimately Donald Trump.
Notice what’s being left out here. Nowhere in his essay does Tomasky appear to consider the possibility that ordinary people might have taken an active role in this process. Nowhere does he wonder whether maybe, just maybe, voters compared the mainstream media to the alternatives and came to the conclusion that they had reason to choose the latter. The idea that American voters might have agency is apparently alien to him. In fact, he ignores one of the most crucial details of the 2016 election in order to avoid dealing with the agency of the ordinary individual.
His article claims that the torrent of dank memes that sent the Democratic party reeling in 2016 came from the right-wing media. This is inaccurate. Those memes were created by a loose and sprawling network of alienated young men linked by online imageboards, of which 4chan is the most infamous. It was there, in the crawlspaces of the internet, that enthusiasm for Trump’s brash antics built a raffish subculture that embraced Pepe the Frog as its mascot, the Euro-pop song “Shadilay” for its anthem, and Kek the Frog God for its half-serious deity. This subculture flooded the internet with memes supporting Trump’s campaign and gave him a crucial boost. The rise of the “chans” was one of the most astonishing twists of recent political history—and it is quite literally unthinkable to people who share Tomasky’s views.
Here the bottom drops away and we plunge into very deep waters.
Back in 2002, the BBC aired a documentary titled The Century of the Self, which focused on one of the more dubious offshoots of Freudian psychotherapy. Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the central focus of the documentary, was the man who launched public relations as an industry. He insisted, based on his uncle’s theories, that human beings would respond like automatons if stimulated by the right words and imagery, and he claimed to be able to make this happen for his corporate and political clients.
I discussed that documentary in a post here a little more than two years ago. As I noted then, the most interesting thing about it is that the documentary never challenged Bernays’ claims. Rather, it took them at face value, despite the fact that the campaigns Bernays carried out were by no means as invincible as he claimed. (To cite only one of many examples, though Bernays was hired by Herbert Hoover’s reelection campaign in 1932, this did nothing to keep Hoover from suffering a thumping defeat.) I argued that the program was aimed, like most highbrow BBC documentaries, at members of the managerial class, and that it was an exercise in reassurance, meant to keep doubters believing that the corporate-bureaucratic system they served really did have the power to tell the restless masses what to think and how to feel.
Deficient as it was as an account of history, in other words, The Century of the Self accurately reflected the consciousness of the Western world’s privileged classes just when the corporate-bureaucratic system and its reigning ideology—call it “corporate liberalism”—were beginning their long slide down from the zenith of power. It’s indicative that the same attitude was expressed at nearly the same time by a Washington bureaucrat (persistent rumors insist that the speaker was Karl Rove) who famously told reporter Ron Suskind, “When we act, we create our own reality. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Does this remind you, dear reader, of the ideas splashed across the mental landscape of our time by Rhonda Byrne’s pseudospiritual bestseller The Secret, or by thousands of less efficiently marketed New Age speakers and writers? It should. Across the whole sweep of elite culture in the Western industrial nations, and above all in the United States, a set of beliefs took root that treated the individual member of the Western world’s comfortable classes as the measure of all reality, and assigned to everything and everyone else in the cosmos the roles of painted marionettes jerked around by strings to play parts in some childish melodrama.
It’s far from inaccurate to label the era over which this ideology reigned the Century of the Self, because the ideas that gave Byrne, Rove, and her many equivalents their fifteen minutes of tawdry fame did in fact get their foothold a little over a century ago, as the subtler and more reasonable teachings of what was then called New Thought got simplified, distorted, and marketed to a fare-thee-well by figures such as Napoleon Hill. The idea that we each create our own reality was a central theme in this ideology of the imperial ego, but inevitably it turned in practice into ideas like those marketed by Edward Bernays and his many heirs, in which the privileged call the tune and everyone else has no choice but to dance mechanically in step.
You can see the same thing reflected in the way that, during the Century of the Self, people in the privileged classes assumed as a matter of course that their peculiar subculture, with all its beliefs and prejudices and odd obsessions, was the natural goal of human cultural evolution, and that every person of good will would of course gravitate toward it once they were shown the error of their dissenting ways. That’s the attitude that put classes in queer theory in universities in Afghanistan during the American occupation of that country, to cite only one tone-deaf absurdity among many, and it also explains the frantic hatred and rage flung against those who fail to fall into line. The ideology of corporate liberalism is so obviously superior to the alternatives, the logic goes, that only the deliberate embrace of evil can explain anybody’s refusal to buy into it. That, in turn, was the attitude that led Kamala Harris and her prodigiously funded campaign straight to electoral disaster.
Thus the change that we’ve just passed through can be described easily enough. The Century of the Self is over, and the Century of the Other has begun.
All around the world, people who reject the values of the Western world’s privileged classes are in the ascendant. Russia, which shrugged off Western sanctions with aplomb and is nearing victory in the Ukraine war, is returning to its roots in Orthodox Christianity; across the Middle East and North Africa, traditionalist Islam is resurgent; further east, the ancient civilizations of China and India are rising to reclaim the preeminent role in the global system they had before the age of European world conquest. In Africa and elsewhere in the global South, one nation after another is throwing off neocolonial arrangements and establishing social and political forms relevant to their cultures and needs rather than those the liberal elite wants to assign them.
Around the globe, as a result, the Western elites who like to think of themselves as history’s sole actors now face intransigent Others who refuse to accept a role as bit players in someone else’s melodrama. Our would-be lords and masters are confronted by hostile and increasingly confident rivals who reject the values that corporate liberalism considers self-evident, and embrace visions of destiny that are antithetical to everything that corporate liberalism stands for. The monolithic future imagined by the Western world’s privileged classes has thus shattered into a thousand glittering shards. What is rising in its place is a kaleidoscope of possibility in which the dreams of Harris and her allies are only one option among many.
In much the same way, Donald Trump united a wildly diverse coalition of supporters, embracing Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, midwestern factory workers, Amish farmers, Muslim immigrants, and much more, to bring about his victory. What drew these disparate interests together, more than anything else, was their rejection of the claim by the liberal elite that the reality it likes to imagine is the only one that counts. Harris’s campaign insisted that sky-high grocery prices and mass migration across the southern border didn’t matter, because it was inconvenient to her that these things should matter. To the voters, on the other hand, they mattered a great deal.
Thus the Century of the Other has dawned in the United States as well. The flailings of Democrat pundits as they try to respond to Trump’s election may actually be a hopeful sign, for these might mark the first step in the process of coming to terms with that reality. A principled liberalism of the kind Edward R. Murrow exemplified, one that can explain and defend its viewpoint in the public arena instead of shrieking abuse at those who won’t conform to its fantasies, has an important place in American public life. Too many of today’s liberals have a long and difficult road to walk if they want to return to that standard, but I hope they make the attempt.
A small correction:
You write: “Social historian David Graeber, in a post that ran through a litany of standard accusations against Trump,”
I wish anarchist anthropologist David Graeber were somehow blogging from beyond the grave, but I will graciously accept the author to whom your link actually points, David Kaiser.
Definitely reminded me of Voldemort. Actually, in the last book of the series, Rowling introduced the plot point that Voldemort took control of the government and cast a spell to notify him of any mentions of his name. A few of the protagonists got caught because they still used his name until one of them warned the others. It was one of the worst plot points in the series IMO.
I find it quite ironic that Rowling, whose series pretty much exemplified the modern progressive ethos, has come to be vilified by some of the actors she helped make famous because she doesn’t believe trans should be allowed in women’s toilets.
Regarding the presidency, personally, I hope that the Trump-Musk alliance stays in place until it can do some good. Both of them have huge egos and I see a lot of liberals salivating at the idea of them turning against each other already, I hope Musk proves them wrong.
Btw the blog you linked is by David Kaiser, not Graeber. Graeber died a few years ago, so I was a bit confused at first.
My impression as a distant observer was that there was a gender split in support last time and quite noticeably this time. Also in the public meltdowns post election day. Not absolute by any means but as a general trend. Did that actually happen or is it a consequence of the media that I see?
Here in Canada, I’ve been watching the American left reaction to the election (and elsewhere, including here) and being somewhat stunned by the intensity of the what? distress. Many decades ago when I was in my 20s, I worked as a nurses aide in a mental hospital. All I could think of when watching the liberal reactions was: the inmates have escaped the insane asylum.
I keep on thinking of the ancient Greek saying: Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.
Autumn, thanks for catching this. I’ve corrected it.
Alvin, the saga around Rowling’s confrontations with transgender ideologists and the woke scene generally has been a fine bit of irony. I’d say “those who live by the woke, die by the woke,” but so far she seems to be holding her own tolerably well.
Andy, there was certainly a gender differential, but it was strongest among voters of color — many more black and Hispanic men than women voted for Trump, while among white voters it was present but not so wide. I grant that among the people who are melting down most histrionically, Democrat women seem to be far in the lead.
Annette, you’re not wrong. I suspect extreme cognitive dissonance is involved here; a great many of Harris’s supporters are people who have been taught that they have the right to expect the world to be whatever they want it to be, and the shattering disconfirmation of Trump’s victory — in the popular vote as well as the Electoral College — has left them feeling as though their world has crumbled into bits around them. That they were taught lies by the corporate system, in order to make them easier to manipulate, is not something they’ll be able to grasp easily.
JMG, a customarily excellent piece! I have a few items related to this week’s topic:
1. The thought-stoppers are in full swing in America right now! I’ve repeatedly had people abruptly shut down conversations about Trump’s next term by hurriedly shouting–often with a wry sense of self-aware amusement–“Trump is Hitler!”
2. However, in a rare moment of self-reflection, I recently saw a New York liberal waxing philosophical about the election results and reflecting on how being a Republican has become cool, because the Republican party is much more inviting and tolerant of differing viewpoints than is the case with the modern Democratic party.
3. In my draft of this post from a couple of weeks ago, I was going to ask if you had any podcast interviews on the state of American politics in the works. To my delight, I got my answer a week later when I stumbled upon your excellent two-hour discussion on Andrii Zvorygin’s podcast. Do you have any others coming up? I eat up your podcast interviews!
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/10/politics/democrats-election-party-future-voters/index.html
An intriguing extract from the link above (the beginning of the article):
(CNN) — Pick one word to describe Republicans and Donald Trump, the focus group moderator asked, and one word to describe Democrats and Kamala Harris.
“Crazy,” said the White woman in her 40s, who hadn’t gone to college. Then: “Preachy.”
The focus group organized by Harris supporters in western Pennsylvania, not long after the presidential debate in September, was made up of a dozen people who voted for Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 but who were undecided this time, except for being sure that they’d vote.
Asked to pick between the two words, the woman said she’d “probably go with ‘crazy,’” anguish clearly in her voice.
“Because ‘crazy’ doesn’t look down on me,” she said. “‘Preachy’ does.”
Errr, The New Republic article… Joe Rogan is about as centrist as you can get…
I don’t know if this paywalled, but it is a cogent article with regard to the cluelessness of people like Tomasky and
current intellectual elite
He references the Tomasky article as well: https://www.racket.news/p/ding-dong-the-cult-is-dead
The left wing of the bird brain really could have had just as robust of an alternative media if it wanted to. I think where what there is of an ctr-left media lost a lot of people, including certain radio shows I used to listen to, was the way it berated everyone else… and that just got amplified more than any other vision starting in 2015 or 2016. The main reason I stopped listening to a few radio shows was how they almost flipped their lids and started attacking people in the middle of the country. There were other reasons, but I was one of those who Left…
I never heard any of the alt-right media speaking as one voice though.
I’m sure its not escaped you that the Fox is another animal associated with trickster and changer energy.
Maybe also if the media actually reported on anything that mattered to citizens we wouldn’t have to rely on going to read articles by unhinged right wing reprobates and unwashed hillbillies.
I really hope the Fairness Doctrine gets a fair shake at being revived.
I am more than curious how things will be in 2025. Will the people whose minds have melted have any kind of awakening? Can we bring people together?
Love the sign, and that Star Trek pic!
Part of the issue with the media is how everything has been elitified. A journalist job was something a person with a working class background used to be able to get into. Not so much any more. Now the people who call themselves journalists have a much more vested interest in keeping their privilege.
Rowling’s fifth book was all about Harry Potter and his friends revolting against the wizarding mainstream media (Daily Prophet) and the bureaucratic state represented in the book by Cornelius Fudge and Dolores Umbrage. Fudge and the Daily Prophet conducted a smear attack on Harry Potter and Umbrage turned Hogwarts into a totalitarian hellhole, because they don’t want to admit the inconvenient truth that Harry Potter was right and that Voldemort was back.
I think a lot of the anger at JK Rowling comes from corporate liberals suffering from cognitive dissonance that they have more in common with people like Fudge and Umbrage than they do with Harry Potter in today’s world, censoring and conducting smear attacks on anybody who reveals inconvenient truths about today’s society.
I share your sense that profound shifts are under way: tectonic movements, dissident plutocrats, unasked questions rising to consciousness (thank you!), the subterranean gods playing their cards. Rebirth and transformation are in the air; Pluto dancing the Aquarian Shuffle.
Perhaps many readers here do not remember the “Fairness Doctrine,” mentioned above. It was an FCC rule (probably deemed by the media networks to be “burdensome government regulation”) that the FCC chief did away with during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. So, after that, no more “equal time for opposing views.” Thus the networks’ viewerships became segmented, which was probably good for the advertisers and the networks’ owners, but it was a real loss for this country.
If someone knows how to help them grasp “that they were taught lies by the corporate system, in order to make them easier to manipulate,” I’ll be happy to know. I’m not out to prosletyze, just if it is part of a conversation. Ideas welcome!
My friend (the retired professor and NYT’s subscriber) is convinced that Trump won because the great consensus that once governed the media has fallen apart. In this narration we are to believe that once upon a time all the great media outlets held to a common narrative that supported all that was true and good in the world and could reject ” misinformation” the way your body antibodies reject disease.
The rise of forms of media that are essentially disinformation ( their opinion) is what brought this great travesty upon the body public. They can’t understand why Trump supporters would cast a vote against their own interests. They believe ( in addition to Trump being Hitler) that Joe and Kamala’s policies are truly the ones that help the working class, and Trump is just a boorish shill for the Oligarch class. Why can’t Joe Sixpack see this they wonder? They must have been mislead to depart from the true path championed by the great Lights of media civilization.
The “don’t say his name” campaign or whatever it is does indeed remind me of Voldemort, but I also wonder if they’re finally catching on that feeding all their psychic energy to Trump is counterproductive? It seems that might be giving them too much credit, though. I for one will be relieved if they talk about something else for a change.
Excellent post, JMG!
Following the vein of individuals having their own agency, as a geopolitical analyst, I find that the notion that small states have their own agency is often a foreign concept to decisionmakers.
I have had difficulty explaining that it matters very little whether the U.S. can prove what Russia actually did or didn’t do in a particular event, Russian allies in the global south will parrot Russia’s line or ignore the event entirely just because it is in their interest to do so. You would think U.S. leaders would understand since they do their own versions of the same thing regularly.
Similarly, Russian elites will never accept that smaller nations have or can express opinions or take actions on their own initiative, or take any action against Russian interests on the basis of their own. That’s just as true of Poland Joining NATO as it is Tajikistan signing trade agreements with China. They’ll never get it.
At the risk of coming off as pedantic, I think it’s worth pointing out that when the vote-counting is finished (it’s bizarre that this takes us so much longer than it does countries on a comparable level of development), Donald Trump will have won the popular vote by probably .1% less than 50% of the vote, his popular vote margin of victory will probably be by 1.5%, and the number of votes by which he won the popular vote will likely be something like 2.5 million. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by 150,000 shy of three million and would have won the election had she received those 150,000 missing votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan in a roughly evenly-distributed manner. My point is that we remain a society roughly equally divided against itself.
Donald Trump’s decisive Electoral College victory, however, was indeed made possible by the demographic/ geographic balance being tilted slightly in his favor, and this happened for the reasons you pointed out in this excellent post. If “Team Blue” refuses to do the necessary soul-searching to get back in more of the public’s good graces, I expect this balance to continue to tilt even more in favor of “Team Red” as represented by Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.
Dear JMG,
One topic which you touch on here is something that I have noticed since I was in my teems, and have noticed countless times, and that has always seemed to me overwhelmingly obvious yet mysteriously curious. And that is the overweening arrogance and self-righteousness of leftists.
I had a good friend in my high school and college years, whose parents were from an upper-class patrician New England background. And I encountered this leftist arrogance from them routinely whenever anything touching on politics was discussed. They seemed to have a deeply-held assumption on many matters to the effect “All the GOOD people just NATURALLY believe X”, X always being some pro-establishment and/or pro-leftist position. It was such a foundational part of their belief structure, in fact, that whenever I (gently) challenged them on it regarding particular subjects or positions, their immediate reaction was almost as if I had suddenly starting speaking in Sanskrit. And I have noticed this same foundational arrogance countless times among leftists since then —- to whit, “EVERY good person believes exactly as I do, and if they do not, then they are either evil or an idiot”. They never seem to be able to grasp that an intelligent person of good faith could possibly hold a differing opinion from their own.
Do you have any insight into where this leftist arrogance comes from?
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that conservatives cannot be arrogant, either. But it does seem to me to be a ubiquitous and virtually defining feature of the left.
“The Century of the Other”! I love this way of framing it.
A couple of comments on the election–
1. Way back in 2002 I saw Pat Buchanan share a stage with Ralph Nader at the University of Pittsburgh. I went expecting it to be a debate, but I found that the two men agreed on a great number of things. Their disagreements, meanwhile, seemed like the sorts of things where you might try one solution to a problem, and, if that didn’t work, try a different one. Of course, it was the things that they agreed about– especially the problems of corporate power, “free trade,” and militarism– that made them anathema to the Republican and Democratic parties, which were in lockstep on all of those issues. At one point someone in the audience asked whether they might consider running on a joint ticket. This was considered a great joke, and everyone laughed. But I thought it sounded like a wonderful idea. I was an 18 year old punk rocker dressed up in punk gear, and I had gone expecting to love Nader and despise Buchanan. Instead I found Buchanan very reasonable, and agreed with him over Nader on many of their points of difference. He was also very polite to me when I spoke with him afterwards, which I didn’t expect.
When RFK Jr joined the Trump team, I thought, “My God, it’s Buchanan and Nader!” I have never been happier to cast my for anyone.
2. Regarding American liberalism, my hope, which I expect as much as I expected the Buchanan-Nader joint ticket, is that it will cease to see itself as “liberalism” and become conservatism. What I mean is that many of the core ideas of the left are not actually components of a universal ideology, but the particular, rather quirky folkways of the regional cultures of New England and the Mid-Atlantic, and their descendents further West. That includes ideas around gender roles, diversity, and religious radicalism. Pennsylvania was founded and ruled by Quakers who believed in reincarnation among other “heretical” doctrines, and included whole colonies of Rosicrucians, as you yourself have written. New Jersey had women voting in 1790 and a constitution that made no reference to gender. And, of course, with regard to diversity, the old arrangement assigned different regions of a town or part of the countryside to different cultures and ethnic communities, and let those groups maintain their own culture without forcing it onto their neighbors. From what I understand, that began in Pennsylvania, with the various hills and valleys distributed among the English, Welsh, and Germans, and continued into the 20th century’s division of neighborhoods in the big cities between Jews, Irish, and Italians.
Of course, all of these ideas have no been corrupted, as part of having been converted into an imperial ideology. Instead of religious tolerance, we have anti-Christian zealotry; instead of gender equality, we have transgender nuttery; instead of a diversity of communities, we have the sort of enforced diversity that prevents the formation of community.
My point, though, is that none of these ideas are human universals, not even within the continental United States. Southern, Western, and Appalachian ways of doing religion, gender, and race– among many other things– are different. Indeed, most of mankind’s ways are different. I’d like to see those of us who live in “blue” regions and still identify with these ideas start to understand them as, not “The Way,” but “Our Way.” It is and always has been wrong to force the culture of Massachussetts or Portland, Oregon onto people living in Texas or Alabama. That’s all that most of our “liberalism” is– just Northern imperialism. Equally, though, most of what passes for “conservatism” in the North and the “blue states” is actually just an attempt to imitate Southern culture. There’s nothing “conservative” about it, because it doesn’t conserve our actual culture. If it were to be enforced by the government and corporations as “liberalism” is now then it will simply be Southern Imperialism. And so what I’d like to see is for the “liberal” regions of the country to themselves embrace the Century of the Other, and become conservatives of their own culture, instead of either imperialists or imitators.
No, I don’t think it’s very likely, and in any case imperialism seems to be be baked into the culture in New England. But then, I didn’t think that the Buchanan-Nader ticket was likely either, and here we are.
, including cultural diversity, gender equality, and even religious radicalism,
My fear is that the “wildly diverse coalition of supporters, embracing Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, midwestern factory workers, Amish farmers, Muslim immigrants, and much more,” having little in common beyond opposition to the neoliberal consensus, will fall to bickering and allow the PMC to co-opt them one by one.
I’m surprised the reaction on both sides post-election; fear, rage and incoherence from the Dems, and starry-eyed giddiness from the Repubs. Don’t they remember how the country actually survived and moved on after 2016?
My take on all this is rather simple – Trump won as the obvious lessor of two evils. Most people have some sense when the smoke starts getting blown, and the Dem side of the Presidential race was filled to the gunwales with dense smoke and lies. More so than on the Repub side.
So, the option was to take the Devil you know versus the unknown of how much more potentially worse it would be with Word-Salad-Gal.
I also fear that the present administration’s decision to allow the Ukrainians to (tell the American personnel actually operating them to) fire long-range missiles into Russia, accompanied by Russia’s changes in nuclear doctrine, may make anything happening as far in the future as January 20 moot.
A small thing I noticed…three letter acronyms are now sinister…the four letter ones are reassuring, like the tetragrammaton. So DEI is out and MAHA is in. Something to it
I’ve been thinking myself about how a few national TV-networks dominated the media environment in the Western societies in the late 20th century and what consequences it had. The big media companies had an unique monopoly to broadcast their news and programs directly to people’s homes. How strong control it gave to the elite to control the discussion. Especially the Boomers feels a TV-generation. But the internet at the latest changed this. Also it’s ironic that a boomer and a reality TV-Star Donald Trump had a central role in this change.
>the most striking aspect of it all is the curious fact that Kamala Harris did everything she was supposed to do
1) She didn’t do that much. In fact, I’d call her the essence of a brick.
>and still crashed and burned
2) No matter. How do you make a brick fly? Why, you strap as many jet engines to it as you can. That’ll make it fly. But what if the jet engines for whatever reason, aren’t putting out the thrust and power that they used to? What if we’re back to an earlier era, where if you want to make something fly, it’s gotta have wings etc.? No more bricks.
>Here again, though, I think there was more going on than this
3) I pointed out when she baited everyone with a Beyonce concert and then switched all those people for a Willie Nelson concert instead, was she actively trying to tick off the public? Or was her campaign cursed? Or was it just the people who worked for her were so abused by her, that they were getting back at her?
In any case, I still question why there wasn’t as much fraud as there was in 2020. Where did those 15 million voters go? Did they really exist in the first place?
I have been a long time fan of your work, but with this post I am starting to doubt my reading of it.
I am very disappointed with your support for Trump. I disagree with many of the arguments you raise, but these two quotes are easiest illustrations of where I disagree:
– “Trump … handled his previous stint in the White House without undue signs of stress.” — not only was he hugely incompetent in his previous term, he was a laughing stock by the presidents of other countries, a diplomatic disaster, probably a traitor & and finally a thief of official secret documents. He might not have been stressed because he was oblivious of what he was supposed to be doing. The results of his presidency were catastrophic. The next 4 years fill me with dread.
– “Western elites who like to think of themselves as history’s sole actors (now face intransigent Others) ” does describe Trump as much as it describes “corporate liberals”. Trump is part of the “corporate elites” & “privileged classes” as much as other candidates were — so *that* difference does not explain why did he gain support of the “a wildly diverse coalition of supporters”.
I see holes in your explanation, and I did expect better analysis from you.
Plus, using Pepe memes will not place you on the “right” side of history – but only time will tell.
I am beginning to think that the USA will either create hard boundaries and voluntarily disintegrate, or will keep soft boundaries and inevitably lose it’s sovereignty by military defeat.
I doubt trump will be able to keep the confidence of the people, even if he has it right now.. He is the last spectacular distraction, the finale of the light-show, before the theater becomes a empty brick wall.
The nice thing about a empty brick wall is it gives the young people time to practice graffiti before the wrecking ball comes in, knocks it down, and truth finally rears its ugly head for all to witness.
The question is: Will people believe the truth when there is nothing else to believe in or to distract them?
I doubt it, we might enter a era where hard truth is rendered meaningless by conformity, tribal association, information dilution, and easy answers (religion.) If people could believe the truth of our situation, then they would have taken action long ago.
—
I predict there will be a hard split between the generations stuck in the psychosis of times past, and those who want to build the future for themselves. The younger ones might have to fight the older ‘commissars’ for control of their future, which ends with the oldsters being unofficially exiled from society, and seen as a dark stain on the human consciousness. The trend between aging populations and sustainability of children will have to correct at some point in time.
Humanity’s sustainability is children, not the mad egotism of those who suck the life out of others. I will refer back to the idea of biological parasites on that one. Remember that the easiest way for a parasite to die is the host being eaten by a predator. Something about being weak, sick and old, from the parasite’s grip… makes easy hunting.
If you are old, then it is time to go out of your way to be productive and overly useful, by your skills and experience, so you have a decent resume for the coming times. This is no country for old men, so perhaps getting a secondary residence somewhere in south America or Asia is a good idea, where you can still compete with comparative advantages to the labor force/population.
(If a psychopath were to come to power, then they would probably kill the people they do not need, along with some of their own revolutionaries to scare the opposition out of town and keep the populace quiet. It has happened before. No country for old men, indeed.)
Orange Julius as a throw-away line hiding in the meme weeds ADDED to this post makes it the most on fire you’ve been in months–and I’ve been LOVING the Wagner cycle. You are at the top of your form, sir.
Thanks for the great read.
JMG, thank you for a great article.
“It speaks of the Democratic establishment’s desperate longing to return to the world before 2015, before the working classes found ways to speak up for their own needs and interests, in place of those it was convenient for wealthy liberals to put in their mouths.”
This is so ironic given that the slogan on the door of the Democratic Party headquarters in our Mountain West capital city read “We will not go back.”
Wow, the cognitive dissonance is strong in those articles. Basically, we lost cause you wouldn’t listen to us!!!! Listen to US, you plebes!!!!!!
I want to take this opportunity to thank you, JMG. Your writing and this blog (and dreamwidth) are such a breath of fresh air in cutting through through the BS to the underlying issues no one else wants to talk about. I’ve been following your blog for a decade or more now, and I’m not entirely sure where I would be had you not opened my eyes to so much of this stuff (political and spiritual).
Wow am I disappointed in this essay. I find your analysis deeply revealing. I guess we know who you voted for.
Thanks for this beautiful deep dive into where we are after the election, JMG. The relief I felt on November continues to flow in my life, and while no doubt the incoming Trump Administration is as fallible as anything human, I have hope that a new world is dawning and a deep national cleaning just may make our national downward path smoother than it would’ve been with Harris and company in “command.”
At 65, it’s a chuckle that I’m among the rebels now. Feels good, man! 🐸
OtterGirl
A short history of media lies for the non-US readers;
Back in the late 1980 or early 1990s CBS 60 Minutes got caught rephrasing interview questions so the answers they had on tape were more incriminating. They were caught because the background behind the interviewer was changing during the interview. Shortly after this when 60 Minutes showed up for an interview they discovered the target had his own camera and sound crew set up to prevent “new interpretations” from being imposed. 60 Minutes turned tail and ran, huffing “this is not the way we do things.”
Just recently CBS got caught again creatively editing Harris is an attempt to make her more coherent.
In between was the Swift Boat Veterans scandal that cost Dan Rather his career. So CBS can’t be trusted.
NBC got caught creatively editing George Zimmerman’s 911 call. Then it turned out Brian Williams the anchor, had been making stuff up for years. And he was gone. So NBC can’t be trusted.
ABC was caught setting up a duplicate crime scene because the police wouldn’t let them close enough. And the moderators in the Trump/Harris debate were widely panned for biased ‘fact checking’. So ABC can’t be trusted.
FOX had the famous “Sum Ting Wong” incident after a plane crash, and shot off their mouths way too much and had to pay a whopping fine and fire Tucker Carlson as part of the settlement. So they can’t be trusted.
NPR immediately after Sandy Hook went on a “You can buy guns over the internet without a background check” spiel for a week. They even named allegedly law-breaking dealers. That turned out to be a a mistake as at least one dealer sued them. NPR never read the FAQ section of the web page that explained explained exactly how that process works. There is most definitely a background check. I know, because I used that process twice when the local stores did not have what I wanted. NPR had to issue a formal on-air retraction of their lies.
Then during the 2016 election NPR had a “listen to our campaign coverage” ad that ended with the sentence “Latino voters are registering in large numbers to VOTE AGAINST TRUMP.” Yes, the really did crank the volume to maximum on the last three words.” Subtle guys, real subtle. So NPR can’t be trusted.
CNN, lost cause there. In 2016 every Hillary picture had her in kindly grandmother mode, every Trump picture had him in full bloviating mode. Everything they published was biased.
Then we had every network (maybe except FOX) going full on about Russian Collusion, (there wasn’t any), Hillary’s person email server with classified data was no big deal (wrong), and Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation (but it’s not). They also ignored the Uranium one deal, the graft in the Clinton Foundation, and Joe Biden’s part in Hunter’s grifting operation.
We can even throw in every storm is now the end of the world. “The bomb cyclone will devastate the Pacific Northwest.” It’s November. It snows in November. We got two inches and a light breeze, the coast did get some gusty winds, it happens there.
So now the formal news media is upset and can’t understand why nobody outside their own echo chamber trusted. “Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle, said it plainly: “Objectivity has got to go.” I’m not surprised that viewership is down since they have thrown away the only reason to pay attention to them. I have better sources for fiction. I’ve had to come up with my own assortment of news sites to figure out what might be going on. And none of those networks are on the list.
Neither is Scientific American. That editor had to step down after some post-election undiplomatic rage outburst.
Harris felt like the same old, same old. Trump feels different, unpredictable, and therefore exciting. Which show would we rather watch? And it’s getting clearer that something, anything new is needed and even inevitable. May as well enjoy the drama. Or comedy.
Today’s New York Times was one gigantic issue-wide hysterical meltdown over The Horror That Is Trump et. al.
Pat, snorting and giggling.
As for David Kaiser – last time I quoted him to my hard-core liberal friend in Oregon, she dismissed what he said with “He’s a Republican.” To see him now dismissed as ultra-liberal calls for a concert rendition of “The World Turned Upside-Down.”
One thought that went through my mind in the last couple of weeks w.r.t. the election of DJT is that people have long noticed two important facts about the changes brought about by the liberal establishment:
1. The benefits of any of their changes tend to accrue exclusively to a small number of already privileged people; and
2. The costs of any of these changes are by large borne by the many who do not, in any way, share in the alleged benefits
As a consequence, people have turned on the athours of their misery and voted for a possible remedy
Otherwise, I really enjoyed this week’s essay, thanks John
If you marketed that yard sign, I think it would sell.
What I see in the fear of the camps, etc. is not the return of the repressed so much as projection. Would those screaming loudest about fascism put Trump supporters in reeducation camps if given the opportunity? Dangbetcha they would. So naturally they anticipate the same. Of course this type of reaction has been going on since Reagan’s first campaign. The threats, never unfortunately carried out, to flee to Canada; the rumors of detention camps already constructed and ready for the roundup of dissidents; the planned destruction of Social Security; and, of course, the end of reproductive rights have been predicted so many times.
As for the latter, I am pro-choice. However, I would love to see a vision of feminism that did not rely on abortion as its foundation. Could we build a society in which an unplanned pregnancy would not doom a woman’s education or career? Maybe, but thanks to Roe v. Wade feminism in the US never even tried.
Some major publication, can’t recall which, claims that with all the California votes counted Trump no longer has popular vote majority. It will probably take a while to settle this point. In the meantime, California’s governor has all but written articles of secession in his project to thwart deportation and other Trump plans. Ironic since several progressive propositions on the state ballot went down in flames and one pushback to so-called criminal justice reform passed handily. For those outside of CA I will explain that changes to the state laws and even the constitution can be placed on the ballot either by the legislature or by citizen’s petitions. In this election the “progressive” propositions included a measure to allow cities to impose rent controls stricter than state mandates, a measure to raise the minimum wage, and a measure to abolish forced labor in prisons. However, Prop 36 reversed a measure from 10 years ago that had reduced certain crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. This had unleased a wave of increased drug use and a wave or retail thefts that drove stores in major urban areas to lock up many products or even to close stores. Prop 36 was opposed by Governor Newsom, but it passed.
Liberals do seem a little ambiguous about Trump’s actual power. If you point out that Trump has never opposed marriage equality, for example, you will be told that Project 2025 calls for eliminating it. This implies that Trump is actually a tool of right-wing extremists in the Republican party rather than the all-powerful dictator of other claims.
I’m currently sitting in a doctor’s exam room, where my wife is trying to find out why she had a recent onset of heart palpitations and shortness of breath.
So far, no one has asked her how much time she spends agonizing about the election and scanning the interwebs for all the terrible things the King in Orange will do to her. I dare not bring it up, for fear of bringing on another attack.
(Trump’s election is already my fault, since I refused to vote for either uniparty candidate because of their support for the extermination of the Palestinians)
For further reading, David Brooks of the New York Times has written at least two opinion pieces on how the Democrats ignored the concerns of many Americans. He’s an anti-Trump Republican, and maybe because of that he’s willing to look at the role that the arrogance of the Democratic educated elite played in Harris’s failure.
@Alan.
Puritanism is your answer. It’s poorly masked religious fundamentalism, all the more religious because they do not acknowledge it’s religiousness. What you call leftism in the US may just be a materialist/progress mask for the older Puritan essence of the North East.
Greetings JMG,
A question not precisely about the recent election,
more about the left and right divide:
I have heard this interesting political theory that new ideas are usually tried by the left, and if they turn out to be useful, the right will adopt them. Do you think there is truth to that?
Thank you,
Hi JMG and kommentariat. Well John, a provocative and deep analysis…I’ll write later with more lenght about this clear Trump triumph and Harris defeat, but by now I would say we maybe have entered, in the Western world, in a “friend-enemy dialectic”. Looking at the dirtiest election campaign of the century, I think I’m not doing a rethoric figure…
Good luck, Peter!
Your mention of Spengler inspired me to take another look at this essay I wrote six years ago, attempting to use his theory of history to map our precise location in the West’s unfolding arc. By my deductions our current moment is analogous not to that of Julius Caesar, nor Augustus, whose statue is depicted in the meme, but another key figure in Roman history.
Lest I spoil the ending for first-time readers, I provide here a link to my 2018 article, which I think stands up pretty well as both analysis and prediction. (I did not predict, for example, a second term for the MAGA movement following an interim of elite resurgence, but that fits the Roman example uncannily well).
https://awizardofearth.blogspot.com/2018/10/a-map-of-futures-past.html
I think what you’re describing in this post is what Spengler calls ‘the rise of the fourth estate’: after state religion, landed aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie have each had their turn at the helm of a civilization, the masses find their champions and have their say. It is truly a tectonic moment in the trajectory of a culture.
Can anyone explain what in Trump’s platform will help the working class? A tax hike of $2200 a year on anyone making under $100K? Skyrocketing prices due to tariffs? The removal of 75% of the workforce that brings food to Americans?
The map of “international community” illustrating corporate liberalism is an almost perfect overlay to that of The Five Eyes; perhaps that is just my overactive imagination or reification or early signs of (gasp) apophenia?
Seriously though, part of my cerebrum wonders if the foibles of our elites, explored by Burnham in “Managerial Revolution” stem from blind, unthinking loyalty to Descartes’ 1st principle: cogito, ergo sum? It was FDR who first seriously implemented rule by bureaucratic experts, on which JFK doubled down. If they think, therefore they are, it’s not surprising that those with unearned & unchecked power, need a clue-by-four to learn the commoners aren’t onboard & want for a seat at the table, before the planners’ dreams inevitably go wrong.
Funnily enough Adam Curtis who produced `Century of the self` has made a lot more documentaries since then basically go on to highlight how the supposedly powerful in politics/marketing/technology have completely failed to control the people and that the idea of subduing the people long term is a path of folly. Basically no matter the claims of those who seek control, the people are the ones who wield the power in the end. This is a sentiment shared by many dictators in their more reflective moments.
Secondly, I have found it hilarious that recently many Trump supporters have started calling him Hitler sarcastically as a joke. Doing it to highlight the absurdity of the claim. For example “Can you believe Biden let Hitler in the Whitehouse!”
Thirdly, good to see New Zealand actually made that map. It is usually left off.
The day after the US election, in my workplace, on the other side of the world, about as far from the US as you can get before looping back around, I embarked on an experiment. I wandered around the sprawling offices to overhear conversation. There’s a team that I predicted would be making comment. Let’s call them, “Advice and strategy”. University educated (I don’t use the phrase “well-educated” any more to describe this), with day jobs that revolve around abstraction. The conversation was as I expected – “we should now abandon democracy, because it doesn’t work”, “the people don’t know what’s good for them”, “we need to unite to stop him”, and so on.
I did politely object that this may be, whether you like Trump or not (and I really don’t like the guy), a sign that democracy still works and is may still be the “worst form of government, until you look at all the others”. I also was a bit bolder and said that if you pick up the big old forgotten books of class analysis, you’ll be finding that yes, the 2024 US election is the first substantial stirring of a return to class politics. There was stunned silence.
A class of people excluded, and class of managerial elite types who are losing, but lack self-reflection amidst their abstract world to see it.
Hello again, JMG and kommentariat. Well, you all will know I’m not an American commentarist, but I would like to write something short about the Trump ‘earthquake’ from my European view. I’ve thought about the US election and I’d like to write some ideas on it:
1-Trump won because the “Democrats” lost their election. Ke-mala Harris is a non-charismatic politician who thought (she and her supporters) she would win because…ahem, she isn’t white, she hasn’t a penis and she’s younger than Trump. “Dems” are with their minds in a state of self-deception. Is there any smart life in that party now? Let me think I doubt it.
2-The “Dem” propaganda arrived to Europe (at least to my country) like the Truth, except for freaking far right extremists here. It’s been a unpleasant surprise for the European public opinion this Trump victory and Harris defeat. MSM have been here toxic, woke “progressive”, and supposed “conservative” too.
3-Trump promised a lot of things in his campaign, I doubt he can/wants perform them in his second mandate. Between other things there’s a Deep State, for example…”Dems” are provoking more and more the Putin Russia to difficult a peace which they maybe imagine in 2025 like a Russian moderate victory. I see Trump voters maybe are full of too much optimism. How much time will it last?
4-“Democrat” campaign has identified Trump and his supporters and voters with fascists, even predicting that if Trump would win, he would going to become a dictator!(ahem ahem) I wonder if “Dems” are going to go on this toxic Narrative, so they would trigger their stormtroopers (BLM and Antifa, woke hordes…). Am I wrong or right?
5-I’ve found another view of Kamala Harris defeat here, it’s interesting because it comes from India, which is a BRICS country…I don’t have to agree with every word of it, but I found it very interesting:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/us-presidential-election-2024-results-11-reasons-why-kamala-harris-lost-badly/articleshow/115023169.cms
What do you yhink about it?
I leave this ideas to argue with you and the kommentariat. By the way, I found some days ago a “Trump 2024” sticker in my neighbourhood, on a roadsign. The US election campaign reached some way this European corner. OMG!
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On the other hand, I’d like to comment something about the last floods in Valencia, because I think it’s an interesting topic not only for Spain. Yesterday, King Felipe VI and his wife visited some damaged areas, and people didn’t throw mud to them.
https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2024/11/19/spains-king-and-queen-return-to-flood-ravaged-valencia-royal-couple-enjoy-warm-welcome-after-infamous-mud-slinging-incident/
It’s not a surprise, because last time they visited the flooded areas, they were with some spanish politicians (ahem); and this time yesterday, they were the King and the Queen both alone, representing the Spanish Nation (OK, you maybe know I’m a republican in the European sense, but I also know Spanish Monarchy is the Honorific Head of the State). People in Valencian towns were less angry than 2 weeks ago, because of the lack of the hated politicians Mr Sánchez (national government) and Mr Mazón (regional government)…There’s a serious political legitimacy problem in this country, I think I’m not the only one here that thinks it. It isn’t a party problem, but the system problem. I’d like to ask you, European kommentariat: Is there any sign of lack of legitimacy in your countries government?
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(Off topic?) Finally, I have to say to you that I’m very interested in Sacred Geometry and Architecture. Please John, could you tell me any good books and writers on these topics? Thanks in advance…
Several months ago my husband was bloviating about Trump, some c@@p he’d seen on MSDNC, and I told him Trump’s going to win. Why?? Because all you “liberals “ do nothing but obsess about him and talk about him ALL THE TIME!! Look at all that free publicity he gets 24/7 on American media. I cannot for the life of me see how they can all be so blind. The smartest people in the room, hahaha!!!
A return to principled liberalism would be very welcome for sure. Along with the scientific method and organic agriculture you tend to rightly cite, I think the concepts of universal freedom of speech, conscience, religion and assembly are some of the genuinely valuable legacies of Faustian civilization. I’d hate to see them thrown out as part of the backlash, but I suppose they might have been too utopian to last anyway. Here’s hoping, though.
“The ideology of corporate liberalism is so obviously superior to the alternatives, the logic goes, that only the deliberate embrace of evil can explain anybody’s refusal to buy into it.”
To borrow a fun phrase from your writings, this sounds a lot like “fundamentalist Christianity in secular drag” to me. Then again, the Religion of Progress did borrow most of its substance from Christianity, as you laid out in After Progress.
Back to the election: here in Norway, the reaction from the mainstream left-oriented media has been pretty moderate. Coverage of the campaign was surprisingly even-handed too, even if there was an obvious pro-Harris bias. Of course there’s been some pearl-clutching from “experts” about the horrors of a vaccine skeptic (gasp!) as Secretary for Health, and the hardest NATO shills are unhappy, but overall it’s been much less shrill than last time. Also helps that we have an actual left-populist party and a traditional left-wing newspaper who’ve both been talking about class and economics all along.
Finally, as a long-lapsed Harry Potter fan, I do want to give Rowling her due. Yes, she is (was?) a typical corporate liberal in many ways, but do note that the entire HP series is pretty much one long, scathing critique of a clueless bureaucracy/managerial state that’s become senile and out of touch. Cornelius Fudge acts in a way that would be right at home with the Harris campaign, to put it that way. He continually refuses to face unwelcome facts and treats it all as a PR problem instead. It’s also easy to read him as a representative of industrial civilization refusing to face up to limits, with Dumbledore as a William Catton or James Hansen type trying to make him see sense, even if Rowling obviously never intended that interpretation. Also, Dolores Umbridge is a perfect caricature of all the most unpleasant sides of the woke, years before they became a phenomenon. Maybe it’s not so strange Rowling fell out with them after all.
Walking Worried, thanks for this. I’m glad to hear about the New York liberal — that’s exactly the kind of reflection that could lead the Democratic Party to become tolerant and openminded again. As for podcasts, not yet — most podcasters are still asking me about other topics.
Anon, good heavens. That’s actually good reporting — and from CNN, of all places! I didn’t think they had it in them.
Eagle Fang, hmm! Yeah, it’s the braying uniformity of the corporate liberal press that made me tune it out. I never had to wonder what they were going to talk about or what they’d say about it — and that being the case, why bother to read them?
Anonymous, interesting. I bogged down about a third of the way through the fourth book and never went any further, so I didn’t know this.
Goldenhawk, thanks for this. Things really do seem to be in motion.
Phutatorius, maybe it can be reinstated!
Eagle Fang, I wish I knew something that could accomplish that feat, but the Moody Blues are still dead on target:
“The words that I remember from my childhood still are true
That there’s none so blind as those who will not see.”
Clay, that’s basically what Tomasky’s saying. “Catastrophic cognitive failure” is the term that comes to mind.
Jennifer, that’s a good point. I want to see if they can actually stick to it; if so, that’ll be an excellent sign.
Sirustalcelion, oh, I think that’s starting to sink in, at least in the US. Watching the incandescent rage when small nations pursue their own interests instead of ours or Russia’s tells me that cognitive dissonance has set in, and that’s a good sign that somebody’s waking up.
Mister N, I’ll be very interested to see what happens when, as he’s promised repeatedly, Trump uses the DOJ to enforce laws against vote fraud. The fact that a handful of blue states are still counting votes two weeks after the election, and those votes are coming up Democrat at unusual rates, suggests to me that the popular vote figures may need to be corrected the other way.
Alan, that’s an interesting question to which I don’t have an instant answer. I think some of it comes from the fact that belief in social progress — defined by them as movement in the direction of their goals — has taken on the force of a religion among many liberals, and the smug arrogance that is the besetting sin of ideological religions has flowered in them, unconstrained by the critique of self-righteousness most of these same religions use to try to keep that smugness in check. But I’m open to other suggestions.
Steve, thanks for both of these. One of the secrets of the fringes is that nearly all of them have the same critique of the established order of things — and it’s usually a pretty accurate critique. They differ solely in what they propose to do about it. As for the conservative nature of modern liberalism, if only they grasp that theirs really are peculiar folkways and traditional attitudes belonging to them and not to others, and drop the deranged notion that someday everyone in the world will agree with them because they’re right about everything, that would be a wonderful step. I’m not holding my breath, but one can hope.
Roldy, that’s always a risk. The question is whether the new administration can move fast enough to solidify its power centers and start slashing bureaucracies, so that it’s the PMC that’s on the back foot.
Drhooves, oh, we survived after 2016, but a great many of us didn’t move on. That’s exactly the issue. The question now is whether the country moves on.
Roldy, the Russians know perfectly well that Biden’s handlers are frantically trying to start a war Trump can’t get out of, in an attempt to salvage their failing Ukrainian project. The classic Russian thing to do would be to smile, wait, keep on hammering Ukraine, and then drive a harder bargain once negotiations with the Trump administration begin.
Celadon, hmm! In symbolic terms, we’ve just moved from Saturn, the planet of restriction and stagnation, to Jupiter, the planet of expansion and generosity.
Roger, it was a very strange window of time. As a tail-end Boomer, I find it amusing that I got to see it all unravel.
Other Owen, there was much less fraud because the GOP had been taken over by Trumpistas and had 230,000 poll watchers and 500 attorneys ready to pounce whenever an irregularity popped up. I notice with some interest that this stopped once the election was called, and there have been a flurry of further irregularities in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and California. My guess is that Trump has set a trap for them, and officials in these states are going to be doing perp walks once Trump’s nominees take over at DOJ.
Vesna, if you’re a longtime fan of my work, I’m astonished that you somehow missed my political opinions — I’ve been talking about them at great length here and elsewhere for more than a decade now. I notice that both the examples you cite here require you to take what I said out of context. The more important issue to me, though, is that invocation of “the wrong side of history.” Do you really think that history has a right side and a wrong side? If so, you’ve fallen headlong into the cognitive trap I’ve critiqued in this post; you might also have a look, if you haven’t read it yet, at my book After Progress, which has just going back into print.
False Eruption, so noted. I think you’re mistaken but I certainly admit that your prediction is plausible.
Doug, “the Orange Julius” was something my commentariat started calling Trump back in 2016, so I can’t claim credit for it! By all means have fun with it, though. I’m glad you’re enjoying the conversation here.
Angelica, ironic indeed! It strikes me, though, that saying “we will not go back” is a way of saying “we will not learn from our mistakes.” If you’ve driven into a blind alley, what’s the one direction of movement that can get you out of it?
Trubrujah, you’re most welcome and thank you to your contributions to the commentariat!
Dana, if that came as any kind of surprise, you must be very, very new here.
Ottergirl, oh, I get that. At the age when most people were young and hip and rebellious, I was the geeky guy over in a corner with his nose in a book, wearing pants a couple of inches too short for his legs. Now, at 62, I’m baffled, amused, and pleased to find that I didn’t have to join the counterculture — the counterculture has joined me.
Siliconguy, thanks for this!
Dennis Ok, farce. Definitely farce. We’ve got Trump at the top of his outrageous form, Elon Musk giddily tweeting like an excited thirteen-year-old, people all over the world dancing the Trumparena, and liberal women swearing off sex under the bizarre conviction that this will upset conservative Christian fans of chastity. The best satirist in the world couldn’t make this stuff up.
Patricia M, I may just read the Times, then. That sounds hilarious.
Raymond, that’s quite a reasonable summary. If enough voters really have noticed this, we’re in for massive changes.
Rita, oh, doubtless you’re right. It’s just that the camps come up as reflexively as cheap airport food on a rough flight, and I’m left wondering if there’s some unmentioned craving under it all.
Peter, oog. I’m very sorry to hear this. I hope she’s okay eventually.
To add to Siliconguy’s (#32) list, in 1993 “Dateline NBC” ran an episode on how the Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck was prone to explode in a collision. It turned out NBC added real explosives to the truck and detonated them to make it behave the way they wanted it to. They were forced to apologize and pay damages to GM.
I think part of the reason for the decline and loss of objectivity of newspapers is a change in how they’re sold and consumed. Pre internet, nobody knew what people read and marketing would say that most people bought them for the sports and puzzle pages. As they’ve steadily moved to an online subscription basis, editors know exactly who’s reading what and for how long – and consciously or unconsciously will end up pitching op-eds and news angles that subscribers like. If they sound like they’re preaching to the choir, it’s because the choir is paying their wages (plus whatever advertising hasn’t been sucked up by the firehose of Googbook).
Catriona, delighted to hear it.
Tony C, it really varies depending on which party is actually trying something new. Right now in the US, that’s the Republicans, and we can expect the Democrats to catch on after a while. That happened back in the late 19th century, btw, when the Republicans were the liberal party and the Democrats the old-guard conservatives.
Chuaquin, thanks for this. I’ll look forward to it.
Dylan, and thanks for this! I think you’re quite right, btw. Trump is our Julius Caesar; our Augustus probably hasn’t appeared on the stage yet, though it’s not entirely impossible that Vance will fill that role.
Eva, if you intend that as an honest question rather than a rhetorical outburst, go ask some working class voters. They’ll tell you exactly what you’re missing — if you’re willing to listen, that is.
RCW, exactly. The thing to keep in mind is that the bureaucratic state really was an improvement in its early days, and solved many of the problems the earlier imperial-capitalist system couldn’t address. Then it ran through the usual trajectory and produced its own crop of problems, which the incoming entrepreneurial-capitalist system will solve. This is one of the things that shows that progress is an illusion.
Michael, interesting. I wonder if he figured that out in the course of his work on Century of the Self.
Peter, ha! Fascinating.
Chuaquin, many thanks for the data points. You may be surprised at how vulnerable the bureaucratic state turns out to be at this point. But we’ll see. I’ve bookmarked the article and will read it when I have time. As for sacred geometry and architecture, please bring that up in next week’s open post!
Heather, ding! We have a winner. Exactly; they’re literally feeding him energy.
Kim A., I also hope that those concepts can be preserved, at least as ideals. Democracy has its massive problems, but it really is better than the alternatives. With regard to the Harry Potter business, duly noted; I ground to a halt early enough that I don’t think I encountered Fudge or Umbridge — I certainly don’t recall them — but I don’t intend to read the books again and so I’ll take your word for it.
Roldy, thanks for this.
Mark, that seems plausible.
HI JMG,
The New Republic article was Painful! Your assessment that the these elite are caught in a bubble would be hysterical if it wasn’t so tragic. Glenn Greenwald did an amusing look on System Update focusing on CNN’s equally deluded discussion on the Power of Joe Rogan.
https://youtu.be/ETtPaB_PKm8?si=9mlM5SPq4eltvRAC
He wrote, “And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?”
Can we add a highly unpopular candidate her first time round when she dropped about befoe Iowa? Little know about her as VP before she was appointed to candidacy except “tensions” with the White House (although if it were with Blinken and Sullivan, I applaud her) and a terrible record on the immigration border issues? Too close to the abysmal Biden administration that continues to blunder us closer to WWW3? The genocidal Israeli situation that lost her the young vote. And vapid answers to interview questions that made her appear woefully inadequate for the position?
I haven’t listened to any of the podcasts named in the article, yet I was sure Harris would lose. And after her $Billion-dollar fundraising campaign, I understand she’s still emailing her constituents for funds to pay for it!
It’s not entirely her fault. The Democratic Party has increasingly betrayed their voters throughout the years – Clinton with NAFTA, Obama with the banks bailout, to just name a couple of examples of their preference you’ve highlighted on their corporate elite donors.
I heard it put cyncially that both the Republican and Democratic parties got what they wanted: The Republicans wanted Trump to win; the Democrats did NOT want Sanders to win.
JMG
This is rather tangential, but you wrote:
“I’m beginning to wonder, though, if the current example may be the exception that proves the rule.”
I was told years ago by an Orthodox monk that the old famous saying is a translation error. He said that actually the saying goes more like: “the exception challenges the rule”, which admittedly makes much more sense. The saying in it’s current form of course has a life of its own too, despite of the apparent absurdity.
Caesar was assassinated and the republic disappeared.
JMG wrote in his post:
“That’s the attitude that put classes in queer theory in universities in Afghanistan during the American occupation of that country”
I’ve had to reread this sentence two times.
WTF? Did they do that? I didn’t know it. What arrogance…
Drhooves #20
“Trump won as the obvious lessor of two evils.”
I agree, if you see the madness in “Democrats” about for example the Ukrainian mess…TRump apparently is the lesser evil.
Peter the Khan 37
“I refused to vote for either uniparty candidate because of their support for the extermination of the Palestinians”
I see you’re a good man, Id do the same like you if I were American.
Kim A. 47
“here in Norway, the reaction from the mainstream left-oriented media has been pretty moderate.”
You’re lucky. In Spain, the pro-Harris bias was infamous even for “conservative socialists” (not woke)like me…Trump was Hitler and the Antichrist too. Please…
I don’t disagree with your analysis. The Democratic party seems to represent not the managerial class, but now a subset of the managerial class. If anyone wants an “a-ha” moment that helps explain our current political landscape, I continuously recommend Joe Bageant’s book Deer Hunting with Jesus: DIspatches from America’s Class War. It was published a decade before Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Bageant grew up working class in the mountains of Virginia, joined the Navy, came home, went to college, became a writer and a socialist. His book detailed clearly the Democratic Party’s divorce from the working class in the early 2000s and why, say, an endorsement from Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t move the needle much. Apparently nobody in the current Democratic leadership has read the book.
On a different point, I spent much of my career in what was called, back in the day, broadcasting. To offer some historical perspective on the Fairness Doctrine, it was Ronald Reagan’s conservative FCC that buried it. The Fairness Doctrine was an FCC regulatory framework, not a law (although it survived Supreme Court challenges), so it was comparatively easy for a Commission packed with Reagan appointees to kill it. In response, the Democrats, led by liberal Fritz Hollings, tried to enshrine the Doctrine as a federal law. It passed Congress, but Reagan vetoed the bill.
Many people confuse the Fairness Doctrine with Section 315 of the Communications Act, which requires that bonafide candidates for public office be given equal opportunity for access to broadcast news audiences. This is still on the books as federal law.
However, the Fairness Doctrine and Section 315 apply only to licensed over-the-air radio and TV stations, which is why the oft-repeated claim that Reagan’s repeal of the Doctrine somehow allowed Fox News to be born is not true. Neither applies to cable networks (Fox, or MSNBC, for example), and most definitely don’t apply to the Internet. So, for example, Joe Rogan was under no legal obligation to have Kamala Harris on his podcast after he hosted Trump, but Harris’ appearance on Saturday Night Live arguably could have fallen under the requirements of Section 315 because the show is aired by traditional broadcast TV stations .
All of which is to point out that the media universe is very, very different than it was in Edward R Murrow’s time, so much so that I wonder whether the example of Murrow even applies anymore. I revere Murrow ( as I do many of the broadcast news pioneers of his era) for his principled commitment to seeking some sort of objective, verifiable truth (even if that was elusive) and to communicating it to the American people in a manner that respected their intelligence. However, we need to remember that in Murrow’s time there were 2 1/2 networks (ABC was nascent and far behind NBC and CBS in the number of affiliate TV stations) and most Americans who were paying attention got their news from two sources: one of the networks, and from their local newspaper. In the 1950s and early 1960s many households could only get one network, especially in smaller cities and rural areas. It’s often been pointed out that a more diverse landscape of perspectives is better, but I often wonder if the public informed by Murrow or Walter Cronkite was better off than ours that gets “news” from anonymous s***posters and bots on Facebook, 4chan or whatever social media silo they’ve built for themselves.
Murrow is perhaps best remembered for helping bring about the downfall of Joe McCarthy. Unfortunately, McCarthy’s tactics outlived Murrow, and are now warmly embraced, it seems, by the entire political spectrum.
@JMG: You said “we’ve just moved from Saturn, the planet of restriction and stagnation, to Jupiter, the planet of expansion and generosity.” In fact, that happens tomorrow @ 2:56 pm EST!
JMG 54:
“You may be surprised at how vulnerable the bureaucratic state turns out to be at this point. But we’ll see.”
We’ll see, but I’m for now like St. Thomas: If I don’t see it, I don’t believe it…We need to wait more time.
Dear JMG
Do you see it as likely that the Democrats will rethink their approach?
I have no idea why any Democratic strategist thought their course was a good one! First, hand pick Joe Biden and sabotage Bernie Sanders campaign, then make a point of picking a VP whose presidential campaign bombed and who didn’t even excite any Democrats, then swear Biden is mentally sharp until he obviously isn’t, then run around in panic, then push the VP who can’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden as a candidate. Then act shocked when she loses!
There are some Democrats who seem to be reassessing their approach, but as I see it, many are not getting to the underlying problems. And the meltdowns! Don’t speak his name, don’t have sex any more, etc. How about, drop the histrionics and realistically assess what happened? Although given the Left’s statements on freedom of speech, democracy, their superior knowledge, I might not like what they come up with after such an assessment.
Cugel
I’ve always had Howe and Strauss’ Fourth Turning in the back of my head for these past 20 years, wondering if it would play out. I’m a little surprised to see how well it’s living up to its predictions. In 2001, Howe said that 9/11 was too early to start the Crisis, he offered the late ’00s. In his book he mentioned that the Fourth Turning could start with another Tea Party, and we had the The Party Movement.
After 2008 came, I wondered if the experts would use the old solutions to the new problems as predicted, and it was true. Howe suggested a catalyst to the crisis might come about 12 years later, and there we were in 2000.
It seemed like the last quarter of each previous Fourth Turning was when all the changes happened, and here we are in 2024 with a populist president with a serious goal for change. That’s why I’m optimistic something will really happen this time.
Add to that the US Uranus return, and maybe something significant will change. Uranus does promise some rousing excitement.
@Chuaquin #48 ” I wonder if “Dems” are going to go on this toxic Narrative, so they would trigger their stormtroopers (BLM and Antifa, woke hordes…). Am I wrong or right?’
Those types rampaged in Democratic/Blue areas and cities. In your typical red state or even in my conservative part of California in the south Central Valley they would be promptly brought to order and face legal consequences. So at worst their storm trooping would be quite localized. For instance when that stuff was going on a few years ago they attempted to pull it off in Idaho. The local law enforcement and citizens caught wind of the plans and the caravan of stormtroopers and the law and an armed citizenry turned out and nipped it in the bud. As the saying goes “Don’t mess with Texas”! Or Idaho.
The reactions among Democratic voters in my personal circle can be summed up as ‘quiet dismay.’ Perfectly understandable, and I would be doing the exact same if Trump had lost the election.
The Democratic reactions that I’ve encountered online can be lumped into two categories: The elites who cannot understand that their shrieks of horror and outrage are precisely what I’ve been hoping for since 2020. And the lower rung of hyper-online partisans, who are basically insisting that Harris ran a flawless campaign and they have nothing whatsoever to learn. They seem to be trying to blot the existence of the election completely out of their awareness. We’ll see how that goes.
David Brin, meanwhile, is displaying a fascinating mixture of screaming-at-the-refrigerator psychosis and common sense. I’ve never seen anything like it.
JMG @ 54: I would appreciate an answer, if not from you then from the commentariat here. It was a sincere question. It appears not a single Republican voter bothered to read the platform they voted for, solely because Trump lied and said he hadn’t read it. (Of course he hasn’t read it: it was widely reported his intelligence briefings had to be made into picture books to hold his interest and his intellect, and Project 2025 (or as he likes to call it, “Agenda 47”) is 900 plus pages. But he seems to be hiring a lot of the people who wrote the document. And Elon Musk is cheerfully getting ready to “break” the economy. “There will be hardship”, he says. These are people who have never managed anything of note, being asked to manage massive systems they are actively hostile to.
Who votes for hardship? I really would appreciate an answer.
Hello. Long time reader, first time commenter.
I’m in the camp that does not like Trump. While last cycle that was due to him and his personality, nowadays it’s more because he rallies the conservative politicians who want to push Christian ideals. As a middle-aged gay man, I don’t ever see the likes of Josh Hawley or Marjorie Taylor Greene inviting me to dinner and I don’t feel that many of that ilk would treat me as a person deserving the same respect as anyone else.
I also have a friend whose wife was impacted by the post-Roe enabled restrictions on abortions in my state. She was in a great deal of pain for three days after a miscarriage before doctors would act, and like many women could have died. It’s one thing to talk abstractly about women’s rights, and another when someone you know personally is impacted as a result of such things.
Over the last year,I can’t figure out if this site has become a right wing bastion that lumps homosexuality in with being liberal and woke, or if I’m just being fearful as a result of the current political climate. It happens I’ve been reading the Weird of Hali series, and it was nice to see some “alternate” sexualities included. (I hasten to add that’s not the main reason why I’m enjoying it!)
In closing, I wish more people would adopt my favorite dictum, courtesy of Josephine McCarthy: don’t be a jerk! (Her noun is slightly ruder, haha.) But human nature being what it is, all I can do is honor that to my own best extent — which ain’t always easy, even for this average joe who just wants to do his own thing.
John,
The best and most specific prognostication of what this election was going to be about, that I am aware of, was published in 1997 and is entitled “The Fourth Turning”. If you haven’t read it, I highly suggest you do — if you can put yourself into a 1997 frame of mind, that will help you appreciate it.
It was extraordinarily explicit in how tumultuous a period this was going to be; what was driving it; and how revolutionary things were likely to get; and how *everything* would be at stake. It made it crystal clear that trust in all public institutions would collapse in a grand super-generational cycle which previously peaked (or hit a nadir, depending on your perspective) with the Revolutionary War; The Civil War; the Great Depression. It explicitly called for a single “Grey Champion” to critically lead the revolution which was coming. What it did not do was predict the outcome for the US, other than to say that the US would either live or die based on how the revolution went. Further, given the weapons in use and the role of the US in the world, it left room for the possibility that the world as we know it might not — maybe even likely would not — survive it.
It isn’t over just yet, so it is too early to say the close is clear. Indeed, I would say the real big fireworks are still to come. This is, like, a 20+ year cycle end. If 2008 is taken as a likely starting point for this 4th Turning, that would take us to 2028 — or, arguably, 2032. If you assume the cycle started a little earlier, say 2005, then we might see how the story ends a little sooner. How clearly did astrology forecast this, in comparison? That is a question for you, maybe?
I first read the book around 2007, and it seemed interesting, but implausible. By 2020 I had almost forgotten about the book, since the country, although screwed up badly, and clearly way beyond bankrupt in terms of both culture and economics, didn’t seem all THAT gone loco. 2020 and since more than shook me out of that fantasy!
Again, I recommend you read the book. And keep in mind it ain’t over yet. What DOES make me suddenly very hopeful is that a clear majority of the American People woke up for this past election. A clear majority want the social institutions to be thoroughly re-vamped. Some of us want much more than that . . . some even want much, much more. And yet, the “side” which lost the election hasn’t yet gotten its reckoning, and seem unlikely to go along with the reckoning without more of a fight than they have shown thus far.
What leaves me hopeful — both about the country getting another cycle, and that the next ten years might really be glorious beyond imagining — is that it wasn’t just “Trump” who got elected this time. It was Trump+Elon+RFK+Gabbard+Vivek+Tulsi++++++++++ as all those heroes showed up, almost like magic, or like reincarnations of someone from 1776. They showed up during the darkest night, and stood up, and put EVERYTHING on the line.
As I said, it isn’t over yet, and I think we are going to be utterly shocked when this Fourth Turning is clearly in the rear-view mirror.
But, yeah, I think it is more than safe to say that this time might be different.
Eva,
I have zero faith that Trump and his administration will actually implement the stuff in Project 2025. He and those around him such as Steve Bannon or Jeff Sessions promised many of the same things in 2016, only for his first administration to end up being very similar to a Romney or a Jeb Bush administration, dressed up in MAGA rhetoric, with the anti-establishment people getting kicked out from his administration. I’m fully expecting Elon Musk and Vivek and RFK Jr. and Gabbard to get fired sometime within Trump’s second administration and replaced with yet more Republican swamp creatures.
@Chuaquin #48
Re. “I’d like to ask you, European kommentariat: Is there any sign of lack of legitimacy in your countries government?”
Good question. I want to say “sort of?”. The current government here in Norway is certainly unpopular and struggling badly in the polls. This “Red-Green” coalition came to power in 2021 mostly on the strength of the Center Party, which is kind of strange in international terms, but basically represents agrarianism, rural areas and, yes, a certain kind of rugged, Trump-like populism. Voter fatigue quickly set in, though, and it doesn’t help that the Labor Prime Minister is an old millionaire with little charisma and a very PMC elitist vibe.
Of course there’s a few steps from unpopular to outright lack of legitimacy, though. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, for two main reasons: first, there’s still so much wealth sloshing around in the system. Even now that harder times and unpopular cuts are starting to bite, we’re still a long ways from any real hardship. And second, as much as we like to talk about all our dialects and regional differences, this country is still much more cohesive culturally than places like the US or Spain (as I understand them as a foreigner, anyway).
The main sign of lacking legitimacy is how the “fringe” populist parties are gaining support at the expense of Labor/Social Democrats and the Conservatives, who’re both about upholding the status quo more than anything. Especially the (ironically named for this blog) Progress Party has been doing very well lately, and they’re very anti-PMC and anti-status quo, at least in rhetoric. Their first stint in government from 2013-21 didn’t work out that well for them, though.
So in short, I’d say there are some smoldering embers here if you look for them, both in terms of populist support and frustration with worsening economic times. In spite of that, I’d say the government still has a fair amount of legitimacy for now. Few people actively like the sitting cabinet, but I don’t think nearly enough outright hate it to threaten its base legitimacy. There’s one data point from the frigid north of the continent, anyway.
Hello JMG,
Thank you for the post. I would like to share what I see around me here in the belly of the beast – Silicon Valley. Many people who voted for Biden in 2020 stayed home on November 5th. Many people who stayed home in 2020 voted for Trump this time around. I know 1 person who voted for Biden in 2020 and for Trump in 2024. These are PMC. They still vote values, not interests. The fact that dry beans were $1/lb 5 years ago and $4/lb now is of no practical significance to them. The values that these people find annoying have mostly to do with wokeness. Having to state the pronouns after your name feels awkward (“Look at the picture and take a guess! Hint: it’s really easy.”). Lately, it’s considered unenlightened to refer to your husband/wife as such. You are supposed to say “My partner”. Women are unhappy to see men in mixed-gender public restrooms that are ubiquitous in San Francisco. Parents want the schools to stick to the basics, teach them well, and leave the politics outside ( no such luck). Corporate serfs are annoyed with endless woke “training”. Something has definitely shifted.
JMG, and all,
You might remember the New Age spiritual leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet whose prediction of the end of the world via nuclear war in 1990 was another in a long line of such failed prophecies. I remember the day of her prediction, though at the time I had forgotten about her prophecy until someone reminded me of it a day later. I remember the day, March 15, 1990, because it had such a peculiar feel to it, which is difficult to describe, just a sense of a vast, all-encompassing finality, a resignation and a shifting, a sadness there but exhilarating in a way. I later had the sense that ECP had actually prophesied the right end-of-the-world day, but the event had taken place in the upper planes, not on our material earth.
On the evening of Nov 4th of this year, I had something very close to the same feeling, it wasn’t an exact replica, but certainly there was a sense of a finality and a great shifting in the air, so to speak … which now leads me to imagine that Trump’s election might also mark a significant shifting in the upper planes. I’m assuming that the higher beings of the upper planes helped nudge things along in Trump’s favor by way of our prayers and offerings, but I’m wondering if there hasn’t been a concomitant change in the upper planes. Possible at this time in history?
Thanks for essay.
“Russia […] is returning to its roots in Orthodox Christianity”
It’s seriously funny to read this as a Russian. The only return to religion is happening on TV screen on government media channels. If you have ever interacted with Russian youth you would know that religion is the last thing we care about.
https://rrsociology.ru/journal/article/2170/
A black South Side Chicagoan: “I like Trump. He is a felon. Everybody is against him. I like that.”
Trump, the outsider, appeals to some other outsiders for precisely that reason. The more one tries to control it the more it eludes control.
Llewna, I’m callous enough that I still find it hilarious. 😉
Oskari, oh, I know. “Prove” used to mean “test.” It’s a common enough saying that I decided to use it anyway.
Gregory, and that’s also a risk we run.
Chuaquin, I certainly read news stories that talked about such courses in Afghan universities.
Friction, oh, granted. It would still be a step in the right direction, and might enable broadcast media to regain some of the market share their hyperpartisan shilling has lost them.
Patricia M, I’m looking forward to it.
Chuaquin, well, we’ll see!
Cugel, if it follows the usual pattern, the Democrats are going to be an also-ran party for anything up to several decades, until the last of the current leadership is dead, its influence is buried, and a new and less clueless leadership has taken over. It took the GOP almost 20 years to do that after FDR’s epochal victory in 1932, for example.
Jon G, it’s turned out to be rather more accurate than I expected. I’m rethinking my reaction to the book accordingly.
Cliff, I’m glad to hear that. Quiet dismay is a useful state, as it doesn’t interfere with learning.
Eva, you really need to get information from sources other than the corporate media. No, Trump’s platform is not the same as Project 2025 — even though the Democrats and their pet media said it was — and most of the voters who supported Trump did so because of his platform, not because of the man himself. They wanted a stop to unrestricted illegal immigration and an end to free trade policies for the same reason: jobs. Talk to working class Americans — I’ve done so repeatedly — and what they want, more than anything else or any combination of other things, is plenty of good steady jobs at decent wages. The Democrats have systematically pursued policies that flooded the job market with cheap illegal-immigrant labor and flooded the marketplace with products of sweatshops in the global South, and both these sent the supply of ordinary working class jobs plunging.
Trump, during his first term, sent the joblessness rate to unprecedented lows — fewer African-Americans were unemployed during his term than ever before in history, for example, which is why so many African-American men voted for him — because he pursued the same policies that he’s proposing now. He’s also proposing to cut the federal budget by laying off vast numbers of federal bureaucrats and decreasing the huge regulatory burden the government places on all businesses, and especially small businesses, the most effective source of job creation. That will allow him to decrease taxes — if Congress goes along with this, in fact, he’s called for the abolition of the income tax altogether, since tariffs will bring in enough to support a smaller and less intrusive federal government. Imagine for a moment what the end of income tax would mean for your monthly budget, and thus to how much you could contribute to the economy (instead of having your money poured down an assortment of federal ratholes). Now multiply that by hundreds of millions of working Americans, and maybe you’ll begin to get a glimpse of why the working class is sick and tired of Democrat policies and voted for Trump’s policies instead.
Jayce, thanks for this. Are you familiar with Scott Pressler, the gay man who did so much to win Pennsylvania for Trump? He’s one of many gay men and lesbians who supported Trump. I mention them as a reminder that Josh Hawley and Marjorie Taylor Greene aren’t the only kind of supporters Trump has. You might be aware that the Orange Julius got a very large share of the Muslim immigrant vote, but did you know that he also got 2/3 of the Native American vote? As for this site, I try to keep it where I myself am, toward the center — outside of election season, I get uncomfortable if I don’t get critiqued equally often by the right wing as by the left — and my view will always be that what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms is nobody’s business but theirs. I’m glad that comes through in my fiction.
Gnat, I read it quite a few years ago, and considered its predictions overly rigid. As I noted in my response to Jon G above, I’ve been startled by its accuracy and am rethinking my reaction to it.
Inna, hmm! That’s fascinating, and to my mind it’s also very promising. Thank you.
Will M, fascinating. I felt a lifting of the energies more than a week before the election, and that sense increased steadily over the days that followed. We’ll see, but it’s possible that something very significant has changed in the Unseen. I also had, a few weeks before then, a very odd visionary experience which I’ll be discussing over on Dreamwidth sometime when I’ve sufficiently processed it.
A9, fair enough — I’m not in Russia, of course, and my only exposure is via what little trickles into the alternative media. What do you care about?
Asdf, one of the funniest comments I heard about Trump before the election was from a black guy I know. He pointed out that Trump loves bling, he entertains huge audiences, he’s got three babymamas, he’s been convicted of felony charges and even been shot at — he’s the ultimate gansta rapper!
@JMG ” interesting. I wonder if he figured that out in the course of his work on Century of the Self.”
It feels like it came a while afterwards which is good to see that he is willing to grow out of previous stances a little. I also think he may have bent the original message slightly to appease the heads of the BBC. Two works that come to mind are “All watched over by machines of loving grace” (2011) and “Hypernormalisation” which only just barely touched on Trump as a point of blow back to the system. But as it came out in late 2016, it only very lightly touches on it. The wikipedia summaries are straight to the point.
“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” – “Curtis argues that computers have failed to liberate humanity, and instead have “distorted and simplified our view of the world around us.”.
“HyperNormalisation” – “argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex “real world” and instead established a simpler “fake world” for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.”
Back your current essay.
Another angle on top of your analysis is that the sheer volume of media is as a factor. For a long time I have felt this is one of the lasting impacts of the 9/11 attacks. It finally took the breaks off the media to saturate the airwaves with endless analysis, propositions, talking heads, other talking heads about the previous talking heads. 24 hour news networks, oh dear! Once the fairness doctrine was removed combined with online media volume and algorithms optimizing for attention – it went into hyper drive and the old players lost control. While this has allowed for a lot more diversity of messaging, it has also meant that more divisive messaging can flourish on all sides when placed in the context of attention span optimization. Except for this site where it feels much more balance. You aren’t trying to keep us hooked here all day. Thanks for that! 🙂
I have said before, the most hardened on all sides need to talk to each other and realize the almost cliche that ‘most people are decent enough’. There are differences for sure and there is no one over arching solution for everyone but the screaming at each other feels like it forces people into hardened tribal camps as a defense even if they don’t want to be. If the medium is the message, maybe it is time folks to change mediums, even if just to release a little pressure. Something something platos cave. 😉
A good example I am seeing is that lot of people on the left are loosing their minds about Trumps environmental policy (and all the other picks). Yes, it is awful but then so was the democrats, only the biggest difference is the messaging. The environmental track record under Biden has been abysmal! The environment was going to suffer no matter who won. But you know it wouldn’t be presented like that if the table was flipped. It is a great example on how these the messaging came to polarize.
No government wants climate change to be a thing, to be a limit on their possibilities. As Bill Clinton once said “Nobody won an election saying what we cannot do”. But once the left started to used it in a fashion that ended up impacting those outside of their immediate space, it ended up becoming a battle ground. Many could have been very well intended but they ended up paving the road to hell with how it was handled. The response came in the form of ‘climate change be used as an excuse to hurt people’ and that is very fair. But as the rhetoric table tennis’s its way back and forth we have ended up with the “WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE” vs “IT’S NOT REAL!” siding. It is a shame as it didn’t need to be like this and the reality of what will actually happen will probably be a lot more muted than those extreme. Time will tell.
I am not stressed about it all at a higher level. This is the way the world has been for a long time and it will keep this way for a long time to come. Sun comes up, sun goes down. Water is wet. Fire is hot. If you are stressed about this have some Lemon Balm or Yarrow. 😉
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Annette have a successful resolution for her kidney stones, and a safe and easy surgery to remove the big one blocking her left kidney.
May Peter Evans in California, who has been diagnosed with colon cancer, be completely healed with ease, and make a rapid and total recovery.
May baby Gigi, who may be suffering from side effects of medication prescribed during pregnancy, be healed, strengthened and blessed. May her big brother Francis also be blessed and remain in excellent health.
May May Jennifer and Josiah, their daughter Joanna, and their unborn daughter be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
May Ram, who is facing major challenges both legal and emotional with a divorce and child custody dispute, be blessed with the clarity of thought, positive energy, and the inner strength to continue to improve the situation.
May FJay peacefully birth a healthy baby at home with her loved ones. May her postpartum period be restful and full of love and support. May her older child feel surrounded by her love as he adapts to life as a big brother and may her marriage be strengthened during this time.
May Leonardo Johann from Bremen in Germany, who was
born prematurely two months early, come home safe and sound.
May all living things who have suffered as a consequence of Hurricanes Helene and Milton be blessed, comforted, and healed.
May Kevin, his sister Cynthia, and their elderly mother Dianne have a positive change in their fortunes which allows them to find affordable housing and a better life.
May Tyler’s partner Monika and newborn baby Isabella both be blessed with good health.
May The Dilettante Polymath’s eye heal and vision return quickly and permanantly, and may both his retinas stay attached.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery to treat it.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer.
May Kyle’s friend Amanda, who though in her early thirties is undergoing various difficult treatments for brain cancer, make a full recovery; and may her body and spirit heal with grace.
Lp9’s hometown, East Palestine, Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people, animals and all living beings in and around East Palestine, and to improve the natural environment there to the benefit of all.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
This article in the Free Press on why Harris lost was pretty spot on in my opinion.
https://www.thefp.com/p/how-kamala-harris-lost-to-trump
There’s a Chinese AI modified video making its way around social media of Elon Musk as a Ming Chinese imperial official explaining to the emperor what he will be doing as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency
https://xcancel.com/Eivor_Koy/status/1859127741209321951
I posted a short article today about using the liberal reality check as a thrust-block opportunity to learn some important lessons and further our own development. Hopefully someone finds the suggestions helpful. As always thank you for the inspiration.
https://naakua.substack.com/p/the-gift-of-the-antagonist
JMG
Just finished the article, haven’t read the comments yet. I have many similar feelings. Will continue to read what you have to say. Am curious to see how far off my thoughts are from yours. And yes, I understand how this comment shows how 90’s I am.
Trying to have empathy for others, I often tell myself “Don’t hate the player, hate the game”. That way I am not mad at those whose entire purpose is to game the system. Have recently been trying to figure out why no one seems to suggest that the system can be improved.
“Don’t get high on your own supply” – this is a good suggestion for drugs of all kinds. It seems to me that far too many are believing their own BS and lies. Which is always a dangerous situation, no matter who is too deep in this. Your article here shows one example of this. I am seeing way too many examples in today’s society of folks believing delusional lies they have told themselves. Unsure if this is just humans being human or something new.
I wonder if our century idea overlaps. Recently I have begun to refer to things as the “Boomer Century”. From 1945 to 2045 the Boomers have been the center of attention and commerce. Being older they vote more. Plus I am told that they have 50% of the nations wealth. It is my theory that much of the selfishness comes from the group thought Me generation of the Boomers. Obviously many individuals think otherwise. But there is a corporate sense of catering to this generation, because that is where the money is. With short term corporate thinking not looking past the next quarter. I believe there is an apocalypse coming. It is not what is advertised, it is the having to change how things are done once the cash cow Boomer generation is gone. With everyone lying to themselves to not have to prepare for a future that many are able to see coming. Knowing this I am trying to figure out what skills need to be taught and what mentality is needed for when this happens in the near future. Your writings have helped with this, so thank you for them.
>At the age when most people were young and hip and rebellious, I was the geeky guy over in a corner with his nose in a book, wearing pants a couple of inches too short for his legs. Now, at 62, I’m baffled, amused, and pleased to find that I didn’t have to join the counterculture — the counterculture has joined me.
Rule of Alternation. I’ve seen it with people I knew when I was a kid and they were wild and hip – and now they are some of the most straightlaced dogmatic religious people you’ll ever meet. And the sticks-in-the-mud are now some of the weirdest dissident people you’ll ever meet. And the wheel turns.
Hi John Michael,
You’ve said it before that the planes are discreet with only the merest of overlap. And we’ve just had massive proof of this.
What never occurred to these sorcerers, was the above good bit of advice. You’d think they’d have learned the lesson by now, don’t you? But then, all those journalists and pollsters who incorrectly called 2016, 2024, Brexit and not to mention the Voice referendum down here, using the term ‘close’, deserve to be sacked. A knife that is not sharpened and honed, quickly becomes dull and even worse, useless. They’re not fit for leadership positions.
I feel quite harshly about this subject, because those same folks are making my working life far more difficult than it would otherwise be, for no apparent reason that I can discern. Small business is doing it tough under the crushing load of unnecessary red-tape. Not a fan because that lot are lifting themselves up, on the efforts of people working in this sphere (and small business tends to employ far more people, than any other sector) – and that is their dirty little secret.
Cheers
Chris
The current Democrats are more likely to follow the Whigs to complete implosion than follow the 1932 Republicans. They have basically alienated everybody that could have backed them in their justification of the current status quo, just as the Whigs alienated everybody by justifying the status quo with regards to slavery in the 1850s.
The current Republicans are too divided internally between many different factions who all hate each other, such as the isolationists vs Republican neocons, the anti-immigration faction vs the pro-immigration faction, etc, that the Republican Party is likely to themselves split up into multiple parties over these irreconcilable differences., as the Democrats did over slavery back in the 1860s. Don’t forget that Mitch McConnell and Mike Johnson and John Thune and other Republican establishment figures still control the House and the Senate, and Mitch McConnell has made statements signaling that he will try to block Trump’s anti-establishment picks for government office.
Trump and his band of anti-establishment people are more like the 1850s anti-slavery Democrats in my eyes. They will eventually turn on the Republican party due to the Republican establishment blocking of anything that Trump will try to do to the system, and instead join the former Democrats who have been abandoned by the current Democratic elites to form a new populist nationalist party. Just as the anti-slavery Democrats joined with the anti-slavery former Whigs who have been abandoned by the Whig elites to form the anti-slavery Republican party.
Hello JMG
How do you think the US-China conflict will play out now that Trump’s in?
My guess, for what it’s worth, is that while Trump is in office there will only be economic warfare with sanctions and counter sanctions. Then after Trump – presumably he will complete his term normally – there will be military conflict, most likely a large-scale war.
SMJ
Hello, JMG and others! Another thoughtful essay. I agree with your assessment of the Democratic party (which really applies to the entire neoliberal project spanning both parties). However, I am much more cautious in my expectations of the next Trump administration. True, the MSM created a fictitious narrative about Harris, but the (admittedly much better) alterative media is also full of hacks, partisans, and fools, too, and they have worked to create an image of Trump as a counter-elite that doesn’t jive with reality. If we look at the two candidates’ donor bases, previous governing records, and stated policies (such as they were), we find them depressingly similar to each other and to previous iterations of the uniparty gov’t.
As night follows day, they will implement the same neoconservative-neoliberal policies as always, and those who hoped so much for something different will twist themselves into ideological pretzels to explain it. I have worked in Washington 28 years, and I think those who haven’t don’t grasp how firmly entrenched neoliberal-neocon interests are, and -this is important – how the financial and career interests of Trump and those around him are also dependent on those policies, just like all of the elite. They will not usher a revolution or defeat the bureaucratic state, because they benefit from the status quo as much as the Democratic elite.
Something to think about. Anna (AKA black-pilled)
>it wasn’t just “Trump” who got elected this time. It was Trump+Elon+RFK+Gabbard+Vivek+Tulsi
I call this the “Voltron of Sanity”. It’s like they looked around, looked at each other and realized they were the only sane people in the room. I think the assassination attempt really catalyzed this, sped it up, especially RFK deliberately joining forces and hammering out a deal with Trump.
Amazing the things external pressure can do. None of those people would’ve been this close to each other a few years ago.
Hi John Michael,
Almost forgot to mention a related side issue. There’s a mob which says they’d do no evil (I refer to as gargle, you know who I mean), just like the nice folks you wrote about claimed. Now I don’t know whether you’ve caught wind of certain changes to certain algorythmns (!) earlier this year, but in real time I watched the traffic to my independent blog website dwindle. It was a brutal act of censorship, but then I offer a reason for the lovely folks reading the essays and conversations to keep coming back and only lost new readers and lurkers. However, looking around the interweb, I noticed that people were losing their freakin’ minds about this shift in the electronic interweb traffic winds. Many shut down their blogs. You may have noticed a huge retreat to substack recently? Hmm.
Anywhoo, I stuck it out and haven’t previously mentioned this change. What really disturbs me is that a mere day or two after your election, the traffic of readers who don’t usually comment, but lurk around, began flowing back.
I must say, I’m singularly unimpressed that doing no evil, kind of looked pretty evil to me. Censorship as a policy, has rarely worked.
Thought you might be interested in another strange episode from this time.
Cheers
Chris
Alan @ 17, the left of today, as distinguished from liberals as well as conservatives, keeping in mind there are many flavors of both, was founded by the self-styled New Left in the anti-war protests of the 1960s. N.B. this New Left had almost nothing to do with the Civil Rights movement, or with environmentalism. Its foundational ideology was and is, Marxism, an imported European secular religion which simply did not apply in the USA. The Austrian School free market ideology of the right is also an imported ideology, but that is a tale for another time. This core left has still not gotten over the failure of their secular religion, and the usual delusional pathologies, like projection, name-calling, etc. are on raucous display. Don’t forget that for decades, the USSR was the preeminent Marxist nation and its disintegration caused a psychic wound in leftists which has not yet healed. That is part of why this group hates President Putin, who is, as they see it, is ruining their beloved Worker’s Paradise.
There is also, on both sides as well as everywhere else one looks, the agendas and nefarious influence of party funders. The Republican nominee can promise to stop the war in Ukraine, but he dares not even hint about applying similar medicine to the ME. The Dems must know that the public is sick to death of overseas wars which bring us no benefit, but their funders simply don’t care. Both parties know we need greatly expanded mass transportation, but the auto, insurance and RE industries won’t hear of it. So, Alan, I suspect the annoying leftist arrogance is highly defensive. They simply will not see what is in front of their faces.
Eva @ 44 I believe the Republican platform is not intended to help the working class, whom the nominee despises just as much as do his rivals. What it is intended to do is set up conditions of chaos and uncertainty in which grifters and con artists, the nominee’s core supporters, can prosper without having to, you know, build something or do some work. I hasten to add that my unflattering opinion does not, of course, apply to everyone who voted for the Republican ticket. I did state “core supporters”.
Kim @ 50. Thank you for mentioning freedom of religion, part of the First Amendment. I think any candidate for public office, male or female, who makes their faith a part of their campaign should be asked two things. 1. Will the person abide by and defend the part of the Constitution which guarantees freedom of worship? and 2. Does the person accept the principle of separation of church and state, even if their pastor does not?
JMG, the one thing I do find lacking in your otherwise capable analysis is any consideration of the outsized influence of major funders on both parties.
I’ve seen a fair number of lefties on Substack bragging how they’ve cut off family members and friends for the crime of supporting Trump. I’m also seeing a small number of BlueAnon types who are convinced that Trump faked the Butler PA shooting and stole the election with voting chicanery. Before it’s all over I expect to hear that Harris and Walz are really running America while Trump and Vance have been sent to Guantanamo and replaced by body doubles. But in general I think many Dems have gotten past denial, anger, and bargaining to acceptance.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the Republicans did a good job of pushing away their fringe elements who supported publicly unpopular positions like White Nationalism and National Socialism. By contrast, the Dems have been playing to the looniest corners of the Left for eight years and counting. I’m expecting that will change among the Democrats that matter, whom I also expect are just as tired of the screeching as everybody else. (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes removing the pronouns from her Twitter profile was rather a tell in that direction).
I also have a feeling that the next generation of American Left-wing radicals is going to come out of the pro-Palestine movement. Silencing and jailing your radicals generally creates a cadre of hardened revolutionaries educated in prison and tried by fire. The Romanovs learned the hard way how that ends…
Thank you for brilliant post! Yes, it was that “you can keep your insurance” lie after I lost my perfect one that politics became personal for me and I saw the light. However, because of where and how I live has led most of my friends to assume I would share in their tears after the election (I stayed quiet) but boy oh boy, I was just so happy! Honestly though, I think even some of those who professed to be upset might be secretly relieved… if only for the possibility of some sanity when it comes to the ugly crime situation here in NYC🤞
Good article, JMG.
A couple of thoughts…
1) I haven’t read your last few posts, so I’m not sure if you know about the mass tantrums on X about its ‘toxic right-wing content’? Lots of progressives have been announcing their departure very loudly, and moving over to Blue Sky, a clone of Twitter. As a result, the quality of discourse on X has noticeably improved. Over on Blus Sky, the security team have announced that the number of complaints has rocketed to previously unheard-of levels. The progressives took their culture of denunciation with them, I guess.
2) ascendant. Russia, which shrugged off Western sanctions with aplomb and is nearing victory in the Ukraine war, is returning to its roots in Orthodox Christianity; across the Middle East and North Africa, traditionalist Islam is resurgent; further east, the ancient civilizations of China and India are rising to reclaim the preeminent role in the global system they had before the age of European world conquest.
All of this is very true. I’ve tried to explain this to people, but am meeting astonishing levels of resistance to the idea that Africa, in particular, might be turning away from the west and embracing the Sino-Russian global architecture. People simply cannot process it. It’s very strange.
As for Russia returning to Orthodoxy, well, yes and no. Putin, the army, and the state mechanism are observantly and officially Orthodox, yes, BUT. They are also reflective of Russian society, which is determinedly multi-confessional, respecting all faiths. Within the Russian Federation, the second-largest group are Muslims, though not all of the same kind. In the west, the flamboyant tribes of Chechnya and Dagestan get the most attention, but the reality is that most of the Russian Muslims are Tatar, who have been well-integrated for generations. Increasingly, I feel that the mental model we need for Russia is not Muscovy and its Tsars, but the religiously tolerant and intellectually curious Khans who kept the peace from the Baltic to the Pacific. Just a thought….
I’m not American, but the meltdowns and hand-wringing post-elections have definitely caught my attention. Another thing that caught my attention was this pre-election piece by Five Thirty-Eight:
https://abcnews.go.com/538/538s-final-forecasts-2024-election/story?id=115511051
Honestly, they didn’t do too badly. Their model predicted a 50/50, but also qualified that if the polls were off by 4 points towards Trump, he’d win 312-226 (which he did). What did catch my attention was this paragraph:
“This is a good time to remind people that our forecasts are not crystal balls. And especially in a year with races this close, they cannot provide more certainty than the data available to us. The point of creating election forecasting models, as I wrote last week, isn’t to provide a hyper-accurate, laser-like predictive picture of the election that removes all doubt about what could happen. Rather, it’s to give people a good understanding of how the polls could be wrong and what would happen if they are.”
I asked my wife to read that paragraph and try to make sense of it for me, especially the last sentence. She couldn’t make sense of it either.
Since they’re confused about their own purpose or don’t seem to know, I can answer some of these doubts for them.
First, what happens if the polls are wrong? It is that some other guy/team, besides what the polls predicted, wins. That’s it, why are you guys so confused about it lol.
Second, the polls are not literally crystal balls, yes, but they do serve the same function, which is to predict the future. “But crystal balls are medieval superstitious nonsense and our methodology is backed by facts and science!!!” I hear you screaming in the background. Look, man, I’m someone who was raised as a generic modern liberal guy just like you; The medievals liked their crystal balls, but we modern people like our superstitious nonsense expressed in terms of numbers, graphs, and scientific jargon. That does not make it any less than *at least a little bit* of superstition.
Third, and finally, aren’t the people who do these polls curious as to why commentary (about things like sports, politics, etc.) tends to be a very popular genre. Doesn’t any of this not matter? After all, at the end of the day, doesn’t the only thing that count is whoever has the most points in the board, or the most electoral votes, or whatever counts as the win-condition is for the game? As it turns out, we humans are myth-driven creatures, and the story behind the game is just as important as (if not more than!) the actual game and its outcome.
Of course, I could be overthinking all of these and the whole point of the polls are for the bookies to have some basis on which to set their odds, and ensure they make money. Either way these pollsters seem to be really worried about getting it wrong and losing their jobs. And some of them already have in the aftermath; a few prominent ones have already announced retiring or going on hiatus.
Hi JMG,
I would like to add my experience regarding “lifting of the energies” just before and after the election. Before the election, for weeks (maybe months) I was increasingly nervous, frightened, and unable to sleep for longer than an hour or two. (I read somewhere that insomnia is akin to insanity.) There was some terrible pressure going on in the Unseen. Three days before the election this terrible pressure began to lift. I could sleep again! I’m still recovering from that lack of sleep. I wonder what it was all about. I don’t suppose we’ll find out here.
Michael, interesting. Thanks for this. For what it’s worth, once the Wagner sequence is finished, I plan on having some things to say about climate change, with the goal of finding an accurate middle ground between the two extremes.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Jg, I’ve bookmarked it for later reading; many thanks.
Peter, ha! I hope many beheadings are part of the proposal.
KVD, duly bookmarked for later reading — many thanks.
Miles, it may be ’90s, but being comfortable with disagreement is also a basic element of maturity, so thank you. As for the Boomers, well, I’m a tail-end Boomer, and I heartily agree with just about all of the criticisms of my generation. It really does suck.
Other Owen, oh, I was weird then and I’m weird now. It’s just that in those days I was a despised and bullied outcast, and these days I’m a very minor internet celebrity whose ideas are seeping through the crawlspaces of our society, and whose following is enthusiastic and generous enough to keep me comfortable.
Chris, Sara worked for quite a few years as a bookkeeper handling the books of small businesses, and the over-the-top regulatory burdens, fees, and taxes loaded on them were just absurd. That’s one thing I hope will change as the US adapts to having to live within a budget.
Mark, your prediction is duly noted. Now we’ll see what happens!
SMJ, Trump’s unlikely to allow a war with China on his watch, which is one of the reasons the neoconservatives hate him so much. By the time he finishes his term, however, China’s military may well be so much larger and more technologically advanced than ours — it’s already getting there — that war won’t be an option. That’s my hope, certainly.
Anna, so noted but I think you’re mistaken. You’re certainly right that both candidates were backed by plutocrats, but they aren’t the same plutocrats — I see Trump’s win as a push by the rising entrepreneurial elite to supplant the decadent managerial-bureaucratic elite, and these two elite sectors have radically different interests. The Washington bureaucratic elite and its corporate and nonprofit wings can no longer do something as simple as providing enough artillery shells for a proxy war, and the US dollar is losing its reserve status, so the deficits needed to prop up the DC bureacracy won’t be sustainable much longer. Gutting the DC bureaucracy and retooling the country for relative economic autarky is one of the few ways to stave off complete collapse. My take is that enough of the wealthy classes have realized this that the DC establishment is on its way out. That said, of course, we’ll see.
Other Owen, I would travel a good ways to hear a band called “Voltron of Sanity”!
Chris, whenever I deal with Gaggle, I remember the basic rule of affirmations: the subconscious mind doesn’t hear negative words like “no” and “not.” So every time they thought they were saying “Don’t be evil,” they were telling their subconscious minds “Be evil” — and that’s what they did.
Mary, then you may not be paying attention. You might notice how often I use terms such as “plutocrat” and “kleptocrat,” for starters.
Kenaz, when AOC quietly deleted the pronouns from her Xitter page, I knew that Trump had won more than a simple political victory. As for those pro-Palestinian activists, yep; I’ve been saying for years that the next stop for the American far left was radical Islam, and this is a major step in that direction.
Jill C, I’ve heard a lot of background murmurings about people who are quietly very glad that the Dems got their rumps handed to them, so you’re certainly not alone.
Bogatyr, (1) I’ve heard of that. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. (2) It astounds me how few people in the West remember that Africa is the world’s second largest continent, that it had urban civilizations before Europe did, and that the only reason it’s been impoverished and violent is that Europe’s continued to use neocolonial gimmicks to bleed it dry. Africans have every reason to extend an eloquent middle finger to the West and align with less predatory allies. Once Africans can profit from their own abundant natural resources and labor force, change will be dramatic; I expect the rise of Africa as an economic and cultural powerhouse to be one of the defining facts of the second half of this century. As for Russia, hmm — interesting. I’ll look into that.
Carlos M, that’s quite a paragraph! I think what it means in translation is “We don’t dare talk about what our polls are actually showing because we’d be crucified by our bosses, but don’t believe what we’re saying here.”
Bird, thanks for the data points. I know I’m sleeping much better at this point!
Jayce,
It’s an interesting phenomenon—in my observation, the excesses and malfeasance of the Left over the last decade or so have pushed a bunch of former centrists, liberals, and even progressives more to the Right, but the core of the Right has actually become more tolerant on social issues and in many ways moved to the Left. One of the oddest things to me about the multi-year Trump meltdown is that he’s actually a moderate. Compare the Republican party of the early- to mid-2000s (when I politically came of age) to the MAGA movement, and MAGA seems downright pro-gay, anti-war, and pro-worker. For that matter, I think Obama actually said more against gay marriage than Trump ever has. I do also see that some of the reaction against the most off-putting Democrat culture wars stuff is bleeding over onto semi-related issues and populations (for instance, the most obnoxious of the trans and drag queen stuff has made some people who were fine with gays and lesbians look at them with beady eyes, and advertising free abortions in the clinical equivalent of a food truck and opposing/removing protections for fetuses even after viability while mandating COVID vaccines has moved some formerly pro-choice people of the “no one’s in a better position to make the choice than the pregnant woman” and “safe, legal, and rare” varieties to believe that there should be more legal restrictions on abortions, or at least that it should be left to the states. But the MAGA coalition overall strikes me as hearteningly diverse, tolerant, and protective of individual liberties compared to either the former Republican party or the current Democrat party.
#37 Peter the Khan of Potlucks — although conventional docs won’t say it, many cases of heart palpitations and sudden onset arrhythmias can be resolved by taking electrolytes. Specifically, potassium, magnesium and calcium supplements, at about twice the label dose.
If stress is also a factor, vitamin b-complex is specific, double dose.
You didn’t mention your missus’ diet, but if she is vegetarian or vegan, the b-vitamins supplements are particularly important. Veges simply don’t get enough in their diets.
Most critical: turn off the source of stress, and spend time walking outdoors.
Honestly, the election results didn’t change that fact that I am politically homeless. I don’t see anything exciting or promising about what Trump is bringing to the table. Just four more years of him sucking the air out the room.
To treat the firing of thousands of federal employees or the rounding up (thousands? millions?) of illegal immigrants as an abstraction, or even worse, an entertaining wrestling match, is deeply disturbing to me. I just can’t talk casually about people’s lives the way so many people are doing, and the magical dimension of all this is even more unsettling. There’s a tragicomic dimension to what our country is going through. I mean, Elon Musk over a department of government efficiency — the same guy with the Faustian dream of sending people to Mars? Give me a break.
“Too many of today’s liberals have a long and difficult road to walk if they want to return to that standard, but I hope they make the attempt.”
To quote Bob Dylan in “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”, I just said, “Good luck!”
The thing that has surprised me about the post-election response is how completely consumed the Democrats are with Identity Politics. That’s all that their world consists of.
I think it was about the Supreme Court nominee where Uncle Joe said, “I don’t know who it’s going to be, but it’s going to be a woman of color”, because, obviously, identity is the most important thing in a Supreme Court Justice. It seems there was a lot of that thinking going on when they picked Kamala for VP, and again when they ran her for president.
So there’s really only one explanation for why Kamala lost: too many people in America are racist mysoginists (thereby insulting half the country again). I mean what else could it be? I hope they realize the extreme focus on Identity Uber Alles is one of the major tenants of the party that people voted AGAINST! But I have my doubts.
I heard of a recent group of Democrats who were looking forward to 2028 and had a poll to see who the Democrats should run for president. The clear winner (with 41% of the vote) was Kamala Harris, followed by (in the teens) Gavin Newsome and the Governor of Pennsylvania (forget his name) and a few others with single digits. I can’t believe after all this they would be so tone-deaf as to actually run her again, but then again, maybe they are.
@JMG,
That article by Tomaski is a keeper, in all the wrong ways. “Trump is popular because of conservative media! And conservative media is popular because…???” It’s true, of course, in a sense, but there’s a difference between adding more links to the causal chain, and actually following it to the root.
I remember back in 2016 I was working at the student newspaper of my college. It was small and rural and mostly had engineering students. (There were no journalism majors but our newspaper still got entered into contests for “best college newspaper” where it regularly outranked numerous papers run by journalism majors. Make of that what you will.)
There were two organized student political clubs: the Republicans and the Libertarians. There was also a quasi-official college Democrats in the form of the “Women’s and Diversity Center,” an office which the school was required to fund in order to comply with Title IX, and whose director ran it like a partisan entity – left-wing internet memes printed out and pasted to the door, debate-watch parties for the Democratic primaries at the same time the actual College Republicans were doing theirs for the Republican primaries. The woman in charge of all this even got chewed out by the other university staff when she starting advertising for a “First Woman President” party, with school resources, about a week before Hillary Clinton didn’t win.
Well, I remember when I was doing copy-editing for that newspaper, having to edit an opinion letter, half-a-page-or-so long, which talked about Donald Trump the entire time without ever mentioning his name. It was always “Melania Trump’s Husband” or “the 45th President,” and other circumlocutions. Apparently the wished-for result was that he would go away, but of course it didn’t work. It still hasn’t worked.
Here are links to two articles that might be apropos to this weeks topic. One is on the Noah Smith blog and is by a center-leftist trying to answer the question “What drove Asian and Hispanic voters to the right in 2024?”
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/what-drove-asian-and-hispanic-voters
Unlike Tomaski, it seems Ms. Sreenivas wants a real answer to the question, and she looks at things like anti-Asian discrimination in university admissions (which the left is generally in favor of, though they never describe it that bluntly) and the fact that Hispanics who are in the country legally are generally pro-law-enforcement, and have more to lose personally from open borders and the attendant crime than affluent white liberals do. And also they care about inflation, which (contra our host’s assertion) this author considers to be more important for most voters than job creation.
And here is an article at the Twilight Patriot substack entitled “Identity Politics Blows Up in the Democrats’ Face.”
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/identity-politics-blows-up-in-the
This author’s thesis is that a lot of non-white voters just don’t like the way that Democrats divide people up into victim groups and then pursue the (imaged) interests of the most special victim group at the expense of everybody else. (Just recall how, over and over, when President Biden had to make an important nomination – such as for Vice President, and later for Supreme Court, he announced ahead of time that for DEI reasons he was only considering black women? Well how do you think most people feel about an “inclusivity” process that excludes about 90 percent of potential nominees, including half of blacks and most women?)
@JMG, here in the Philippines, there are two prominent survey organizations, Pulse Asia, and Social Weather Stations (SWS). In 2022, the Pulse Asia polls leading up to the national elections were showing Marcos Jr. with a massive lead over all his rivals in all demographics. The post-Marcos Sr., post-1986 establishment was dismissing them as inaccurate and smeared them with the moniker “False Asia”. I even remember my wife asking a Robredo (the candidate backed by the post-1986 establishment) supporter who she should trust then, if not Pulse Asia. The reply was “the one of (social scientist) Dr. Mangahas”, i.e. SWS. Curiously, SWS stopped publishing poll results after February 2022 (the elections were in May that year). Nevertheless, the monthly poll results continued to be leaked on the Internet, and they showed exactly the same thing that Pulse Asia was showing. Mind you, everyone knew that SWS was the organization most aligned with the post-1986 people!
As for the progressive, legacy media outlets complaining that they are losing audiences to new, conservative media ones, I recently watched a video where psychologist Jordan Peterson had something to say (i.e. an angry rant) about that. I don’t have the actual quote, but it was something to the effect of, “The legacy media noticed that everyone was going to these new media platforms which are dominated by conservatives. Well, you [progressives] kicked us out of your platforms, so we made our own. Then we’ve spent the last seven years inviting you to come talk with us and none of you took us up on the offer, you sons of *witches!!!”
*Not the actual word, something that rhymes and comes off a bit stronger in American English
The situation of cluelessness with regard to working-class Americans and their own obnoxiousness is not enough to fully explain how bad the Harris Campaign actually was. Even the greenest political operative knows that it is always necessary to reach out to the undecideds, new voters and switch voters to win anything. But the Harris campaign seemed to ignore everyone that was not already a hardcore, Hillary/Biden democrat. Why spend millions on Rally entertainment ( crowd draws?) that had zero chance of bringing in undecided voters ( Lizzo). Why ignore any media outlet where you might reach a couple of independents or disgruntled republicans. Why spend millions on media consultants that helped you make the most pathetic commercials every seen.
There can only be three answers;
1) The democrats knew that the gig was up when the “Joe Biden” con unraveled and they just had to put on a show and distribute the billions of dollars in their coffers to their friends and allies in a kind of twisted money laundering operation.
2) They really thought the the democratic ” department of dirty tricks” had the election rigging thing under control and the campaigns only purpose was to look a victory for Kamala look plausible.
3) The woke rot had so completely infected the party and the campaign that incompetence was the order of the day. If you had a chance to see any of the Harris campaigns ” why stong men should vote for a woman,” commercials , you know what I mean. Teleprompters cutting out, botched interviews, sham Beyonce concerts all support this theory.
Trump has nominated several people for his goverment with stains on their personal history. Pete Hegseth (for Sec. Defense) was accused of sexual assault; he claims it was consensual sex with a 30-year old married staffer after he got drunk in a hotel bar. Modern Dating Theory states that a drunken person is incapable of consent, so maybe she should be held responsible? (On the other hand, a prudent candidate for any government position that requires a security clearance should avoid drinking in hotels, anyway.) Matt Gaetz, candidate for Attorney General, is accused of using illegal drugs and paying for sex, possibly with a 17-year old girl (7 years ago), though the Federal investigation has already been closed without charges. And, of course, Trump’s personal life has some awkward moments.
What I’m taking away from this is that these candidates immunize other government officials from attempts at blackmail. With Jeffrey Epstein’s client list out there somewhere, the only way to neutralize it is to normalize the behavior and shrug off the accusations. “Maybe it happened; maybe it didn’t. Let’s secure the border, OK?”
A few days after the election a talking head on MSNBC claimed that Harris ran a brilliant, flawless campaign. Her evidence of this was that she had been endorsed by two prominent singers. The pure contempt and disdain she apparently holds for American voters, who must vote blindly for whoever the Famous Pretty People tell them to, still amazes me.
The title of your piece is vastly underappreciated among the commentariat I think! We are not talking about an election, but an epoch, and not because of something Donald did, but something deep that is changing as the People shake the scales of propaganda from their eyes and the ditch the lonely self-obsessed person created by materialist culture (finally read psychology of totalitarianism and it makes thus argument very beautifully) and increasingly granular mass marketing! I LOVE the ‘Century of the Other’ as a recognizing of this feature. The Century of the one-who-was-not-named in the dominant narrative, didn’t see themselves in it but hadn’t yet found the way to write their rebuttal in action.
Also major appreciation to Steve T @20 (who I think is the only other one to comment intently about the title) and his vision for the historical roots and future possibility of this time where cultures are allowed to flower in their unique expressions with their central hills. Instead we have the historical experience of the wicked colonial gaze ‘Othering’ them, to make them less-than, in order to justify their oppression; and then this being fashioned into an excuse to grey wash them into oblivion in a raging melting pot. Turning diversity into a question of color and not CULTURE made it incorporable into colonial political economy. The Century of the Other could be about restoring vibrant color to the true diversity of lands and their situated peoples! I am so excited about this project.
Which brings me to @Roldy #21 . First, opposition to the neoliberal flattening of everything, shining light on everything so there are no hidden cracks to hide, administering everything, jailing what doesn’t fit… this shared project is a deep allegience, not a shallow one! The allegience is to something more like what Steve T described, if New England could conserve New England ways and Appalachia appalachian ways and midwestern farmers midwestern farmer ways. The Century of the Other.
The heritage food fest was the weekend after the election and honest, I didn’t hear it mentioned but once when someone speculated if they would really let a Joel salatin or the like into the usda (others suggest corn farmer/bureaucrat/weather tracker-manipulator for climate ‘resilience’ Kip Tom more likely and I agree; in political practice trump will not be as discontinuous as we hope unless people find ways to keep up pressure). Seriously no one was talking about it. Our eyes were on a more distant horizon and more immediate action at the same time. Let’s give a great meaning to the Century of the Other and make a fine joke of all of Bernays excretory work.
@roger kulmula
On the question of the media transition, I recently fracturing into many streams, there’s a YouTuber I just discovered called ‘TruthStream Media’, it’s a couple. You might like them while you’re turning over this thought. They also made a documentary called ‘The Minds of Men’ in 2018 about mind control experiments from the 30s-70s, reported recently from North Carolina, present extensively about media manipulation and propaganda. She takes apart the term ‘mainstream’ in one of the videos. Anyway, it’s crumbling… it is funny that it’s a boomer reality tv host playing such a role in the transition, shows that at the least Trump is bigger than that role, that he knows how to ride a wave.
Finally, I second Peter the Khan 37
“I refused to vote for either uniparty candidate because of their support for the extermination of the Palestinians”
Thanks again JMG for the Century of the Other framing. It’s so rich.
Eva (#44) – Are you asserting that our economy relies on exploitation of undocumented immigrant labor? Is that an economy that you feel proud to support? If we can no longer exploit undocumented immigrant labor, then production costs will go up, but our society should develop more respect for that labor when we realize that it’s “people like us” that do it. (I picked cucumbers for a pickle factory in Michigan, while in high school. It was hot, dirty work and the leaves and vines were scratchy. But I was proud of my part of the harvest, and the money that I earned.)
@ Dr Hooves “My take on all this is rather simple – Trump won as the obvious lessor of two evils.”
I favorite take I saw on all this was someone saying “I voted for Satan so that I could say I voted for the lesser of three evils.”
@ EVA just a little more on Project 2025. I agree it has a lot of horrible things in it, the good news is that a lot of it will never be enacted. ‘The Heritage Foundation’s’ influence on Republicans peaked in the mid 80’s and has been waning ever since as those within the party try to distance themselves from the policies and the people in general. Heritage Foundation is a think tank, not doctrine. There is still the question of what they will pick out of it, if anything but only time will tell on that. Same with a lot of what Trump has said. They cannot do everything that has been said, so it becomes a case of see what is viable and what gets left behind.
My biggest concern with Trump is that all these folks he is pulling in are new to the position. That can mean doing things in a whole new different fashion and that is great, it also means that mistakes can be made from lack of experience. It is a weird time ahead, hopefully for the better.
And to follow on @ JMG “He’s also proposing to cut the federal budget by laying off vast numbers of federal bureaucrats and decreasing the huge regulatory burden the government places on all businesses, and especially small businesses, the most effective source of job creation.”
There is that saying, don’t trust a government you couldn’t drown in a pond. I think at least they might get it down to a small sized lake.
It will be interesting to see how they try to downsize as only 15% of the budget is allocated directly to wages. It cannot just come from the bureaucratic side of things, it will also need a significant decrease/reallocation in spending on materials/energy. That is not to say that it cannot be done, just that it will be a fine path they need to walk to achieve this.
“And Elon Musk is cheerfully getting ready to “break” the economy. “There will be hardship””
I will float my most pessimistic take on this, take with a grain of salt. Let’s say it goes down the darkest path, that would be one in which they deliberately tank the economy so that the billionaire class can buy up assets for cents on the dollar. Essentially do what happened in Russia in the mid 90’s. I don’t seriously think they will do this but I also cannot entirely rule it out, may be a 1% chance of that happening. I might have been reading too much dystopian fiction here.
As an aside, one thing I do keep hearing in between the screaming is the common phrase “Trump wants to be come a dictator!”, this is based on the idea that they will push for a 3rd term. To do that they would have to over turn the 22nd Amendment, I hope they do. Not because of Trump in general but because it is a silly limitation as a whole. It was put in place because of Roosevelt’s 4th term but if that is who the people want. Why the arbitrary limitation?
Here is Australia we had our Prime Minister John Howard for 4 terms, only to lose on round 5. That didn’t make him a dictator only that the people voted for him a lot.
The flip side of this argument is that if this is Trumps last term, they are going to push hard to make change happen.
@ Cugel #62 “Do you see it as likely that the Democrats will rethink their approach?”
I think they will be forced to rethink out of pure logistics. Excuse the dog terminology but they have now practically run out of both Clinton and Obama pedigree. Maybe they will finally try some contemplation of what they are doing wrong doing something new… or they will go for one last shot and just do the stupid thing; float Michelle Obama and take another beating.
@ ASDF & JMG – Just call him Gangsta T from now on. I will!
To Eva @ 66:
I’m a regular reader of this blog, and did not myself vote for Trump (or Harris – I sat this one out). I can’t speak for JMG or other commentators, but you frame the vote for Trump as a vote for ‘hardship’. Let me first say that I did not like the last 4 years of a Trump administration, and I DO think we as Americans have an EXCELLENT chance of ending up in actual hardship as a result of men sweeping into power – Elon Musk comes to mind first and foremost – who think they understand much, much more than they actually do about the world. And yet…
I admit that I felt a great sense of exhilaration and even relief when I found out Trump had been elected. If I was to put a pin in why, I think comes down to how my Democrat-leaning friends and family have behaved over the past 4 years. What disturbs me most is the way that their opinions are no longer open to argument. There is not a way to bring up any alternative viewpoint, no matter the caveat, without it becoming a personal betrayal. It is 100% tribalism, everything the Party does is right, everything Republicans do and believe in is evil, and during COVID, this behavior cranked up way past 11.
I’m quite pro-science, and have had a pretty solid education in it, but I had personal reservations about the vaccines as I was about to conceive my 2nd child, and I could tell from simple math that no one had tested for potential complications in that area. Refusing the shot on those grounds alone – I made no other argument – lead to my entire family’s eviction from a home we were living in that belonged to a Democratic relative. Attempting to make a case that the CDC’s own scientists (!) had published on the Internet (!!) the results of a study directly contradicting the claim that vaccines prevented transmission, therefore removing the argument for mandatory vaccination (!!!) fell on deaf ears. Without the Supreme Court throwing out the mandates, my personal choice to take the least risk possible for my upcoming pregnancy would have put my family in the streets. I have Justice Roberts – a man my family of origin hated without reserve! – to thank for the roof over our heads today. In a sense, it was the apocalypse for me… an unveiling of certain truths about politics and human beings themselves, which my extremely partisan family and community had never and likely will never acknowledge.
This example is personal to me, and I did and do not expect it to apply to the electorate. I have made peace with every family member that lost their actual goshdang mind during the COVID years, though I have drawn a hard line through ever speaking about politics with them again. But I ask you: was my experience not ‘hardship’? I was relieved when the Democratic nomination passed from Biden to Harris – as I will never, ever personally forgive Biden but had no such baggage with Harris – but I could not muster even the slightest bit of enthusiasm. These past 4 years have taken too much from me. The reduced voter rolls for Democratic stalwarts this time around may reflect similar situations.
Also, there are aspects of every single sacred cow of the left that deserve discussion, at the very least. I support trans rights. But should transwomen be allowed to participate without caveat in women’s competitive sports? I support immigrants not being blamed or punished for the realities of America’s modern economy. But has the choice of our government to systematically undercut native-born labor using those immigrants come without consequence? I’m well aware of the statistics on which gender commits more violent rape, and violence in general. But how do we properly guide our young men when masculinity itself seems to be what the loudest voices on the left are determined to attack? I could go on–Palestine, DEI, tax policy – but the response to any questions raised to a left-leaning space (or person) became “Trump is Hitler!!!” Or “check your privilege!!” Which is, of course, a very academic way of saying “Shut your mouth!” So I have. But this has lead to my withdrawal, not my support.
I fully expect harder history to come visit this country down the line, and my biggest grief about the election is that the Democratic side threw it so very, very completely to their enemies, and that none of us will escape the consequences of that failure, whatever they may be. But just as I had to take the consequences of my own choices in the teeth, accept them, and rebuild from there, it seems only fair to expect the same from the Democratic party. There will almost certainly be another election in 2028. If 4 years could take me from a never-Trumper to relief at his re-election, there’s more than enough time and opportunity for the Democrats to swing the electorate the other way by then. I don’t have the energy to spearhead it. But I will be watching from the sidelines, hoping someone else makes an example I can follow. I wish the best luck to all partisans… the game is yet afoot, and the ball is still in play.
A perspective I like on climate change is the book Climate: A New Story by Charles Eisenstein. You may find it worthwhile. Eisenstein was in a place of input and advice in Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
@Mary #89 … the way I interpret the separation of church and state…. the church can influence the state without limit, but the state cannot impose on the church. Maintaining this is of course not easy. One gap is through selective enforcement of laws. For example, churches get various special freedoms, e.g. tax breaks. But what exactly is a legitimate church that should be entitled to these freedoms? Plus, a lot of nasty political business is done by non-governmental agents, mobs and thugs and private militias etc. So if somebody roughs up a church, the government might be either lazy or diligent in its investigation & enforcement actions, depending on whether it favors the particular church or not.
@ Chris/JMG Gobble dropped that a long while back.
If my motto was ‘Do not murder’ and I go to people, “Hi my name is Michael, I do not murder” – that would look very suspicious. 😉
MJ, well, the impoverishment and immiseration of a hundred million working class Americans is at least as subject to the same concerns, and yet that’s what the former bipartisan consensus did, you know. As for Musk, you do know, don’t you, that he laid off 80% of the staff at Twitter? Customer service improved thereafter. That’s what got him the position at DOGE.
Thomas P, oh, granted, but a being can dream.
Slink, it’s the one thing they can talk about without admitting their own condition of privilege.
Sandwiches, thanks for both of these. I’m not surprised that your school paper did so well; as we all know, those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; and those who can’t teach get prestigious jobs at universities.
Carlos, hmm! Thanks for this. As for Peterson, he’s right, of course, including his use of English…
Clay, that’s an interesting point. I’d like to suggest a fourth option, though: sheer bureaucratic incompetence. I’ve noticed that in a vast number of settings, any large bureaucratically run organization — government, corporation, nonprofit, you name it — has recently descended into hopeless incompetence. I don’t think it’s wokery, or even DEI. I think we’ve reached the point that there are so many levels of bureaucracy that it’s no longer possible to get anything constructive done, and no useful information gets through.
Lathechuck, that’s certainly possible.
Zachary, I’ve seen that sort of bizarre proof-by-assertion very often of late. When I pointed out to Michael Hughes of the Magic Resistance that the spells he was teaching were lightweight bunny slope stuff, he responded stiffly, “No, these are powerful, sophisticated spells!” They weren’t — they made use of none of the technical methods that could have justified that description, and they were incoherent and sloppily written to boot — but he apparently thought that he could make his statement true simply by asserting it. It’s a very, very odd habit.
AliceEm, thank you for getting that! I hope it catches on.
BeardTree, I’ll see if my local library system has it.
Michael, well, there’s that!
Lathechuk @107: Yes, I am outright stating that much of the economy runs on migrant labor. I feel like this is not really an argument. Is that bad? Yes, it is. What replaces it? Americans, working at minimum wage? Highly doubtful. More likely machines, but those are going to take YEARS to roll out, and in the meantime, between a broken food supply chain, the tariffs, the $2800 tax hike on anyone under $100K, and Trump’s completely unqualified cabinet, cheerily deregulating so the food, the water, the soil and the air are no longer safe….
I hope I’m wrong. I hope that Big Tech is regulated (but with Elon running the country, I don’t see how that’s possible). I hope that deaths are minimized when twelve million people and their families are rounded up — and I can assure you from history they’re not too particular about who they round up. I hope that people aren’t legislated out of existence, that women don’t die from miscarriages (wait a second, that’s happening….)
Perhaps you might understand why people are scared? It’s beyond TERRIFYING…the cruelty really does seem to be the point.
Oh, and —
Respect for labor? In America? Don’t make me laugh. It took riots to get what little labor actually HAS in this country.
I understand completely that liberals are condescending and obnoxious. I fail to see how this will be an improvement, just from what has been announced
@Eva #66 I’ll take a run at it, although I imagine you will either claim I am making things up, or I am somehow deluded. In any case… Responding directly to his actual platform (not the one the mass media is trying to assign him).
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform
1) Seal the border and stop the migrant invasion
It is basic economics that if there is more of something then it is less valuable. Mass uncontrolled immigration (estimates are about 20 Milion illegal crossing during the Biden administration) lowers wages, raises criminal acitivity, and burdens social services. Remember we are talking about *illegal* immigration. I notice that many liberals like to conflate legal immigration and illegal immigration.
2) Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history
This follow along with number one. And despite what the mass media will tell you it is very doable. In fact, many illegal immigrants will self deport after a number of major corporate heads find themselves facing enormous fines and even possible jail time for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants. After that people will ask for proof of citizenship before hiring. With no work and a crack down on social services there will be no reason to stay in America for many who crossed illegally.
3) End inflation, and make America affordable again
The working class is impacted by inflation way more than the upper class. Why? Because a working class person will spend a larger percentage of their income on things like food (about 15%) while a upper class person will spend 8% or less. When inflation raises the price of food more of the working classes income is eaten up.
4) Make america the dominant energy producer in the world, by far!
If you have been reading Greer for a long period of time you know that he understands that energy is the core resource. Trump understand this too. When asked how he would lower prices he said by lowering the cost of energy. Now, I fully admit that this is a temporary solution. But most working class people are not aware of the peak oil problem. So for them this just means heating your house, filling your car’s tank, and having food arrive at the grocery store all get cheaper.
5) STOP OUTSOURCING, AND TURN THE UNITED STATES INTO A MANUFACTURING SUPERPOWER
I don’t see how you can not see this as a huge boon to the working class.
6) Large tax cuts for workers, and no tax on tips!
Once again, how does this not help those struggling to get by? My wife’s small business pays almost 40% of its revenue in taxes, licenses, and fees.
7) Defend our constitution, our bill of rights, and our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms
We working class believe in the right to speak freely without fear of being cancelled, the right to practice our faith, and the right to arm and defend ourselves from crime and from tyranny. We support a president who supports those things.
8) Prevent world war three, restore peace in europe and in the middle east, and build a great iron dome missile defense shield over our entire country — all made in america
Our son is on a ship facing down the Houthi’s as write this. We’d like him to come home safe, not end up dead in a pointless war in some far flung country because our leaders are so filled with hubris that they want to police the entire world.
9) End the weaponization of government against the American people
As Matt Taibi has shown the government is involved in colluding with tech companies to censor Americans. We beleive in free speech. See #7 above.
10) Stop the migrant crime epidemic, demolish the foreign drug cartels, crush gang violence, and lock up violent offenders
I live in an area where fentanyl is a major problem. Care to guess how it gets here? Care to guess who is importing it, selling it, and violently protecting their turf and their income?
11) Rebuild our cities, including Washington DC, making them safe, clean, and beautiful again.
This one, actually impacts some of the working class less. I’m not in a major city and wouldn’t want to be..
12) Strengthen and modernize our military, making it, without question, the strongest and most powerful in the world
Once again, son in military, pretty common in the working class.
13) Keep the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency
If we lose world reserve status we are all screwed.
14) Fight for and protect social security and medicare with no cuts, including no changes to the retirement age
I have no idea how old you are, but I will be 61 in a few months. I would like to be able to retire at some point.
15) Cancel the electric vehicle mandate and cut costly and burdensome regulations
Trump was 100% right when he said the electric vehicle mandate will cause a bloodbath in the auto industry. Other than Tesla all of those vehicles are manufactured overseas. If that mandate stays in place, or even worse, is strengthened thousands of working class manufacturing jobs will be lost.
16) Cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children
Hey, we love our kids and don’t want to see them indoctrinated into idealogies *we* don’t believe in. You may think all of these ideas are lovely. Fine teach them to your kids at home. We’re okay with teaching our kids faith at home, you can do the same.
17) Keep men out of women’s sports
Anyone who can’t see that men have an enormous advantage in most sports is being willfully blind. We would prefer our daughters have a chance to work hard and succeed at athletics and not risk their lives getting a volleyball spiked into their face by a large transwoman. But this is not just a working class issue,
18) Deport pro-hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again
This is one of the few that I disagree with. Not that I am pro-Hamas, or pro-Israel. I just think it is a freedom of speach issue.
19) Secure our elections, including same day voting, voter identification, paper ballots, and proof of citizenship
Once again not purely a working class issue. But it is a pretty common sense proposal. I woould add make voting day a national holiday.
20) Unite our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success
Absolutely. I mean in theory. What’s the old saying, “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.”
I’m not saying Trump will succeed at any of the above. Frankl y, I have my doubts that he will even make it to the innaguration. But your question was, why would a working class person vote for Trump and his agenda. Well, the above is his 20 point agenda, and I have told you why our family voted Trump.
I doubt this is going to satisfy you. But I took a shot.
AV
The number one political issue for me in this election, the one that drove my ultimate decision almost entirely on its own, was the continued funding and arming of Israel as it kills Palestinian civilians en masse. They may claim that Israel is just “defending themselves” but it doesn’t seem like they’re “defending themselves” from Hamas or any other “terrorists.” Both candidates ultimately supported continuing Biden’s policy of funding and arming the Israelis, Trump maybe a tiny deal more. The entire time I leaned towards sitting this election out and when it came down to it I stuck to that position.
I will say that Trump’s cabinet picks are terrible. Gaetz may not be guilty of any sexual impropriety, the existence of investigations were illegally disclosed. Ultimately they didn’t find anything, but Gaetz is still a strange repellant guy and no one I’d want running the Department of Justice. Marco Rubio for Secretary of State is the one I find most likely to be confirmed and he might get Democratic votes in the process, but he’s also an Israel-first Republican and has criticized Trump over Ukraine. I worry that he’ll be an even worse secretary than Tony Blinken and will further alienate the developing world. The most terrifying one of all is Pete Helseth. Maybe the old rape accusations will sink him but that’s not what scares me. What scares me is that he sees himself as some kind of holy warrior and thinks Israel is the vanguard of a crusade against Islam. The US is already losing the Middle East but I can see him leading Trump further into that morass. On an amusing side note Mike Waltz, Trump’s pick for NSA, is the brother-in-law of Creed singer Scott Stapp. Waltz is also pretty bad and might be more influential on Trump but he seems less of an apocalyptic figure and will have no real power of his own.
Finally I do want to end this by saying that one aspect of a Trump victory that appeases me is that some of the worst people in the country are either in complete shock or are bending the knee. Anyone see that picture of Trump with the Bidens where everyone is smiling? Or how Harris almost immediately called to concede to him? Neither Hillary in 16 or Trump in 20 conceded gracefully, Trump never conceding. Perhaps the race just wore her out and she decided there was nothing worth fighting. After all Trump was projected to win the “popular vote” by the following morning despite the fact that California had barely started counting votes.
Chuaquin 48
Per your suggestion, I read the India Times article.
As a family historian and amateur genealogist, I researched Donald Trump’s ancestry long ago. I ascertained that he is German on father’s side, and Scottish on mother’s side, roughly.
One thing any seasoned American genealogist knows about negro genealogy located in the southern US states, is that negroes almost ALWAYS are part-white, most often from a rape of a black slave woman by a white male plantation owner, or by one of his sons. It is very, very, a third-very rare for a black American, who had ancestors who lived in the Deep South (US) from Maryland to Texas and up to Arkansas in the 1700s and 1800s, to be 100% black. I went in knowing this.
When KomodoDragon Harris first came into the limelight in August, she declared she was the following ethnicities, in this sequence: East Asian + Negro + White. To me, she came off sounding like she mostly identified as East Asian.
I wanted to find out if she was correct. Within a couple hours of research using public sources, I drew up her family tree.
Each parent gives a child 50% of their DNA. I found out that:
Harris’ mother’s half is East Asian (colloquially yellow).
Harris’ father’s half is negro (colloquially black) AND caucasian (colloquially white). He is mostly-black with a small percentage white (my guess the proportion is something like 90% black/10% white). Yes indeedy, Harris fits the known stereotype of having been descended from a white male plantation land owner who had relations with a female slave — chances were the relationship was NOT consensual. Her ethnicities show up in public records.
In my own heritage, I found an off-branch of one of my upstate New York white ancestors having a black branch, one being a white male ‘large farm’ land owner. In the North, a plantation was called a large farm. In another lineage, I found a Northern black branch, probably similarly predisposed.
About a week into Harris’ campaign, she completely stopped mentioning the white — which was repeated by eveyone else. I had caught her in a lie. I still can’t figure out her motivation for leaving out that she is part-white (50% of 10% = 5%). Not a lot, but still there. (Seriously, any ideas? What would she have gained from leaving off she was part-white?) From then on, she dubbed herself as black + yellow, this time always leading with the black. And yellow took second place. Nothing whatsoever about part-white.
In other words, the author Nirmalya Dutta, of this India Times article, did not do her proper homework, and mouthed incorrectly that Komodo Harris was black + yellow, being none the wiser that Harris was part-white.
So, my conclusion was that, for the campaign, Harris lied about her ethnicity. I saw her as a liar from Day 8 onwards. Why could she not ‘fess up to being part-white?
💨Northwind Grandma💨🟨🟫⬜️
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Project 2025 is a think tank fantasy project, just like Project 2030 and Agenda 2030 were think tank projects from the other side. One of those 2030 projects called for forced depopulation of the countryside except for those necessary to food production. Mandatory vegan diets and maximum use of GMO crops were to be used to feed the pod-living urban population and the reclaimed land was to be rewilded. Ignore think tank projects. Flying cars have a better chance of being practical.
Oh yeah, I forgot about the press’s “sharp as a tack” comments about Biden just before the emperor’s clothes fell off. Then there was the “cheap fakes” about the video that showed him wandering off after the squirrels or whatever at that European meeting.
So, the entire grand theater surrounding this election – the various spells, cast and miscast through the astral light, both upon unsuspecting victims and the casters themselves, leaves me with a few questions.
First – what, in your opinion, is the best way to avoid ever, ever falling under one’s own spell as the democrats have? I see what this has done to them, and I want to avoid this fate at all costs. We are all subject to believing our own bs, to falling into groupthink – what are the best exercises, meditations, etc to ward against this?
Second – I am fortunate enough to have a friend group that is mixed – conservative and liberal, democrat and republican, all sitting down amd playing dungeons and dragons together! Unheard of in these times, I know. I have always been the wildcard – respeceting both sides, while mocking both, I was going to vote for Kennedy until he jpined Trump, and I folllwed him on that journey, faithful to his vision. Only the conservatives in my group know which way I voted, though. Anyway, my question is – when we all gather for our new years party, as has been tradition for years, what’s the best way to offer comfort, sympathy, and underatanding topeople who have just watched their god die? The fact I don’t believe in the great god Progress doesnt mean I cant sympathize with those who do – I recall when I stopped believing, and it wasn’t a fun time. How does one help them see the comedy in the midst of their tragedy? If discussion of politics comes up, maybe I should change the topic to religion?
Always appreciate any and all advice, archdruid.
Eva, “These are people who have never managed anything of note”. Does having managed projects involving landing rockets, docking with a space station (where Boeing failed), and catching a rocket the size of a skyscraper with two giant arms count as “anything of note”?
I really don’t understand a lot of the progressive critique of Musk or Trump for that matter. Yes, they were both born with massive privilege, they both have massive egos; Musk by all accounts is a terrible father. There are many things to hold them to account on but progressives choose to attack Musk by saying he’s not smart etc. Musk is clearly very capable in actually accomplishing things.
What has the Democratic establishment accomplished by contrast?
You can read Climate: A New Story here for free https://charleseisenstein.org/books/climate-a-new-story/eng/preliminaries/
Eisenstein as a principle of his offers his stuff for free with the option of purchase or a donation.
Non-triggered liberal here, who enjoys taking in a wide spectrum of information, including your emails that I often don’t fully agree with. I do honestly think that Trump poses a danger to our country. What does that danger look like compared to the malaise and ineffective Democrat rule, who knows. The USA is the most conservative democracy in the world (opinion, and others that are more conservative I don’t necessarily trust their democratic process). Things that I would like to see like better gun laws and nationalized health care, seem centrist or normal to the rest of the world but radically left to us. The heart of my comment does not disagree with your analysis of the preconceptions of Harris, the party or the apparatus that supports it. But it does feel irresponsible, looking at how selfish Trump is, to cast any concern away for his governing simply to bask in correctly outing the others selfishness. Looking at the cabinet picks isn’t like Argentina, it’s like Idiocracy.
I am planning on writing an essay on why Trump won. TL:DR is the Republicans primarily managed to support what they loved while Democrats were mostly focused upon tearing down what they hated. I remember when Trump was thinking of running. My exact thoughts as a left-leaning vegan in 2015 were “Oh great, some reality TV celeb wants to be President? No thanks.” Shortly afterward, the Dems talked only of hatred for Trump 24/7. And of course Trump leaned into it and all those funny men on 4chan made it into memes and jokes. Trump did not need to campaign: the Democrats did it for him, and it just kept getting more intense. Maybe had they kept Trump’s name out of their mouths, Harris might have had a shot. A few weeks ago, at the bitter end, Trump hilariously rented a garbage truck and signed autographs out of it because Biden called regular Americans “garbage”. And right now, Biden is trying to start a planet-incinerating nuclear war with Russia by allowing Ukraine to fire long range missiles into the heart of the Bear.
The part of your novel Star’s Reach I enjoyed the most was where a guy immediately gets buried alive by his local township for trying to dig for natural gas. I sincerely hope a similar fate awaits would-be nuclear warmongers in the deindustrial future, though I would also be right on board with the crueler fate of consigning the would-be nuclear warrior to an oubliette.
JMG 51
> …the Russians know perfectly well that Biden’s handlers are frantically trying to start a war Trump can’t get out of, in an attempt to salvage their failing Ukrainian project. The classic Russian thing to do would be to smile, wait, keep on hammering Ukraine, and then drive a harder bargain once negotiations with the Trump administration begin.
I second that. Let’s hope that Putin and his advocates are WISE ONES, and do exactly as you write here. I am on pins and needles to see the outcome of the next sixty days, or so. The wisdom of trees… the elders.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🌲🧹
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Chapter 11 of The Storm Before the Calm by George Friedman has this line, “The 2020s will be a period of failures. The 2030s and beyond will be a period of creation. The election of 2028 (or 2032 at the outside) will create the political framework for moving beyond the storm of the prior decade.”
So there is another person who is not surprised. Also Peter Turchin predicted a turbulent decade due to the effects of an overproduction of elites.
Along with Strauss and Howe we have three groups with three methodologies that all came to the same conclusion.
Even without repealing the term limit Trump is too old to run in ’28. I wonder if he’ll step down in early ’27 to give Vance a clear run at the election. It’s what Biden should have done. If he had stepped down in March of ’23 Harris would have been running as the incumbent and eligible for two full terms of her own.
JMG, I had considered your 4th option, but passed it over, as usually political campaigns are very short term organizations. In most cases lumbering bureaucracies take time to form and become useless and hidebound.
But that brings up another possibility, that is blend of my option 1 and your theory. Because of Joe Biden condition, a large bureaucracy was built up around him, and melded with the DNC apparatus over time. Without a real president this ” Biden Borg” grew and became hidebound and overstuffed.
Then when Biden flopped in the debate they went to plan 2 and scooped up a candidate with most of the same characteristics they could control and grow their power empire around. As they now felt they were brilliant and all powerful for pulling off their ” Sock Puppet president schtick,” they felt it would be nothing for such as powerful and brilliant organization to run a political campaign. So they hired a few “yes men” consultants and some Gen Z party planners. But by now this Biden Borg had become incapable of getting things done or making good decisions, but it was big and everyone got paid. That would explain the huge difference in staff payroll between Harris and Trump ( 10 or 20 times more for Harris) .
While this huge organization lumbered about, the only staffers not totally bogged down in the bureaucracy were the interns from Howard and Vassar, who proceeded to go crazy hiring their favorite singers, spurgling on ice cream and redecorating hotel rooms.
@ JMG – looks to me like the “twilight’s last gleaming” story arc is well and truly here. Which oil-rich country will we attack in 2025?
My bet is on Iran, but that’s easy money. If I had to wager a sneaky pick, I’d say Mexico. PEMEX has wrecked the cantarell field, Trump wants them to pay for the wall, it’s close, and he’s already said he will authorize attacks in Mexico to go after the cartels.
Is there a third oil-rich option I’m missing?
A book I came across decades ago (and whose title I’ve long forgotten) likened corporations to the Italian city states of the Renaissance. It brought to mind that a culture hostile to liberty can express itself in the corporate world as readily as in the halls of government, making collusion a natural outcome. Corporatism delende est.
I found the posts the editor of Scientific American put up. Not a good look for such formerly respected magazine. The worst of the foulness is blurred out.
https://www.aol.com/editor-scientific-american-apologizes-expletive-075009971.html
JMG,
I have been reading the comments, and I am seriously astounded that some of the commentariat don’t seem to be aware of Trump’s platform and the diverse demographic groups he drew his support from. I don’t know if they were genuinely not aware, or just trolls. This blog is as far from the mainstream as you can get.
I am also seeing a lot of apocalyptic fearmongering about what Trump will do – Concentration camps, Stripping people of citizenship, Jackbooted squads knocking on the doors and whatnot. Many people are working up themselves into a hysteria. It reminds me of the previous doomsday panics in 2000 and 2012. I suspect it’s going to end the same way too. Come 20th January, people are going to find that the apocalypse has not arrived.
Eva 66
> And Elon Musk is cheerfully getting ready to “break” the economy. “There will be hardship”, he says.
Americans of this generation, let’s say, 20-40 year olds, not only are not thrifty/frugal, they don’t even know there is a thing as being thrifty and frugal. Thriftiness and frugality will return. Thrift and frugality went out of vogue in the mid-1960s, at the same time that LBJ-Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” giveaways. The USA had extra cash in those days, but not anymore. One needs to count one’s 1¢ pennies (more accurately 25¢ quarters) — inflation.
I was scandalized when the big federal governmental throwing $ money at Americans, and then they spent it on vacations and other nonsense things. They had never heard of “saving for a rainy day.” When the rainy days came, and keep coming, they plead poverty. And yet they used to eat out regularly at restaurants — super expensive. They still buy a helluva lot of processed foods — also expensive.
Frugality and thriftiness is investing in cookbooks, cast iron pots, cast iron grills, and cast iron Dutch ovens (the best ever category of cookware!; not ceramic), pots and pans, flatware, dishware, cutlery, and cooking from scratch. Learn to boil water. Like buying real potatoes and baking them — cheap. Not to mention nutritious. Like buying a 7-pound whole chicken, or 10-pound small whole turkey, roasting it, having two to four meals out of it — cheap. Like buying ingredients for pizza. Learn what a gizzard is. Stick a hand in the cavity of a turkey. Like buying three cheeses and a pound of macaroni, and making mac-and-cheese for a couple meals — cheap. Learn spices and herbs. Learn to bake bread. Stop buying at the deli counter — super expensive ($10/lb. sliced turkey vs. turkey roast).
Thriftiness will get to THAT stage, and THAT is a good thing. If one doesn’t learn thrift and sensible cooking, one’s family starves. Don’t be a victim. Expensive processed foods will go out of fashion due to expense. I have made suppers for as little as $2 per meal. Most suppers are about $5 per meal, cheaper than processed foods and restaurants.
People, mainly women, will have to learn how to cook from scratch. It is hard learning anew but I did it at 70-something, so they can too. Go inch by inch.
One thing I learned is to start with a starch/carbohydrate — starch is what fills people up. One half of a supper is starch, like potato, pasta, rice, corn. Pasta itself has so many choices.
Gluten is protein. One wants gluten. Any gluten-free “food” has been stripped of its nutrition, so why bother? People are going to jump on me for this, but gluten-free is a fad.
One quarter of a supper is protein, like meat. Pork is highly nutritious and safe. Pigs are interesting creatures. Respect pigs. Guaranteed, if their ancestors hadn’t eaten pigs on a regular basis, descendants would not be here. One doesn’t need a lot of it. Meat can be rationed, even in good times.
One quarter of a supper is vegetable🥫🫛🌰.
Coming back to thrift and frugality. Learn it. It is a thing. It is a skill. One can live on food at 25% of what one spends now on food — by cutting out restaurants and processed foods. Stop bellyaching. Stop whining. Stop the “woe is me” attitude. No more bitching and moaning. Stop complaining how rough life is, and get on with it. The food situation is going to get worse. Food bills are going to get ever higher and not stop getting higher. So do something about it.
I don’t cook from scratch all the time. I tire easily, but am 70-something, so I am allowed. Read about cooking, about animals, about plants, maybe even gardening, about food history, about supermarkets.
Anyway, thanks for listening to my food-from-scratch hodge-podge tirade. If I can do it, anyone can. These days, the survival skill (anti-🪦) of cooking-from-scratch just doesn’t occur to people, so here I am yelling that doing one’s own cooking is possible AND desirable. Cooking-from-scratch is a lost art👩🏼🎨, and we need to resurrect✝️it.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🐖🍚🌽🍞🫛
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Can’t wait for your Astrology reading on the new administration.
One thing that is worrying me is more and more Christians trying to push everyone else out of the MAGA movement, just tonight heard one member say the constitutional protections of Free Speech, Freedom of Religion, keep and bare arms etc. should only apply to Christians.
Hoping nothing comes of it, but given the actions of the Witchypoo League of Legitamtly Bad[censored] Witches (they do seem to love to use Witch like the word that rhymes with it don’t they?) I am worried we polytheist are in for a massive backlash.
JMG 75
> He’s also proposing to cut the federal budget by laying off vast numbers of federal bureaucrats and decreasing the huge regulatory burden the government places on all businesses, and especially small businesses, the most effective source of job creation.
I sort of freaked out after being notified by my bank about the threatening “Beneficial Ownership Information Reporting Deadline Extension for Reporting Companies Created or Registered in 2024.” The notice I got wasn’t actually this because the date was any company starting earlier than 1 Jan 2020. If they don’t receive it by 31 Dec 2024, the fine is $100K and jail-time. WTF?
My husband and I have an LLC, and I was deeply offended that the feds would ask this of our small businesses. This threatening regulation is onerous, the sort of sh_t the feds need to stop. I assume the feds already know everything about our LLC anyway, with all the surveillance going on, so why tell us to fill out this form? I am so f_cking mad. We, as a mom-and-pop shop, are simply trying to keep from going to the poorhouse. I don’t have time for these sh_tty regulations. I am incandescent with rage🤬💡. This rage is already hot >>> 1776 American Revolution II material coming along okay?.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🧾🖕🏽🤬💡
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Alexander Mercouris regularly refers to something journalist Yves Smith a while ago described in one of her posts:
If there is an important topic concerning international relations to negotiate, Western diplomats gather in meetings, strive to formulate a final statement agreeable to all and then present the results to the public.
Only to now find that what they casually left out – the fact that this had in fact been a process which needed to involve an Other Party – cannot be ignored any longer, because the Other, especially countries like Russia and China, says No.
This then baffles the Western bureaucrats, who go back for another round of internal negotiations, again presenting their results afterwards, and are again told No to their faces.
Thanks for another thought-provoking essay JMG! I don’t think it was a complete explanation of the US Election, but it helped me clarify some of my thinking–
The New Republic essay by Tomasky reminded me of the end of Don McLean’s “Vincent:”
“They would not listen, they’re not listening still; Perhaps they never will.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rm0OGavjxc
I remember a chat I had in 1976 with Peter, a college classmate majoring in Journalism. “We can use our respected status as Journalists to steer public opinion,” I was told. I asked him how he could do neutral reporting while advocating one side of an issue. “I have no choice,” he replied, “since that’s the position of the faculty. I have to go along with it if I want to graduate.”
And here we are, after nearly 50 years of propaganda and false promises. Was it any wonder that so many did not believe it when Kamala and the media told them the same old stories? They never intended to keep the promises they made….
I was not too surprised that Harris lost, but also not very optimistic that Trump and his team will accomplish much. I see a lot of projection of hopes onto the incoming administration, and perhaps ascribed competencies with not much basis in reality. Neither candidate addressed the real issues.
Jimmy Carter tried to give us the straight story–And it cost him re-election; Carter was right that we needed to lower our expectations and get ready for the end of cheap energy.
So Eva, you are correct to think that the Trump Administration will not help the Middle Class very much, but if he somehow manages, even accidentally, to change some of the disastrous policies of Empire, he could lessen the pain of impending catastrophes.
For example, tariffs will raise prices, probably permanently–But they are a time-honored way to start and shield industries at home. Look for Americans to violate foreign patents in the near future, just as the Chinese did a couple of decades ago.
A domestic economy will also greatly decrease the income of industry moguls on the East and West Coasts, and they will fight like hell to keep foreign laborers working impossible hours for a pittance.
Increasing energy costs are already forcing us all to depend on locally-made, more expensive and scarcer stuff. We are all experiencing shortages due to shipping trouble and broken supply chains in a time of peace. What will happen to global just-in-time shipping if war breaks out?
Another issue– The calling of a Constitutional Convention seems more and more likely, and could accelerate these changes — Here’s a link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Constitutional_Convention_of_the_United_States#Convention_of_States
Taking a step back and talking about culture. Trump simply run on an anti-woke agenda which obviously resonates with many people. I think the western culture with all the ugliness promoted reached its end-state, that is what Spengler hinted at 100 years ago. The political class shows exactly that. I always look at architecture as an expression of culture and also here we in the west are done. No beauty whatsoever. Contrasting that with an area of 30 beautiful classical buildings, erected near Sevastopol in the last 2 years dubbed “Putins Disney-Land” in the West. Check this out, it speaks for itself. It is a bit like Retrotopia. https://t.me/neuesausrussland/21423 . Last time such beautiful things were built in the West was under Ludwig II of Bavaria more than 120 years ago (Neuschwanstein, Herrenchiemsee). I hope for a turnaround of the West, but I am in doubt whether a Trump will be able to handle it. Better put money in beauty than in war as did August of Saxony in Dresden.
Maybe a silly question but …when and how will we see a woman as POTUS?
JMG, to add to our exchange above, and also to add to the discussion of Trump 47 and China….
1. US foreign policy always claims to be about principles and ideals, but is really always about power and resources, can we agree?
So what is US interest in Taiwan really about, if it’s not “democracy”? It’s the chip industry, on which modern economies depend, and the largest source of chips is Taiwan-based TMSC.
Pelosi stirred up the hornets’ nest with her visit to the island and, almost immediately, the Biden administration began ‘encouraging’ TMSC to relocate to the US. Early attempts failed, but recent reports say they’ve succeeded in a production run. However, even more recent reports are of lawsuits lodged against TMSC for discriminating against workers who can’t speak Mandarin. It would appear that they can’t get Taiwan-style productivity without Taiwan-style culture, so thus far it’s clear that Taiwan’s chip industry cannot simply be relocated to the US.
Meanwhile, China and Russia, who used to buy TMSC chips like everyone else, have fast-tracked domestic design & production and are getting very good results. I would expect a major toning-down of rhetoric over Taiwan so that TMSC can get on with its business where it does it well.
So the incoming Trump administration will likely be aware that current China policy is counter-productive. There will of course be trade wars as Trump imposes tariffs to boost domestic US production in industries where that’s feasible, but the risk of a shooting war will subside significantly.
This is quite long already, so I’ll put the second point in a separate comment.
To continue re: Trump 47 and China:
2. JMG and many of the commentariat will be aware that there’s been a lot of discussion of de-dollarisation in world trade, something the BRICS bloc are looking at very seriously. Aware of how important reserve currency status is to US power, Trump has promised massive tariffs against countries which abandon the USD in their trade.
Whether this is even feasible is an open question, but reports on X in the last week indicate that China has already called his bluff and found a way to completely subvert that reserve status to its own benefit and that of the global South. It’s set out very clearly here.
To summarise:
– Since 1973, oil sales have mostly been for US dollars, so oil producers such as Saudi Arabia have massive piles of USD they can’t use productively.
– China has just issued bonds in Saudi Arabia denominated in USD. The Saudis gave China a massive pile of USD which China must repay.
– China uses these USD to buy resources from developing countries especially in Africa.
– These developing countries, previously short of dollars, now have enormous piles of USD which they use to repay USD-denominated loans from the IMF, western banks, etc.
– The developing countries are now closer to being free from the crushing neo-liberal terms of those loans, and are able to redirect government revenues to things like building roads, schools and hospitals.
– The Chinese repay the Saudis not with dollars, but with the equivalent value of things like infrastructure development, high-speed trains and so on, which the Saudis actually want.
– All those USD stop circulating around international markets and are now returned to the domestic US economy where they will greatly increase inflation.
– There is no way for the US to prevent this, short of sanctioning Saudi banks in the same way they did Russian banks – which would mean they could no longer buy Saudi oil themselves, and would hasten the Saudi transition to using Chinese yuan.
Very simple, very elegant.
Even Cenk from the Young Turks has said positive things about the right. He tweeted to Musk that he had ideas to improve the Dept. of Defense, and Musk asked him what his ideas were.
Cenk then said that no democrat has ever wanted his ideas. He may be noticing that the right is the populism that he’s always wanted… but we’ll see.
,
Hi John Michael,
Sara had a pretty good skill there doing such work, and making a living from providing those services is indicative to my mind of the quality of service provided. Less capable folks get washed out of the system, mostly because the job doesn’t get completed. 🙂 That’s work which teaches a person to finish tasks. True too. For your interest, I love doing that work, although my peers stare down their noses at me when I make that choice. After so many long years in the profession, the numbers all recount a story. Being on hand in a business means that you can share the story as well, if they want to hear – which is not always the case. You’d have seen that in students over the years, presumably?
But yes, the red tape is coming thick and fast, and it is bewildering to people in small business. I’ll tell you a funny story, and you can make of it what you will. There was an alleged incident involving a big high profile consultant (huge) apparently sharing goobermint secrets with clients. Anyway, us little small business folks, who’d not profited or benefited from those alleged activities, now have to do 10 hours of compulsory ethics training over a three year period with at least 3 hours per year. There’s already a requirement for 120 hours of training over the same period. There’s a cost to all that stuff, and if I’m doing, and paying for training, it’s not like I’m busy earnin’. You get squeezed like that, all the time, and it’s a slow death of a thousand cuts. The word I hear from my peers a lot is: retirement. They’re looking to get out of the profession.
Hmm.
The gaggle, gaggle incident was just weird and seems heavy handed to me. But yes, I am aware of the inability of the brain to see the negative in the sentence. But maybe, they know it too?
Cheers
Chris
Mister N, I’ll be very interested to see what happens when, as he’s promised repeatedly, Trump uses the DOJ to enforce laws against vote fraud.
If he is indeed serious about that, he should start with California’s Forty-Fifth Congressional District (located in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area). The shenanigans there are so glaringly obvious, it’s like a slap in the face. Everything I hear about California these days never fails to make me so glad that I don’t live there.
More voting available:
https://discourse.nomineesforthepeople.com/
Feels good.
>Who votes for hardship?
It’s not completely rational, but it’s more rational than you might think. Let me walk you through their thinking. A lot of these people have been abused and mistreated by the globalists for decades now. They *already are experiencing hardship* but have been ignored, shouted down, censored, and/or told to their face their problems, do not matter. Or just outright gaslighted and told that they have no problems.
This guy comes along who is a complete clown but in the clownish message, if you read between the lines (he doesn’t come right out and say it) is a promise of sorts – “I’ll make the globalist’s lives miserable”. These people aren’t as dumb as you might think either. They know the system is rigged, they hardly believe in it anymore but they do know that this one referendum is still allowed for appearances.
So what do you do with your one vote that’s almost a joke?
>I would travel a good ways to hear a band called “Voltron of Sanity”!
Maybe they’ll put on a concert in Washington DC sometime over these next four years.
>large bureaucratically run organization — government, corporation, nonprofit, you name it — has recently descended into hopeless incompetence
I think the term “boiling off” applies here. Those places have boiled off everyone who is even remotely competent, leaving only suckups and backstabbers. Where did they go? A good chunk of them took early retirement in 2020 and they’re probably never coming back. A lot of them quietly left the blue states, moved to Texida and when they did so, they decided to pick places to work that weren’t so bureaucratic or large.
I’d say this process has been going on now for almost a decade, which is about when you’d start seeing the consequences of it starting to show. When these big organizations die, they die slooooowly.
>I heard of a recent group of Democrats who were looking forward to 2028 and had a poll to see who the Democrats should run for president. The clear winner (with 41% of the vote) was Kamala Harris, followed by (in the teens) Gavin Newsome and the Governor of Pennsylvania (forget his name) and a few others with single digits.
If that’s true, they should rename themselves to the Brick Party.
My husband at State Department had to endure Hilary Clinton’s staff and the attitude that she was practicing for her Presidency. She was the president in training. She was the inevitable choice after all. It was a done deal. (He nearly got fired for reporting what Lebanon news reported about Benghazi, since it reflected badly on her.) Then Trump happened. The day after the election, everyone was in mourning.
My husband was gleeful that Trump bested all of the old political dynasties – Bush and Clinton.
That is when I noticed the Magic Resistance coming to life. They all expected the same arc of progress and progressivism. A new era ushered in by Obama, etc. It was shattering to them to see their world in ashes. That is when the Neo-Pagans adopted Progressivism as their de- facto religion.
Now Trump bested the old Republicans including Cheney. They are all not Republicans. Now, he is bringing all heterodox thinkers to run his government. It is about time.
The old order needed to be smashed. It was not working. Somehow, the upper classes managed to stave off a radical change after the fall of the Soviet Union. But NATO and Breton Woods are more than creaky, they simply are past it. The new world is going to be painful in its beginning, but it is necessary.
JMG,
I’m surprised you left out the rather obvious divine intervention that occurred during this election. Had Trump not miraculously dodged the bullet at the last second (literally), we would be on a very different trajectory right now. Furthermore, had the assassination attempt not occurred, I don’t think you get the outpouring of support from public figures like Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock and Joe Rogan who really helped make this election not close.
It’s also interesting that a lot of the energy and aura that Trump seemed to lose around the 2020 election seemed to transfer to Elon Musk, and now the two are together after Elon vanquished the biggest source of biased misinformation by taking control of Twitter. This feels like a movie script with a destination in mind rather than business as usual.
JMG, these last two elections I’ve had to revisit thecrowandsheep’s theory of political coolness elucidated on comment #57 at https://www.ecosophia.net/a-few-notes-on-american-magic/
In brief:
“Clinton is often accused of being an incompetent politician, and I am guiltier than most at throwing that particular egg, but as a Democrat, probably her biggest deficit is that she is remarkably uncool.
…
Republican candidates merely need to provide a natural foil for the coolness of whatever Democratic candidate is foisted on the public.”
I am still unsure what to make of Biden’s election victory in 2020 but I think the theory is defensible given that Republican foil Trump was unable to throw enough gunk at the neutral Biden for it to really stick. Maybe the voters considered the (allegedly) cocaine-snorting hooker-cavorting $50000-per-month-Ukrainian-gas-company-board-member-earning Biden Junior to be pretty damn cool and the magic somehow rubbed off on Senior? Senior also has a pretty slick pair of aviators.
Imagine my surprise when the democrats fielded yet another candidate this year even more uncool than Clinton, and thoroughly more awkward to boot.
Today, however, it has become clear to me after reading Aurelien’s excellent substack post “A Strange Defeat” https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/a-strange-defeat
So clear in fact that I can even explain the Democratic party’s mystical selection of Clinton in 2016.
I disagree with Aurelien that the west has no strategy for defeating Russia. Here, Aurelien writes that the western logic in Ukraine is as follows:
“1. do something that humiliates Russia.
2. miracle happens.
3. change of government in Moscow and end of war.”
Now that is a strategy. But it is the same strategy employed by a high school girl to defeat her enemy.
What does a mean high school girl do if she wishes to conquer her enemy? She:
1. Does something that humiliates rival
2. Performs endless teasing and bullying
3. Forces enemy to move school and try to get over her eating disorder.
So that is why they selected Hillary in 2016 and Harris in 2024, and why von der Leyen gets the EC head position again despite not having displayed a sliver of competence her entire career: they were the best mean girls they could find to represent the collective western mean-girl Weltanschauung.
To be fair, if a Harris is the high school mean girl equivalent, Trump is probably that kid that always wants you to get involved in some scheme, like ripping off the cafeteria lady, which may or may not get you kicked out of school if you get caught.
A related thought.
I got tired of being called a Nazi because I voted for Trump. I lost all of my Neo-Pagan friends. All of them.
Went to my husband’s pastor to discuss my loss. I explained that a new world had to be let through. The old world was smashed, and people had to understand that. She said half of the church was worried about losing their homes since they are federal workers. I should be sad for them.
I left feeling like I wasn’t heard. Anyway, I have thought about the anger now displayed by the Magic Resistance and the Resistance (Wash. Post, Jamie Ramkin, etc). It is misplaced grief. It is a secondary emotion for the grief that their world is gone. (In Ramkin’s case, his son committed suicide over depression. That’s when he ramped up his Jan. 6 Committee participation to get Trump.)
So, I guess I am one of the pioneers hacking their way through a jungle, wondering what will eat them, and wondering if the mold will get them. And learning to live with what is.
Jim Kukula @ 111, the way I interpret separation of church and state is that no one group of believers gets to impose its own theocracy on others. If, for example, adherents of one particular sect gain a majority of, say, city council positions, and try to impose a certain kind of “modest dress” on women citizens, that would be a violation of those women’s First Amendment rights. Not because the govt. cares about fashion in clothing–funny how some of the same folks who squawk about Nanny State are all in for telling the rest of us how to conduct our personal lives–but because no particular sect gets to dictate to non-believers. A believing shopkeeper can maybe refuse to serve certain customers, but he or she can’t have those same customers arrested.
I think the point I was making still stands here. Furthermore, we voters have quite legitimate concerns about how candidates might behave once in office. If a devout candidate is making statements which sound an awful lot like dog whistles to his or her co-religionists, the rest of us are not at all out of line to expect that same candidate to answer questions about their understanding of and adherence to the First Amendment.
If I may, the ICC has just this morning issued arrest warrants for Israeli PM Netanyahu and the former defense minister as well.
This morning’s headlines intended to stoke fear and profits for the pharmaceutical industry.
First; “Human Cases of Bird Flu Confirmed to Be Occurring Undetected in The US. ”
But way down the page “The good news is this means most people who have contracted bird flu so far have not been severely impacted. Half of those with the virus antibodies in their blood did not report being ill, so may have only experienced mild symptoms.”
Second “It’s a virus you may not have heard of. Here’s why scientists are worried about it.”
Details; “It’s called Oropouche, and it’s been making headlines because of a notable increase in diagnoses.” It’s related to Zika from a few years back and is spread by blood-sucking insects.
And finally, MONKEYPOX!
“Here’s what you need to know about mpox after CDC sent alert to doctors.”
And in non medical news the Russians tossed a non-nuclear ICBM at Ukraine. Message, we can hit you, you can’t hit us back even with your shiny American toys.
I’ve actually wondered before if the whole “the masses cannot think for themselves! The right wing media must be the cause of the problem!” thing might be a reflection of how the corporate liberals think. I was raised by parents who do and think whatever the media tells them, and it’s occurred to me more than once when I try to explain my reasoning for something to them that they might genuinely be unable to grasp that people can choose not to believe whatever the mass media tells them, or even that some people might think for ourselves…
One of the funnier components of this election (which really began four years ago), was how the left spent so much energy trying to will things that were obviously fraudulent into… not being fraudulent. Everything about the Biden years was just so utterly botched and wrong from the get go. Biden was a fraud candidate, whose DNC and general elections “wins” were riddled with fraud, the election certification and attempt to jail those who protested it was based on that fraud, and all they got for it was a half-demented guy who was stabbed in the back by his own party only so he could return the favor when he donned the MAGA hat in PA (the real death knell to Harris/Walz). I guess what I’m trying to get at is that there is a mythril-type magic to the Constitution that seems to make it stronger the more fraud you throw at it. All the lawyers and cheats who worked overtime to make Biden a thing still couldn’t stop the fact the real President/ultimo hombre was Trump the whole time. Their entire agenda was in reference to Trump, who played that to his advantage and yes, locked his enemies in the crystals. Instead of eight years of Trump, we in effect got twelve.
Re: The Ineffable (or Unspeakable) Name .
A few months ago I was at a conference at which one of the presenters, an otherwise sophisticated and intelligent fellow, was introducing a tarot deck he’d designed and executed. A very nice deck, I might add.
However, whenever he had to refer to a trump card, he would either avoid using the word “trump”, or apologize for mentioning “that name”, and make some apotropaic gesture (perhaps intending it in an ironic or humorous way). Perhaps there was also something of a magical intention — to somehow blemish the name of That Man, linking a sort of current of poisoning with That Name.
Interestingly, except for the first time he did this, the audience did not respond at all, even though I’m sure many were quite out of sympathy with Trump and whatever they conceived his policies to be. It was like being at a stand-up comedy performance in which the performer’s favorite joke, repeated several times, got no response from the audience.
I don’t think this particularly signaled a shift in sympathies — the group had a strong norm against political discussions, and this lack if response probably was more due to that. Still, the almost compulsive breaking of that norm on the part of the presenter may have had the perverse effect of undermining that automatic distaste for Trump in at least some attendees.
A technical point: when one sees someone who seems unable to control himself inappropriately uttering opinions with which one may agree, it can create a certain sense of reserve with respect to that opinion.
If I may have your indulgence.
As I wrote, this election cost me the last of my Neo-Pagan friends. They are all in grief mode complete with saying that Amerikkka (their term) has regressed, and no one is safe because tRUMP is in office. Etc. Added to that is the screaming fear that Christian nationalists will institute witch hunts and kill off Pagans….. in short everyone has gone totally bonkers.
I was cut off being told I was a Nazi, etc, one of the THEM (the theyest they there ever were. Them they.) How could I betray my gender and religion, etc. I add a lot of etcs since I have heard this since 2016, when I started losing friends (ahem) right and left.
I see things differently and have always been a heterodox thinker. What puzzles me is the fear and rage they have over this man. It oozes into the media as the Wash. Post writes their doom and gloom articles. I am dense when it comes to these things.
What are they seeing or sensing that is driving all this rage and grief? As for me, I have always felt that the world needed to be smashed to be remade. If we kept things the way they are, a bloody revolution would happen, which would be worse. I believe that a new world had to come and understand all the disassociation involved. Perhaps having a wall fall on me and ending up with a traumatic brain injury has made me more immune to the changes that people are moaning about.
Just to mention, here in Brazil these last American elections were watched very closely like never before. As it happens, our current elite has been dealing with an opposition movement and figurehead in the likeness of Trump – that would be Bolsonaro, and his family has some close ties with Trump’s own family. Furthermore, both one of our Supreme Court justices and the First Lady have publicly and officially antagonized Elon Musk himself. It’s pretty much a given at this point that there will be some consequences – or payback, maybe – as soon as the Orange Man takes office.
@Mary Bennet #151 … I don’t know how to define the lines exactly. Seems to me that people are religious by nature. We humans are just structured by stories one way or another. The stories we live by, those constitute our religion. The great hope and challenge of the United States is freedom of religion – it’s no accident that the Bill of Rights starts off with freedom of religion. The American colonies were in large part founded by refugees from European wars over religion.
For sure, I don’t want the government forcing me to follow a bunch of rules that are the way of life defined by somebody else’s religion. But I do not see how any rule can be free from religion, because rules come from humans and humans are religious through and through. I think our best hope is that we can cultivate and maintain a rich religious diversity in the USA, and then the courts and legislature can define the rules as some kind of lowest common denominator across religions. Require behavior to follow rule X only when pretty much all religions require X.
Yeah, our best hope for freedom of religion is to maintain a rich diversity of religions.
That ‘century of the self’ does seem to correspond to the plutonian era, at least chronologically, no ? Incidentally yes, I’ve finally got around to reading your book about Pluto ;-). There must be a “one feeds off the other” or “one is an offshoot of the other” relationship.
I suspect only meditation on this theme would reveal where does it work and where it may not.
I’ve watched another of Adam Curtis’ docus (Hypernormalization, 2016) and it’s true, they do leave the viewer with a sense that us little people are somehow powerless and other shady figures do the bidding. Always informative and entertaining, though.
“Across the whole sweep of elite culture in the Western industrial nations, and above all in the United States, a set of beliefs took root that treated the individual member of the Western world’s comfortable classes as the measure of all reality, and assigned to everything and everyone else in the cosmos the roles of painted marionettes jerked around by strings to play parts in some childish melodrama.”
Of course, this was the same problem that doomed Communism to failure. You had an elite which dreamed up an idea of what society should look like, and then set about attempting to transform society in that image.
Put that way, it doesn’t sound like a huge problem. We create other artificial things, from tables to robots, that same way, all the time. Start with an idea, find a suitable matter, and transform the idea into a manifest form.
The trouble is that societies aren’t substances like wood, stone, or sillicon. They are living beings. If you try to transform your cat into your perfect idea of what a cat should be, you may have some success, provided that you continue to give it food and water and train it in a way that cats actually respond to. If, instead, you’ve got an idea of the perfect cat and you ignore the fact that your cat is alive, you’ll probably begin cutting and sewing until you have the grizzly horror of a dead cat with its parts glued to a half-functioning robot.
In other words– this is the thing I just realized– the thing that blinds our intellectual class to the consequences of its actions vis a viz society is the same thing that leads our scientists to denounce Vitalism so stridently, as the worst of all heresies. (Vitalism is to orthodox science as Gnosticism is to orthodox Christianity.) And so we circle all the way back around to the original besetting sin of the modern era: The denial of the life force. Until this is recognized, reformist projects both “Left” and “Right” will be doomed to failure, since they cannot see societies as living organisms but only as matter to be formed.
Also, @ JMG and @AliceEm, the idea of the different American regional cultures leaving one another alone to pursue their own destinies in peace is something I’ve been talking about for more than twenty years. I usually simply frame it as “Let Berkeley be Berkeley and Alabama be Alabama.” I’ve never once had a conservative disagree with me. Liberals, on the other hand, usually, though not always, disagree. And in recent years the usual source of the disagreement is the fear that women in conservative states won’t be having any abortions. I wish I were making that up, because it’s such a stereotype, but it’s true.
On the other hand, the only example of conservatives not pursuing this course that I’ve seen in public (though not in person) came when the Republicans in Washington began pushing for a nation-wide abortion ban immediately after overturning Roe V Wade. Trump wisely noted that this was a complete loser of an issue, and refused to endorse it. I think that’s telling: The only conservatives who are following this sort of elite thinking are those who live in elite enclaves. Of course, on matters of war, immigration and “trade,” their views are otherwise indistinguishable from their class-mates.
I find myself at a weird place at this point in history. I agree with just about everything here… yet still feel compelled to defend the experts!
Even in the worst of organizations, there are passionate people out there who want to use their skills to help humanity. Sometimes organizational forces force someone’s passion to be devoted to controlling people. Sometimes you naturally fall into a “mommy knows best” style of thinking (though even in those cases, I think there are ways to make the case that if the data you’re seeing isn’t matching what people are feeling… perhaps it’s time to revisit your assumptions rather than label people as misinformed!)
The best of a Trump presidency would free these passionate people up to be more in sync with the century of the other. You can be an expert without being a scold! Even using the word “expert” so much in this comment feels icky… we can have experts that don’t place themselves above people. An expert could just be your friendly neighborhood smart guy.
I wish there were a way to achieve this with minimal destruction…
I have to echo a bit of neptunesdolohins’ verbiage. My fervent hope is that Trump 2.0 succeeds in smashing the loci of power that support this parasitic administrative state plaguing the American people. Above all else, *that* is what I voted for. Nothing would aid American schooling more than the abolition of the Department of Education. My mother was a career educator, over three decades and in four states, now retired. I distinctly remember watching as the system slowly squeeze the joy of teaching out of her until she was only marking time at the end. I feel no sympathy whatsoever for the countless pretentious, self-important bureaucrats who destroyed the joy of a gifted and kind-hearted teacher. May their demise be swift and total, and replicated across the civil service until we have only the elements of bureaucracy absolutely necessary to fulfill the roles and execute the powers specifically assigned to the federal government in the Constitution–and not a whit more. Amen.
Trump’s latest win is best thought of as a victory of “up” over “down”, rather than left vs right. Whether it lives up to its promise remains to be seen. There are a lot of people, plus huge corporate entities, plus the established government itself, which have a lot of money, power, and control to lose if they can’t keep people DOWN.
Now, when I say “up” versus “down” I am referring to the Nolan Chart 2-axis system for mapping ideologies: https://i2.wp.com/wmbriggs.com/pics/nolan_chart.png?w=750
For hundreds of years now THE PROGRAMMING OF THE HUMAN RACE TO THINK IN TERMS OF A LEFT-RIGHT PARADIGM HAS SERVED GOVERNMENTS WELL AND HUMANS POORLY:
“As for “left” and “right,” I notice that many people, such as you, seem to want to make them correspond to some kind of abstract principles. They’re not abstract principles — they’re tribal affiliations. Look at the people who call themselves one or the other, and draw your own conclusions.”
-John Michael Greer. https://www.ecosophia.net/the-nibelungs-ring-prelude/#comment-117832
Goose-stepping to the cadence left-right, left-right, left-right has kept Authoritarians (Totalitarians) in power and kept the masses distracted and malleable. That is what politics is all about: keeping actual LIBERTY out of the brain and out of the debate. So, left and right, Liberal and Conservative, Democrat and Republican, these are mostly just distractions. Distractions from what? Distractions from Liberty.
Government is the OPPOSITE of Liberty; In engineering terms, a governor is something which reduces degrees of freedom in a system. That is what a social government is as well: a mechanism to reduce freedom of pesky humans.
Left-Right may have little or no anchored meaning, but Liberty does have meaning: LIBERTY MEANS FREE. Government means — literally — reduction or restriction on Freedom. How much restriction on Freedom do you want? Authoritarians — from Marx to Hitler — both “left” and “right,” and everything squished in between, want effectively all freedom throttled under their control. Most Democrats and Republicans only want “SOME” of your Liberty “temporarily”, today . . . . But today becomes tomorrow and then they ask you for MORE of your Liberty. And then more. And more. And more. There is always an excuse or an emergency. War is a preferred way to get people to go along: Russia, Russia, Russia! “Climate Change!” “War on Terror!” “Save Our Democracy!” “Literally Hitler!” “My Body My Choice!” “A dark winter of the unvaccinated!” Propaganda and slogans are great for getting people to go along with what they are told. The real compliance tests include things like Paying taxes, fighting wars, Jabbing themselves and their children with experimental EUA chemicals. Divide and conquer keeps the juices flowing!
Government is, always and everywhere, the opposite of Freedom. Most people don’t even realize that. It certainly isn’t taught in our schools nor reported on in proper fashion in corporate news. Are some restrictions on individual choice necessary for a functioning society? Of course. How many?
Freedom comes at a cost: You have to stop playing the putz and you need to take on — yes — a lot of self-determination. Another word for self-determination is “hardship”. One needs to learn how to take more responsibility for themselves, take on more immediate risk, develop and use willpower, do work one may not “like”, study, work harder, learn how to manifest better. Note that these things are all “hardships”.
So, in a round-about way I come to an answer to Eva’s https://www.ecosophia.net/the-century-of-the-other/#comment-126177 question: “Who votes for hardship? I really would appreciate an answer.”
Wise people, and people who value Freedom (self-determination) sufficiently, will choose hardship over the alternative, Eva. Having read a few more history books, and watching less TV, helps in realizing that avoiding hardship at all costs will cost absolutely everything in the longer run.
I think the inability to accept hardship, to accept Freedom, may be a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurological_disorder. It is likely even genetically controlled. Seriously. Psychopathy is a brain deformity. And it is obviously conserved in the human genome. Why wouldn’t natural followers (slaves) be conserved as well? Society needs slaves. While that is only my hypothesis at this point, it seems more than reasonable, almost self-evident, and explains a lot.
Why does human society have such difficulty escaping the paired trap of Collectivism-Authoritarianism? Why to we keep allowing self-serving Authoritarians to take over the reigns of government?
I watched a long documentary series on Napolean, a long time ago. What struck me was how Napolean seemed, most of the time, to be operating a good citizen who wanted to better his society. After the LEFTIST https://www.historyskills.com/classroom/modern-history/jacobins/ butchery (a prototype, of sorts, for the Democrat “Lawfare” operations), Napoleon seemed to be gradually compelled to step in and clean up the mess. If you don’t understand what I mean, consider the vast amount of practical work Napolean put into rebuilding Paris, putting in place modern legal mechanisms, etc. The man was. — despite being a dictator — mostly a benevolent dictator.
Which made it especially hard when I first saw this quote from him:
“I have come to realize that men are not born to be free. Freedom is a need felt by a small minority, whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men. ”
-Napoleon Bonaparte
I suspect you were not born to be free, Eva. To flourish under Freedom you need to accept a lot of hardship. And you would never vote for hardship, right?
Hi JMG,
This post was interesting, and it served as my first introduction to Edward Bernays. As always this blog has a welcome habit of shedding light on the ideas that influence our world from the background.
That said, I feel that taking the 2024 election as a portent of a new era is a bit much. Harris’s defeat fits into the general pattern of incumbents receiving an electoral thrashing that we have seen in other countries this year, including the UK and India. The frustration people have with the post-Covid economy is being reflected in the polls, and I think that is the main factor behind Trump’s comeback. If the economy fails to improve for the average American, the Democrats will be back in the White House come 2028. (Liberal hysterics aside I think there is no chance Trump tries to stay in power past his term limits).
Unfortunately for Trump (and frankly, for all of us whose lifestyles exist thanks to industrial civilization) 2025 marks the high mark of industrial output as per the latest predictions from the Club of Rome. The exact date may of course be off, but it is increasingly clear that we are oh so very close to the end of the growth era. What comes after is anyone’s guess.
At one point I agreed with your prediction of a slow decline into a post-industrial civilization, but these days I think otherwise. I feel humanity’s agricultural base is far too dependent on a constant stream of cheap fossil fuel and industrial products for such a decline to happen without catastrophic effects on that front. Consider the widespread effects a short-term rise in food prices in the 2010s had on the Middle East, where it contributed to the Arab Spring and the decade-and-a-half of chaos that has followed. A permanent and sharper rise in food prices is the sort of thing that will destroy countries in the Global South and North alike.
In short, let’s watch the price and supply of industrial/chemical fertilizer for the next decade; that’s probably the single most important (and simple) indicator of global stability I can think of.
@ Clay Denis #13
“They believe ( in addition to Trump being Hitler) that Joe and Kamala’s policies are truly the ones that help the working class, and Trump is just a boorish shill for the Oligarch class.”
Here is a bit of “objective” evidence that red voters are certainly more open to supporting the interests of the low paid segment of the working class than blue voters. It is a fact that a clear pattern emerged from examining the five ballot measures that related to the minimum wage. Voters in “red” Alaska, Missouri, and Arizona voted comprehensively to raise or to secure minimum wage rates, while voters in “blue” Massachusetts and California voted comprehensively against raising minimum wage rates.
I have asked several blue voters, or Trump lamenters, what they make of this.
So far, crickets!
I have asked a number of
Nirthwind, it has taken about 100 years and counting to turn productive American citizens into mindless consumers. Mostly, this feat has been accomplished by relentless propaganda from advertising and mass media, backed up by ginned up social conformity pressure. Surely, you are old enough to remember the conformism which was demanded of people during the 1960s, if one wanted to be considered “respectable”, in other words, employable in any but assembly line work. Then there are the landowners, as many as 90% in some places, or so I have read, who won’t allow tenant gardening.
There is a story around that when Bill C. took HIllary Rodman home to meet Mom, Mom didn’t like her because “she didn’t wear makeup”. I am no fan of either C, but the point here is that is the level of conformism which was imposed at that time. The only reason adherence to ephemeral fashion is no longer expected for working and lower middle class women is no one in those brackets can afford it.
Firstly, let me say that I read the Kek Wars Part 4 post to my perpetually offline husband, to put this post in context. Immediately afterwards, I read him this post. There were various moments of “yeah, that’s right!” in his body language as I read. After he says, “yes, that archdruid guy is rather thoughtful.” 🙂
In re your mention of “The Century of the Self” I will say this. A few years ago when I watched the full 4 hours of it, I found it more full of “horror” than any actual horror movie I’ve ever watched. Likely, though, this is because, like the documentary makers, I had not ventured to question the basic premise – ie the seeming invincibility of propaganda and behaviour modification. I am very grateful to you for your clear-sighted scepticism. 🙂
My comment to Clay above regarding voter sympathy for the low paid segment of the working class is still my personal most “eye-goggling” take away from this election.
@Chuaquin
I don’t think your question is silly at all. Despite all the other things said about liberal women, consider that many of them just wouldn’t vote for Trump because he is a man. A large subset of those have likely been abused by a man at some point in there life. To those who have had that horrible experience, Trump and his admin of bros, despite the good they may be able to do, represent the worst of the worst in terms of male authority. The sexual allegations don’t help, regardless of whether they are true or not. (And I know the other side of the aisle are no saints… Either we need more actual “bi” partisans : )
Meanwhile tradwives are making a comeback. A women prez could come from there in the epoch of the other. However, perhaps a woman president could come from a revitalized liberal movement, that would otherwise have to be changed to the core. I don’t know the answer to any of this. Change is coming though. I see that at least as something of destiny. This was destined, and as a country this is what will be no matter what.
What is on the other side of these next four years is going to be interesting. Will people want something different, or will it usher in a follow up with an eight year presidency from Vance the victorious?
JMG,
speaking of your ideas getting into mainstream media, here is piece from left-left Guardian about how corporate environmentalism ran into dreamland (and fraud): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/21/donald-trump-science-climate-cop29-carbon-markets
(skip the first paragraph of Donald Trump’ ritual bashing)
–changeling
“I’ve actually wondered before if the whole “the masses cannot think for themselves! The right wing media must be the cause of the problem!” thing might be a reflection of how the corporate liberals think.”
It goes back to Lenin.
https://socialism.com/fs-article/lenins-game-changing-concept-of-the-vanguard-party/
“Marx explained that workers’ liberation must be the task of workers themselves. But due to daily bourgeois lies and misdirection, workers come to see through capitalist propaganda very unevenly. Some understand the need for independence from capitalism while others do not. Inevitably, workers’ viewpoints cover a wide range, especially in periods of relative quiet.
Among viewpoints, only that of the need for a vanguard party can lead the working class to liberation. This is not a matter of boastful self-righteousness, any more than acknowledging that the applied science of physicists and engineers is the only way to successfully launch a rocket to the moon. The vanguard party’s analysis and actions point the way forward to successful revolutionary change.”
Translating freely, the Proles are too dumb to run their own lives, the Party must rule for the common good. Stalin of course said “Phooey on that, I will rule.” And history was made.
This morning’s news has put me in a good mood for the first time in a while:
‘Netanyahu and Gallant for “crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October until at least 20 May, 2024” ‘
My hope is that my own complicit government is shaking in their shoes. Although I don’t know how much steam the ICC has, the optics are terrible.
Perhaps some of us can admit that the “Other” is ourselves.
Another astrological observation:
On November 19th 2024, Pluto entered the sign of Aquarius and it will remain there until 2044.
Last time Pluto was in Aquarius (from 1778 to 1798) the American and French revolutions happened. So I guess we can expect a similarly profound changes in the world politics. The dawning of the Age of Aquarius? Maybe. We’re in for an interesting 20 years.
@ Steve T #18
“…my hope, which I expect as much as I expected the Buchanan-Nader joint ticket, is that it will cease to see itself as “liberalism” and become conservatism. What I mean is that many of the core ideas of the left are not actually components of a universal ideology, but the particular, rather quirky folkways of the regional cultures of New England and the Mid-Atlantic, and their descendents further West.”
What a lovely idea! Thank you!
>To be fair, if a Harris is the high school mean girl equivalent, Trump is probably that kid that always wants you to get involved in some scheme
Think Ferris Bueler’s Day Off
Derrick, and as a voter, of course, you have the right to put your own chief concerns at the center of your decision. That’s the whole point of democracy. Be aware, though, that for a lot of people — especially working class people in this country — the plight of this or that foreign population comes a long way down the list.
Siliconguy, there’s that!
Paedrig, (1) daily discursive meditation on spiritual and philosophical themes is the best protection I know. That teaches you to step back from your own emotions and interests, and approach things in an impersonal way; once you have those skills, you can use them on yourself and your choices and feelings, and keep from getting high on your own supply. (2) There I can’t help you — autistic people like me aren’t good sources of advice for how to deal with people, especially in groups. Anyone else?
BeardTree, it’s already on request at my local library — I prefer to handle print copies when I can.
Kyle, I certainly don’t claim that Trump is any kind of paragon of idealistic selflessness. I don’t think he’s as selfish as the political establishment he’s ousting — I suppose you’ve forgotten, if you ever knew, that he donated his presidential salary to charitable causes during his first term. (Try to imagine Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi doing that.) You’re right that the US is one of the more conservative democracies in the world, but it’s the nature of democracy that it takes its political flavor from the voters, and we’ve got a lot of conservative people here. As for his cabinet picks, though, I think you’re letting partisanship get in the way of perception. His picks are frankly much more qualified than Biden’s; what sets them apart is that they’re disruptors, not business-as-usual types. Trump won the election on the promise to put an end to business as usual and cut the DC bureaucracy in the same way that Milei did in Argentina, and his cabinet picks are well chosen to carry out that mission.
Kimberly, I’ll look forward to reading it. As for Russia, the old cold men in the Kremlin aren’t falling for it. They responded by using an intermediate-range ballistic missile with a non-nuclear warhead on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. Nobody’s quite sure what happened yet, but the videos are harrowing — something in clusters came down from the sky and vanished into the ground without explosions. My guess is that it’s ground-penetrating kinetic rod munitions, the so-called “rods from God” weapon system, and that something underground just got imploded. But we’ll see.
Northwind, as I just noted to Kimberly, Putin has responded with a non-nuclear weapon on a Ukrainian target. We’ll find out in the days ahead just what happened. (Fast update: two airfields were just hit by Russian missiles; initial reports suggest total destruction. Again, no nuclear weapons. Nobody outside the Kremlin knows what else is about to be hit.)
Siliconguy, I hate to admit it, but Friedman is probably right. 😉
Clay, that strikes me as very likely.
Ben, I think we’re further along than that. The East African War is being fought in Ukraine, President Weed got shoved aside by a palace coup, and Vice President Gurney just lost the election for the presidency. Now we get to see if the Pentagon is smart enough to keep our carriers out of the way of missiles…
Greg, it’s a fair comparison.
Siliconguy, that’s just sad.
Ramaraj, I think a lot of them are still watching the corporate media — always a bad idea — and believing what the talking heads tell them — always a worse one. No question, when Trump takes office and life goes on without Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, putting in an appearance, plenty of people on the left are going to be sadly disappointed.
James, oh, granted. That’s always the risk when dealing with that kind of political Christians — they’ve never gotten over the days when they got to burn Jews and heretics at the stake. I’m also concerned, though my working guess is that any such problems will be regional and local rather than national; just as in the past, where you live is the most important predictor of the risk you’ll run.
Northwind, I know. It’s one more attempt to squeeze out small businesses to benefit the big corporations, something the Democrats have been especially good at. If you have a GOP legislator, I highly recommend writing to him and protesting; if not, consider posting something on Policies for the People at https://forum.policiesforpeople.com/top, where the new administration is taking recommendations for their policies.
Michaelz, exactly. It’s never occurred to the Western elite that they have to include the other side in their negotiations, because they don’t really believe that Russians and Chinese are people. To the elites, the rest of humanity is just a mass of faceless objects.
Emmanuel, oh, no question, the most the Trump administration can possibly do is cushion some of the impacts as the decline picks up speed. Tariffs are great for relocalizing the industrial economy, and if RFK Jr. can do anything to break the grip of the medical and pharmaceutical industries on the government, that could spare a lot of people a lot of needless suffering and death. Beyond that, and a few similar improvements? It’s very late in the day.
B3rnhard, this might be a good time to begin pushing for a revival of beautiful architecture in the West, and Ludwig II would make a great mascot for that project. I’ll consider trying to start the ball rolling.
Chuaquin, the first woman president in the US will probably be a conservative Republican. It could happen any time in the next decade or two.
Bogatyr, (1) of course it’s always about power and resources — that’s true of every country. What makes Taiwan relevant is partly its industry, but far more important is its role as part of a ring of island and coastal states holding China in check. Have you read Alfred Thayer Mahan recently? He’s worth a second look, as his take on maritime strategy remains the basis of US policy. (2) I’m not surprised that China has come up with something that subtle and unanswerable; that’s what happens when a 5000-year-old civilization has to tangle with a brash and clueless young upstart power. One way or another, I’ ve been expecting inflation to go apeshale in the years immediately ahead, and this just feeds that expectation.
Jon, yes, I’ve seen some of his posts secondhand! I suspect we’ll see other alternate media figures beginning to make common cause with the new populism.
Chris, that sounds about right — every bureaucratic regulation penalizes the small businesses worst, when it’s the actions of the big businesses that need controlling. Sara had plenty of stories about that, too.
Mister N, I would be delighted to see a gaggle of California election officials in handcuffs being marched away by federal marshals. Here’s hoping!
JustMe, thanks for this.
Other Owen, that’s me down there cheering in the mosh pit. As for “boiling off” — yes, exactly.
Neptunesdolphins, your husband has my sympathy. I’ve heard a lot about Hillary’s hangers-on, and none of it was anything short of sick-making. As for change — yeah, it’s coming.
Dennis, if I were writing a book I certainly would have included that. I wanted to focus on a single theme — but yeah, the resemblance to an improbable Hollywood movie is noticeable.
Thecrowandsheep, Aurelien’s always worth reading, and this one more than most — I note that he borrowed the title from Marc Bloch’s harrowing book on the collapse of France in 1940, L’Étrange Défaite, which suggests that Aurelien may have more than an inkling about what’s on its way. Your analysis makes frankly more sense than anything else I’ve seen about the Democratic Party’s apparent death wish, so thank you for this.
Neptunesdolphins, keep hacking. You’re not the only one wielding a machete just now!
Mary, I saw that. Interesting times.
Siliconguy, yep. I think they’re trying to rally support for the pharmaceutical industry in advance of RFK’s arrival.
Taylor, unfortunately, yeah, that’s plausible.
Christopher, true!
LeGrand, fascinating. I’m tempted to put “Trumpety-trump-trump-TRUMP! or something similar at the top of my posts for a while, and see who it scares off.
Neptunesdolphins, ouch. That’s got to be harrowing to watch. I wonder how much of it is that you’re in DC, where a lot of people will be losing their jobs under the new administration; as Machiavelli said, people will forgive the murder of their fathers sooner than the loss of their wealth.
Bruno, thanks for this. I’ve been keeping more of an eye on Brazilian politics than heretofore — living in a Portuguese-speaking town, with a growing number of Brazilian businesses and restaurants, will do that — and it’ll be interesting to see how things turn out.
Thibault, Bernays’s fantasies are very Plutonian in nature, and so it would make sense that they’re cracking and falling apart as Pluto’s influence wanes.
Steve T, wow. You’re right about vitalism, and I should have thought of that — and didn’t. What’s the cry of the scientist in horror movies that sends shudders through everyone? “It’s ALIVE!” As Huxley said of Darwin’s theory, “how extremely stupid not to have thought of that” — what terrifies the elite classes about populism and vitalism and everything else they can’t bear to think about is that it implies that something else in the world is alive and vital and capable of doing things without being moved around by the almighty individual ego. As for federalism, yeah, I tend to use Massachusetts and Arkansas as my examples, but the point’s the same. Pushing for that might be helpful at this point.
Jack, I’m entirely in agreement with you! “You can be an expert without being a scold” ought to be taught to every specialist on day one of their education; maybe it would sink in. More broadly, getting the people you’ve described out of fossilized government bureaucracies might well give them the chance to do something constructive with their enthusiasm and energy. I don’t think it can be done, though, without quite a bit of destruction.
David BTL, my father was also a schoolteacher, and a very good one. By the time he retired he was desperate to get out of teaching, because it had become so burdened with regulations that got in the way of learning. Abolishing the Department of Education would be an excellent first step — and I’m sure plenty of other bureaucracies are just as harmful to whatever they claim to be helping.
Gnat, since tribal loyalties are what drives politics, I tend to use the current tribal labels. As for freedom, I’d argue that no, government isn’t the opposite of freedom; you have no more freedom under anarchy than under totalitarianism, since in both cases somebody can come along, beat you up or kill you, and take everything you have, and you have no recourse. Freedom is a condition in which the supply of government is equal to the demand — not insufficient, as in anarchy, or excessive, as in totalitarianism.
Hobbyist, 2025 as the peak of global industrial output seems reasonable to me, and the share of it coming to Americans will drop steeply in the years ahead. I think you’re misjudging the current shift in power, though. Right now the only things that can improve conditions for most Americans are economic autarky and the gutting of our senile bureaucratic state, and Trump’s promising to do both of those; it won’t matter if overall figures of prosperity go down if jobs for the working classes proliferate and small businesses expand in a deregulated environment, since the working classes have been in the equivalent of a severe economic depression for decades. Provided the coming crisis can be blamed on foreign actors — and of course it will be — the GOP candidate can campaign as a war president; we’ll also have to factor in what comes to the surface once Trump’s promised investigation of vote fraud begins. As for the fast-crash thing, people have been telling me for decades now that I’m wrong, and catastrophe is imminent; one after another, they’ve been humiliated when the crash they predicted didn’t happen and the ongoing decline I predict did. If you want to join their number, though, don’t let me stop you.
Scotlyn, glad to hear it. As for the blue state-red state contrast, well, yes. It’s quite something to watch.
Changeling, good gods — and it’s by Monbiot, too, of all people: the guy who preaches carbon doom but can’t be bothered to weatherize his own home because he can’t see an adequate return on investment from it. We are really moving into improbable times.
Siliconguy, thanks for this. Yeah, it’s a very common fantasy of intellectuals.
Llewna, here’s hoping!
Ecosophian, I’m still of two minds about planetary transits through signs, but this is a good test case.
Jim Kaluka, our nation was founded by, among others, people fleeing religious persecution. I can’t disagree with what you typed, although I would refer to certain powerful and determined religious groups attempting to manipulate “the government” to impose their own version of what they might be pleased to term ‘morality’, rather than just “the government”. Maybe it is a distinction without a difference. Nevertheless, you have not explained why candidates should not be asked about their opinion of separation of church and state, as it is enunciated in the First Amendment. We do expect candidates to state opinions on the 2nd Amendment, and I hasten to add I have nothing against gun ownership, after all. I want to know if a very devout Christian thinks me and my daughters and grands shouldn’t be able to vote, for just one example. I have seen that very sentiment expressed recently. I think the media gentleperson’s agreement that we just don’t ask about that with reference to our 1st Amendment rights needs to end and too bad if certain candidates squawk about my group is being discriminated against. If all candidates are asked the same questions, there is no discrimination.
JMG,
I love your writings and I own over a dozen of your books. You have helped me find a personal spirituality (I have signed copies of the Dolmen Arch books and I’m working slowly through the first book now), and opened my eyes to beautiful realities through your writings.
I’ve been reading along for years, so of course I know of your political opinions. I actually look forward to when you write about them so that I can gain some insights from “the other side of the aisle” as it were. Yes, I’m a liberal, but the fact that we disagree on politics won’t stop me from continuing to learn from your writings.
What I find a little frustrating, but mostly amusing, is the proclivity to coddle everything MAGA in your writings. For example, Joe Biden gets called out for stating that if you get the COVID vaccine, you won’t catch COVID, but Trump gets a pass for claiming (in his typical bombastic fashion) that COVID vaccines are “one of the greatest achievements of mankind” in a 2021 speech while revealing he got the shot? I’m sure you have your reasons to avoid writing negative, critical observations about something/someone you want to see succeed…heh heh… but it causes me to roll my eyes and chuckle sometimes.
I should note that I agree 100% with everything you say about Democratic politics in this essay and elsewhere. I’m incredibly frustrated with my own party, as we have been force-fed candidates for decades now instead of having a real choice (I wish the Changer would have chosen Bernie instead of Donald – but I’m sure he had his reasons).
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/a-strange-defeat
That is a good article.
“To be fair (assuming that one wants to be fair), these issues [the military situation in Ukraine] are very complex: not more complex, perhaps, than neurosurgery or the taxation of multinational companies, but not any less complex either. They require years of study and experience, and a willingness to master strange and sometimes counter-intuitive concepts. The western Liberal mind has never wanted to do this: its ideology of radical individualism is incompatible with discipline and organisation, and its search for instant gratification is incompatible with any long-term planning and careful implementation. In retaliation, it likes to dismiss the military as stupid and war-mongering. When Liberalism was constrained by other religious or political forces all this was less obvious, but with the emancipation of Liberalism from all controls over the last generation, and its dominance of political and intellectual life, western societies have now pretty much lost the ability to understand conflict and the military. It is striking, indeed, that most western military personnel are still recruited from the more conservative and traditional elements of society where Liberalism has made less of an impact, and not from Liberal urban elites.”
From which you get the elites insulting the source of most of the enlisted men they need which in turn leads to the manpower shortages in the armed services. And that also led to Trump’s suggestion that Liz Cheney should go to the front lines of Ukraine herself if she is gung-ho for war.
Then the news media blathered on about Trump wanting to put Liz in front of a firing squad, a blatant misrepresentation of what he actually said, thereby burning yet another increment of their last shred of credibility.
In his November 17 post, Larry Johnson at Sonar21posted a video of Wagner’s Gotterdammerung. Strange how things seem to be flowing together.
The statements about red and blue states always make me have to wrap my mind around who’s who. Here in Canada, the Liberal Party is red, the Conservative is blue. And the socialist NDP (New Democratic Party) is orange, Bloc Quebecois is blue with a white fleur de lis, and the Green Party is green. That’s just in Parliament. If Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party follows the trend of emerging right wing/populist parties being elected then we’ll have a purple colour to add.
Must be boring having only two parties. We have some extra ones if you want.
llewna, I expect the phone conversations between DC and Israel are hot and heavy with Netanyahu demanding yet another address to congress. You will notice that the WH house has not immediately commented, a fact which the Israelis will already consider an insult. I imagine there are desperate pleas from the incoming admin’s transition team to please not embarrass us, overlooking the fact that Netanyahoo has been a walking embarrassment for decades. Meanwhile the other suspect will have already left for his prepared hideout in some country which doesn’t sign extradition treaties. Notice there has been no statement reported from him, which I take to mean he is enroute by submarine.
David by the Lake and JMG, I don’t doubt your sentiments about the D of E, but I am surely not looking forward to the release into our towns of cadres of Bossy Cow ex beaurocrats and their clients looking for something they can be in charge of.
@Eva (#66):
Actually, I will almost always vote for hardship over comfort.
There is such a thing as the “School of Hard Knocks,” and its lessons are the very best one can ever ask for. If you don’t learn some of the lessons that school teaches, you die miserably, and the generations who come after you benefit from your death. It is that school that has made me wiser now, at 82, than I was as a teenager and a young adult. And wisdom (to whatever degree on can win it) is a thing greatly to be desired.
I actually have a coffee mug that says, “Scars are tattoos with better stories.”
And I remember what Muriel Ruckeyser once wrote in a poem, “The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” She is talking, of course, about the inner universe in which all of us “live and move and have our being,” not the mere outer universe of matter and energy, space and time.
The outer universe has its place in our lives, too, for it greatly limits our actions, and “it is our limitations that keep us sane.” Even so, it’s not the more important of the two universes.
Hi John,
Regarding the election, does it bother anyone else that US elections go on so nauseatingly long? It seems in most countries the electoral process lasts 6 weeks whereas here it is a year. I’ve always felt if someone can’t decide in 6 weeks who to vote for then perhaps they shouldn’t be voting. Of course things will never likely change here as the drawn out election process is an economic windfall for the media, advertising agencies and even those who make political signs.
@gnat (#166):
I regard it as highly significant that no US coin minted up to the very early 1900s ever featured the head of any president or other national leader, living or dead. With only a very few exceptions, our coins had a female head or figure labeled “Liberty,” to show that she was not some human woman, but Liberty herself personified.
I think that the slow change from “Liberty” to actual human leaders (presidents) on our coinage was highly significant of a shift in the national egregoire. The first president to appear on a US coin was Lincoln (in 1909), second was Washington (in 1932), and the third was Jefferson (in 1938) — all three of them long dead patriotic figures, not presidents within most citizens’ living memory. (Yet there were four people still alive when I was a boy in the 1940s who had fought in the War Between the States and presumably still remembered Lincoln’s presidency: one of then was a Union veteran who probably revered Lincoln; the other three were Confederate veterans who may have execrated the man and hated the new coin.)
But the big shift happened after World War 2, when recently deceased presidents were first memorialized on our coins as some sort of national hero: Roosevelt (FDR, not Teddy) in 1946, JFK in 1964, and Eisenhower in 1971. This, IMHO, marked a highly significant shift for the worse in the nation’s egregoire, from a nation of Liberty to a nation led by heroic leaders.
The consequences of this shift have bedeviled us ever since, and may eventually come to destroy our nation altogether.
JMG – your comment “the first woman president in the US will probably be a conservative Republican”, that is, not a representative of the party which proclaims itself as the champion of women and diversity, rather reflects the situation in the UK. The number of female and ethnic minority leaders the Tory and Labour parties have had, is as follows:
Tory: 4, 2
Labour: 0, 0.
Miles 81
> Recently I have begun to refer to things as the “Boomer Century”. From 1945 to 2045 the Boomers have been the center of attention and commerce. Being older they vote more. Plus I am told that they have 50% of the nations wealth. It is my theory that much of the selfishness comes from the group thought Me generation of the Boomers.
This may apply to boomers on the coasts and other bluesies, but it doesn’t not hold for boomers in redsies, that is, for example, the Midwest. Even though I have lived in Wisconsin for only four years (after escaping Northern California), people here, including ourselves, struggle to keep lives afloat. Where we are in farm country, people pinch 1¢ pennies (“pinch 25¢ quarters,”) “make do without,” and “always learn new skills for the lean world a-coming.” Silicon Valley, California was way different — everyone except us had the spendies (living “high on the [non-existent] hog”), even those with little money. We have an LLC, and my husband and I (65+) will work ’til we drop, like the farmers around here. We will have no retirement. The idea “of retirement” is abhorrent to me — I feel like gagging.
It feels like governments say, “You earned a buck using your own gumption. We will let you keep a 1¢ penny, we will take 99¢.” This is part of what I want Trump. I hope he cuts the eye-are-ess in half, on all levels: number of employees/contractors plus cut taxes in half. Otherwise, I can’t see Midwesterners doing much more than scraping by.
The feds assume Midwesterners will continue to be willing to not only to feed our own families using our own initiative, but feed people who have no initiative, people who feel entitled to handouts (starting 1965 LBJ), but also feed people who get free-$ living in/near Wash DC who are on the fed’s payroll who don’t even show up for work but get hefty paychecks (which I understand is a helluva lot). We want to feed ourselves, our families, and people in our own communities who are hard up. There is no reason for us to feed people in Mississippi, Arizona, or Washington State.
Do you know that in the Wash DC area, feds pay for free-to-the-public orchestral concerts paid for by-taxpayers-in-other-states, all the time? No-one asks taxpayers-in-other-states’ permission to use their money like that. This is just one example of feds using other people’s money to enrich themselves there in their own coastal bubble. We get no free concerts here.
Anyway, cross off redsies among boomers taking advantage. Redsies work for our money, and in the future, expect to keep larger proportions of our hard-earned money. We want governments to get off our backs🐒. We are tired of being sponged off by the greed of governments. Workers deserve to keep whatever money they earn, whether through employee, contractor, or LLCs, particularly mom-and-pop operations.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🇺🇸🧾💪
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
I’ve thought for a while now that the Left has a “manifestation” problem.
Having now read several books from that end of New Thought and tried to approach them with a sober and serious way, what I’ve found is those techniques seem to require getting into a kind of liminal headspace with one foot firmly in objective reality and one firmly in an imagined reality where your desire is fulfilled. Done right, you start to notice opportunities to get what you want that you would have missed — and yes, sometimes things seem to just go your way.
I’ve also gotten a sense of the dangers of the techniques. One big one is the naive tendency, partly or fully encouraged by some passages by the pop-manifestation author, to try to leap fully into the imagined reality and just deny objective reality or its limitations. This is pretty much guaranteed to backfire, but it’s a very easy mistake to make, and few of the authors I’ve read do anything to discourage it — Mitch Horowitz being a notable exception.
There’s also a passive acceptance that if your desire manifests at someone else’s cost, oh well. Notice how many of the cited examples of manifesting money involve someone dying!
Finally, while the techniques are good for some things, one thing I’ve not had much luck with is addressing any kind of mental distress not immediately related to some external problem. In fact, emotional disturbance seems to pretty much guarantee that it won’t work, which can lead to more mental distress.
Put these all together — along with a a stubborn unwillingness by practitioners to seriously engage with its limitations or problems out of fear that entertaining those thoughts might cause it not to work — and it seems to me you have a recipe for exactly the sort of world-class meltdowns we’re seeing from the Left right now.
“I think some of it comes from the fact that belief in social progress — defined by them as movement in the direction of their goals — has taken on the force of a religion among many liberals.”
I have long suspected that social progress has become the methadone of the religion of progress. The technological revolutions that were hoped for have simply not materialized and, with the help of social progress, we can now simulate something like real progress to compensate.
JMG, I seem to remember you mentioning Marc Bloch’s book on these pages before. Have you ever seen any suggestion or evidence that the French command had been tapped up prior to the invasion? Another substacker Simplicius (https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/the-iraq-war-was-a-sham) makes the case that this is what happened during the second Iraq invasion.
Remember the early stages of the Ukraine war when all the mean girls were so confident Russia would fold easily? Were they relying on inside information that the west, in turn, had tapped up the Russian high command and they were simply waiting (with some delay) for a Prigozhin character to role into Moscow unopposed? That would explain their over-confidence then and their flaying for a plan B now. There has been much musical chairs in the Russian command (see Surowikin) but that could just be the usual wartime churn.
@ JMG #178
“Freedom is a condition in which the supply of government is equal to the demand.”
Intriguing!
Eva: the answer is too long and this isn’t really the place for it. Reminds me of Titok people, AOC asking, “Can you tell me what media/blogs/ AUTHORITIES ORDERED you to think like this?” Ummm…I think our host just wrote a whole article about that, not ten minutes ago. It’s printed above. –Nobody ordered us. —
What got me about their online public postings was, “Go LOOK”. Like, it’s not my job to tell you, LetMeGoogleThatForYou.com and you can read in 30 minutes a hundred times more than I can tell you. But they didn’t, I guess? Because they don’t really want an answer, I guess? They want to emotionally express and collect allies who will assure them this is an anomaly and is all okay? I guess? Because you can know: click “Search”.
Okay, your answer, I can only assume you’re not an American or you couldn’t, wouldn’t need to ask such a question. The entire American system is a wealth pump. That’s why it’s an EMPIRE. Yes, it pumps from say, Iraq, but it pumps a lot smoother from West Virginia, which is a lot closer and weaker. All wealth in the entire United States is pumped FROM the hinterlands, TO the 12 Hunger Games cities that are easily recognized and easily named: NY, Atlanta, SF, etc. And not even that: IN the US cities of Atlanta, NJ, Seattle, the wealth is ALSO pumped FROM every working man at a factory and gas station TO every PMC or Stock-jobber, cantillionaire, real estate flipper who never worked a day. And done EXCLUSIVELY BY GOVERNMENT. They get a huge middle man cut for their service. You can see this in that 100% of wealth is all Monopoly (government) War (government), or …Government. Go drive any small town and look at the state of the buildings and what shops own them: Government + Monopoly. Only . Million dollar football lights at the high school, houses collapsing in poverty 1 mile away. If a High School Admin can soak you that much, imagine what Raytheon can do.
So what do they get with this vote? **They shut off the wealth pump** TO Blue areas, they shut off the Empire, immoral and mass-murdering, overseas. That is, they stop being slaves and get to keep their own money, while the Blue areas can equally keep theirs. Asking about Tariffs is a perfect example. So we all get rich by having NO jobs whatsoever in the US? That’s a win? No, that’s a win for the PMC ruling CLASS, the Richies. It’s a death sentence to the black, the brown, and the Poors. They need a JOB, not a toaster that’s $2 cheaper at Target. …Btw the price rise in tariffs is vanishingly close the zero, just as with tariffs put in in 2016 no one noticed. Example: Retail has to charge 100-500% margin to put in on the shelf. The cost of the $20 Toaster is $5 from China. So it would raise its price $1 on $20, max, not noticed, WHILE re-opening that Maytag factory that left Ohio. I think we can take it. If it’s so bad why does Europe have 100% tariffs and China the same? Sure that’s bad, but when you have to undo 40 years of NAFTA, most favored nation, what’s the alternative? Have FEWER jobs? So it’s not like we don’t know. But we ASKED.
I and everyone could refute and discuss this at terrifying length and detail for you, and would be happy to do so. I’m sure you’re not like this, but the main problem we encounter is no one will listen for more than 60 seconds after asking why. The minute a single word is used that is not the dogma of the trinity and the godhead of the new religion, as expressed by the Pope, their brains shut off and they start yelling, foaming, accusing, like most religious fundamentalists. **We know because we still try.** Every. Day. And are punched in the face for answering your question, every. Day. But we love our nation and our neighbors so whatcha gonna do? You have to talk to and connect, include, reach, love, tolerate and include them.
So, go type it into a browser and ASK. READ what THEY are saying, not what your side is saying. SEE if what they say, plan, do, makes its own sense or not.
Billygabs, it startles me that so many people seem to think that I’m blind to Trump’s many faults and failings, simply because I think that he was a better choice than Harris. My comment about the business with Biden and Covid, as you apparently didn’t notice, was a critique of the media, not of Biden — of course he lied, and so did Trump, but you’ll notice which one the media took at face value without doing even the most rudimentary, you know, journalism. When I’m considering the value of a battering ram, it’s true that I don’t usually pay a lot of attention to its delicacy or neatness; the question is whether it will smash its way through a wall. That’s my take on Trump. Right now this country needs a battering ram, and the Orange Julius, with all his crassness and overblown rhetoric, is exactly the sort of blunt instrument that can do the job.
Siliconguy, and the media doubtless will never figure out what an own goal they inflicted on themselves with that blatantly dishonest business about Cheney.
Annette, since we don’t have a parliamentary system, more than two parties would paralyze Congress completely and bring our federal government to a standstill. Now of course some people might think that’s a good thing…
Mary, granted, but neither the Constitution nor ordinary decency will permit them to be tossed into Chesapeake Bay en masse with heavy weights tied to them, so I don’t think there’s an alternative.
Peter, oh, granted! Our laws won’t allow us to have gladiatorial shows, so this is what we get instead.
Robert Morgan, yep. That’s one of the things that inspired that comment. The left is big on feminism and civil rights in theory, but it’s worth noting who it actually puts in top offices.
Slithy, excellent. Yes, exactly.
Thecrowandsheep, no, I haven’t. The collapse of the entire French military and political high command was very strange — they didn’t behave like people who’d been paid off, they behaved like people who were having nervous breakdowns. I’ve suspected more than once that magic had more than a little to do with it.
Scotlyn, thank you. I’ve been working on this theory for a whole now, on the principle that the opposite of one bad idea (in this case, authoritarianism) is another bad idea (in this case, anarchy), and the better choice is found toward the middle (in this case, good government).
By the way, my response to posts may be a little spotty for the next few days. I learned a little while ago that my father died this morning. It wasn’t a surprise — he was about to go into hospice care — but it’s still a gut punch, and I’ll need to put some time into dealing with it. I’ve posted a brief obit over on my Dreamwidth account.
I had expected a closer turnout. I had no idea that Trump would win in a landslide. It wasn’t even close at all. As you said, it’s clear that the democrats have alienated the working class. If the democrats had been smart, they would have let Bernie win the nomination in 2016 instead of rigging everything in favor of the very unpopular, very corrupt Hillary. And if they wanted a chance at winning, they should have had a vote for their new candidate, instead of undemocratically shoehorning Harris with no vote. Only a populist can beat a populist. The age of neoliberalism is over.
This website https://whyharrislost.com/ is an example of a particularly cogent liberal who actually seems to realize some of the real reasons why Harris lost. Of course they are wrong on some of the points they mention.
Hi JMG and Everyone,
I haven’t read all the comments yet, but I thought I’d drop this link in.
It seems like we are in the era of the ‘Great Unveiling”.
I hope so, plenty of lies and scams need to be exposed!
Does anyone remember that elderly gentleman in the UK, that walked back and forth in his garden, during the crazy lockdowns?
What I find most interesting is the presenter talking about how it seemed fishy at the time, but no-one, including himself, was game to say anything….
Captain Tom scandal: “What the hell happened?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMSttmsqG9Y
Regards,
Helen in Oz
“many Democrats are quaking in their shoes, sure that he must now act out the role they assigned him and throw them all into camps. Those camps have featured so relentlessly in recent rhetoric that I’m starting to think that the people who babble about them actually want to be flung into some such institution” – I guess many of these people are now quaking in their shoes because in their wet dreams this fate was reserved for those that they believe to endanger their way to the stars – as the appalling survey from ’22 which was recently shared on your other blog demonstrates. It’s a source of bleak amusement for me that I am constantly told that I should fear Trumpler and Putler and of course the members of certain political parties which – since they are German parties – are breeding actual armies of *tlers. Well, yes, maybe I should fear them, I can’t be sure about that. But I do know who I actually do fear – since they have already shown their true faces. And they did not even notice.
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
JMG, au contraire, part of my argument is that Trump isn’t qualified to be a true Caesar because he’s not a military man. What we’re seeing now is the first round of victories by the populists *within* the decaying but still functioning forms of the state. Hence my likening Trump 45 and Trump 47 to the two terms in elected office by Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus. Military dictators (which is of course what Julius Caesar and Augustus were) come a little bit later in the process.
My view is that in light of the hundred years of events since Spengler created his model, it has turned out to be much more chronologically accurate than he himself would have thought. And by that reckoning our Julius Caesar isn’t due to show up for another 50 to 70 years. We’ll know we’ve arrived at that point when we see standoffs between rival military factions, rather than sporadic mob violence in the name of rival political factions like we’ve seen so far.
Of course, Spengler could be wrong about all of this! The next hundred years of Western history will really be the testing ground for how accurate his model turns out to be.
Other than that – it’s a great essay which weaves many threads together, and the discussions in the comments are even more interesting to follow than usual! I like the sign with the trite tautologies. Maybe I should replace “house” with “fridge” and stick it to said device in our schools tea kitchen 😉
Nachtgurke
Carlos M. 93
> polls
Polls (“pollers”) ASK people. What people (“pollees”) answer is another thing. Pollees may give wrong answers. For example, a Demoncratic “pollster” knocked on our door the day before the election, and asked, “Who are you going to vote for?” We said, “None of your business” (duh, no comment). We wouldn’t answer. I wanted to say, “Trump” but didn’t want our house fire-bombed overnight, so played dead.
On the other hand, here, I say I was going to vote for Trump all along, and now say I voted for Trump. I have been forthright about why I was, and am, for Trump. Others get an honest answer.
In other words, rather than formal polling, simply ask. If one wants accuracy, ask and listen to the answer. That’s all. I see no need for pollsters. Multiply that by thousands of people. Polling is a waste. Polling has been used for nefarious purposes, so to me, it is forever disreputable. I can never take polling numbers seriously. This election, I assumed polling was being used to slant (rig) towards KomodoDragon Harris, and I was right.
If someone wants an honest answer, make it safe for someone to answer honestly. A Demoncrat “pollster” coming to my door espousing KomodoDragon Harris did not make me feel safe enough to answer “Trump.” He felt it more important TO TELL ME who he was voting for (Harris), and my husband and I would be abhorrent if we did not vote like him. The encounter had unspoken menacing vibe. After the guy left, I shed his attitude from my aura. I felt “yucked,” like being slimed in the movie “Ghostbusters.”
💨Northwind Grandma💨🧫🦠
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Second Comment:
I just read that your father passed away. My condolences. Take all the time you need.
Loved it! So I read the New Republic article and immediately started looking for its comments section. Which didn’t exist of course. The author is apparently still living in the 15th century, when information was something produced by professionals and consumed by the masses. (Do you think he’d enjoy having that pointed out to him??) In all fairness, that remained the case almost all the way through the 20th century, so perhaps his perspective is only 30 years or so out of date, and not almost 600…
Although I understand not wanting to hear what others might think. Like you said, we’re just supposed to receive it, fall in line, and get with the program, not raise inconvenient questions about the entire foundation of his argument. (Which is about as tone-deaf as anything I’ve heard this year, and that’s truly impressive.) Unfortunately for our would-be lords and masters, nobody’s playing that game anymore, and haven’t been for decades. Some of these “progressives” need to progress a bit. See if they can find a clue or two along the way.
Again, I sincerely wish to not make this a political blog with political commentariat – please delete if this is adding too much of this specific content – but you re-added so I re-comment. The Project 2025 is the perfect microcosm of the problem and misunderstanding. So…who wrote it? Where’s it from? Where’s it going?
Project 2025 is LITERALLY NOTHING TO DO WITH TRUMP. At all. A conservative think tank did what conservative think tanks do: they published a grab bag of Conservative ideas. The Democratic think tanks do this, the environmental groups do this, the MICMAC do this, the Atlantic Council etc do this, the Socialist Party does this, the Medical Lobby does this, everybody does this. And? What does that have to do with Trump? They wrote a thing, they emailed him a copy. Wow. I could do that too, but I’m busy this week.
Trump then said, in public: “Whatever dude.” In fact, they disavowed most of it, to the media, specifically line by line. For four weeks. Now that’s going pretty far for a Republican organization to specifically go out of their way to refute their own cousins, a well-known Conservative think tank. I mean, are they Democrats or something that they dare annoy supporters like that?
Okay, you get the picture. What did the Media write? What did YOU hear on that point? Well from your approach I think you read what I read, which is that Trump personally sat down and wrote every line, promised to install every suggestion, and hired every person on staff to make it happen. That’s the OPPOSITE of what happened. The media reported the OPPOSITE.
Is Agenda47 similar? Maybe. But if it has anything at all in common it’s completely coincidental. Trump didn’t listen to rando’s from the status quo conservative side any more than anyone on the blue side does. Fine, but we can all report that and fault that. Not both publish and report the literal opposite of what happened.
Nor was this the first time: it’s at least the THIRD time. In a couple weeks. The “Trump will solve Ukraine” news article was exactly the same. Two former military “advisors” (who talked to Trump once?) Also came up with a “Plan” that suits status quo military contractors, and emailed him a copy. He wrote, “Thanks, maybe I’ll read it if I have time.” Media then reported it was TRUMP’S plan, point of fact, confirmed and intended to be enacted. No one even knows if he read it, ever. This non-plan, by nobody, he never read, was in the spin cycle for like a week. For the second time.
So the point is, we must all now be careful if the Media reported that Trump did this (read DNI briefings in the morning) because I can’t remember the last time what they reported was confirmed or true. The thing they hope we do is to read a spaghetti-shape on the wall they’re thrown and Blue: Interpret Rorschach in the most evil, stupid, vile way, or Red: In the most amazing, positive, supportive way. This is going pretty well, but I don’t care about it. A NORMAL person reads it for provable facts, and then dispenses with people and sources found to be weak, in error, or worse: Wrong on purpose with is too often the standard now. Slowly weed and ferret them out and discredit and avoid them. Luke Harding of the Guardian is a perfect example, reporting everything the Opposite on all cases, but famous for the Assange coverage being opposite, Pompeo CIA press releases.
That’s very hard to find good reporters so I can’t blame you for it. But that’s the story of 2025 and why it’s important and relevant today. This sort of behavior is also why nobody told Kamala her choices, campaign, message, etc were terrible and that she would absolutely, certainly lose, which we all knew. It was because of media “bending” – that is straight out lying – just like on Project25.
Okay, last point, Trump won. Huzzah for the Team. (sarc) Who is up on stage? The Rainbow coalition: A pro-gay marriage President with a Jewish family with an immigrant wife. His VP with an immigrant wife. An Indian. A literal immigrant, the world’s most famous African American. A Hindu from Samoa. All women in the highest positions. But that’s not my point. THEY ARE ALL DEMOCRATS. The “Literal Hitler” stage at Madison Square are all Democrat. RFK, Democrat. Tulsi, Democrat. Elon, Democrat. Even Trump himself: Clinton Democrat. He was at Clinton’s wedding as a NYC Democrat, and a NYC liberal morals, and it was Clinton themselves who told him to run for President. (Wikileaks). Joe Rogan, Crowder, Pool, all these “right wing media” guys? All Democrats only a year ago. 2010 or so. They claim they haven’t moved: the Party did. And they didn’t baffle us, the whole Right knows this perfectly well. I mean: RFK? Kind of hard to hide he’s a Democrat with a Democratic platform.
So you’re right: Why would the entire working class plus a large break of Black, Hispanic, Asian, women, voters all break to vote in these DEMOCRATS? Don’t they know voting for tepid, middle of the road blue-dog business Clinton Democrats is voting against their own interests? That’s what the Conservatives say.
If you want, you can console yourself and say the real joke is on the Republicans: they accidentally voted in a stage full of Democrats. Ah, history has a sense of humor like that.
Great essay.! There’s only one point I disagree with, and it’s how you perceive and present Adam Curtis’ work. What he wants to do is plant questions in your mind, after presenting the facts. He doesn’t ask the questions for you, and he doesn’t answer them. Which is invaluable in encouraging critical thought, and very rare in a landscape of self appointed “prophets” and “truth tellers”. If you haven’t already, watch “I can’t get you out of my head” where he compares western individualism to eastern collectivism. I would appreciate your thoughts on that.
JMG,
Sorry for your loss. It’s awesome that your quarrels stopped after your succeeded as an author. Having that example, I believe it will help him succeed in his inclinations and dreams in the next life.
@ B3rnhard
You might remember that Trump in 2020 signed an executive order on promoting beautiful federal civic architecture. It made the mainstream architectural community quite angry because they despise the vernacular. I imagine the EO will reappear soon. At least I hope so.
The line that stopped me cold in the Tomasky essay was how liberals live in their own bubble and don’t hear any of the right-wing narrative.
He acknowledges that they live in their own echo chamber, yet the first question that pops into my mind was: well, how do these liberals know they have access to an unvarnished Truth while the conservatives are the ones listening to lies and misinformation?
MJ 98
> To treat the firing of thousands of federal employees
Layoffs and firings are what has happened to tens-of-millions of private-industry American employees for decades. Feds have not done that. Feds have added more and more “workers” (as if ‘worker’ is actually descriptive of what they do, or don’t do) (more like ‘faux-worker’) ad infinitum, letting hangers-on stay and get automatic increases in salary over decades.
Hence, there is huge pent-up demand to get rid of federal people — deadwood do-nothings. If federal layoffs and firings had happened commensurate with what has been happening in private-industry, I can see one having a valid objection. The reality is vastly different. Axing half the number of federal employees within, let’s say, one month, may seem draconian, but it is not like these people expected their do-nothing jobs would allow them to stick around as long as they did — they have been on borrowed time even if they have been lucky enough to take in a hefty salary for doing nothing for thirty years — if all goes well, they aren’t going to survive Trump, and THAT is a good thing.
I am tired of my taxes increasing every year because of Wash DC-region people feel they “need” even more entitlements and luxuries, or an even bigger retirement fund, or even more lavish vacations, or a second, third, or fourth home, or more slobs on welfare and food stamps, etc. when I get neither luxury, free food, vacation, second home, nor retirement. The world does not owe me a living. I am not like:
https://youtu.be/Ge7MVBa3N1c?si=abeH1xBiYngt2XUa
The federal government, not to mention state, county, and municipality governments, have not voluntarily whittled-down their staffs, so someone has to do it on behalf of beleaguered American taxpayers.
Trump taking an axe to do-nothing Wash DC-region and other federal jobs nationwide is a long-time coming. I, personally, want it accomplished in one day, but I figure with computers-and-all, I am hoping it will take no longer than a month, let’s say, by 1 March 2025. It can’t happen faster for me.
Trump yes. He needs an axe, and a sharp one. Or maybe this is where a guillotine might fit in. Off with their heads, one way or another.
MJ, if you feel you want to help those federal employees after they get laid off, feel free to pay for it out of your own funds. Don’t be spending other people’s money any longer, because “we dun gots da quarters anymoah.” No more taxpayer largess goes to this classification of ”faux-worker.” They are getting kicked to the curb, and good riddance.
The world does NOT owe me a living, nor does it owe anyone else. We are returning to the 1860s: one works or dies. Simple. Life is often brutal. No more income tax.
💨Northwind Grandma💨💰🏏🪓
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Re: your father.
Ouch. I’ve been there, no one to ask for advice any more. It leaves a hole.
Best wishes.
It’s been reported that the primary target of the Russian missile strike on Dnipro was the Yuzhmash plant, a huge, sprawling industrial facility where many of the USSR’s ICBM’s were produced and which continues to play a major role in Ukraine’s military-industrial complex. Many of the facilities in the complex are located in deep, hardened underground bunkers. So an IRBM with hypersonic “rods from God” type kinetic kill projectiles would be ideal for such a target. If you look closely at the videos, you can see six hypersonic reentry vehicles arriving in rapid succession, each of which splits apart moments before impact to unleash several kinetic energy penetrators.
Mary Bennet #179… for sure, asking candidates about how they see politics and religion interacting, what interactions might be proper, what interactions might be improper, that is a line of inquiry I would certainly encourage in interviews with candidates etc.
Such investigating is interesting enough at the abstract level, but for sure I would like to see it pushed down to specific issues. For example, these days in the USA it is probably Muslims who get the most abuse. Should Muslim women be permitted to wear head scarves in public? Should Muslims and people from predominantly Muslim countries have stronger restrictions for entering the country?
Anti-semitism is another important issue. There are various e.g. neo-Nazi gangs that promote anti-semitism. Should such gangs be prosecuted for hate speech or conspiracy etc., or at least investigated?
I suppose peyote use in Native American religious practice might be an issue to bring up.
And certainly domination by Christian sects is good to explore. Many of those issues will get complicated & a pure focus on religion might not work. E.g. gay marriage, or homosexuality in general. Should gay people be prosecuted, protected, just left alone, or what…. and more specifically, why? A candidate might come up with some curious logic to argue that e.g. gay folks should not be allowed to marry. Religion might be in the background, but the candidate could have some layers of masking to hide that. This would like take some probing to figure out.
I haven’t had a chance to read through the comments, because I wanted to finish my own essay on roughly the same topic before reading this post or its comments. It’s for a print APA so I can’t share it here, but I’ll summarize. I noticed that in my own town (in a literal [also littoral] and figurative backwater of deep blue Massachusetts), voting was almost equally split between Harris and Trump. I personally also thought that under our present circumstances it was a tough choice — but rather than that making me average, I seemed to be the only one in town who wasn’t all in on one choice and demonizing not only the other candidate but also everyone supporting them. I like almost all the people in my town, so I refuse to entertain the notion that half of them (or perhaps all of them) are wicked or foolish. But I can’t help seeing them all as, at present, a bit unhinged.
It’s not the particular outcome, but the extreme polarization in the first place, that disturbs me. I don’t think either of these two worlds (of which I seem to have one foot in each) are acquitting themselves well. Both seem out of balance, as each twists the relationship between hands-on reality and abstract ideas in a different way. Metaphorically, one camp now seems to think that the weather man makes up forecasts to sell snow shovels to suckers who don’t need them because the cold white stuff covering their driveways is clearly fake snow, while the other knows it’s real snow but blames its presence on the weather man’s forecast, demanding to talk to his manager to make him provide more congenial weather in the future. That’s a bit exaggerated of course, but not nearly as much as I wish it was.
Worse, I don’t see this changing without severe metaphorical slaps in the face distributed generously to everyone. Because that will then be too late to mitigate many of said face slaps, I hope I’m wrong, but is there much hope of that?
@Alan #17,
I also don’t have an answer to your question (I reject the “it’s Puritanism” thing).
The day or so after the election, we were driving with the kids and passed a home where some dork had hung an American flag upside-down. (I don’t know how long they left it out; it seems to be gone now.)
I said to my wife, I thought about using this as an opportunity to have a talk with the kids about politics and leftist psychology in particular, but didn’t end up bothering.
If I had, though, what I would have explained to the kids was this:
-the people hanging the flag probably believe the mainstream media, like leftists normally do
-leftists are performative, histrionic
-leftists are obnoxiously loudmouthed about their views, always assuming that everyone agrees with them
Like yourself, I’ve observed this pattern over decades. As far as I can discern, there’s no explanation, it’s not worth trying to find one – it just “is”, it’s just what they’re like.
Rightoids have their own tendencies, to be sure, but not these ones.
Dzanni,
That is another reason why I don’t think that Trump is going to get anything accomplished in his second administration. You have a whole bunch of former Democrats who hijacked the Republican party, but the Republican establishment still controls the House and the Senate and many parts of the executive branch, and hate nearly everything that the former Democrats are promoting. So the Republican establishment will obstruct Trump and Musk and RFK Jr and Gabbard in any way possible to prevent them from implementing their reforms, and then try to implement their own Republican establishment agenda (i.e. more wars around the world, more tax cuts for corporations, more offshoring jobs to third world countries, more mass immigration from around the world, etc). This is just a big recipe for government dysfunction and inaction and unpopularity.
JMG- this is totally OT and not necessarily for the commentariat. I was just down to visit my brother and SIL in Virginia after 35 years. I was discussing my SILs family history with her. Her grandfather CM Eddy lived in Rhode Island and evidently was a good friend of Lovecrafts and was also a ghost writer for Houdini. He also wrote many novels himself in the same genre. Of course I was very interested! His grandson Jim Dyer, and who is my SILs cousin, has become the archivist for his Grandfather’s works. He currently lives in Narragansett. Just an interesting tidbit and thought you might be interested in pursuing this if you felt inclined. Anyway, thought I’d pass this on to you!
Democrats would not understand that bank accounts are straight forward things, and that bank balances are critical, including to people they see as inferiors.
For example, for the hypothetical Mr and Mrs Lopez, it’s tough to not see when monthly expenses ramp up and outrun monthly income. When your bank balance sez zero, there’s no misunderstanding. It may surprise Democrat establishmentarians, because they may not know otherwise, but Hispanics have a full set of intellectual faculties.
Money wasn’t the only thing. A Muslim chap in a swing state said on TV of his co-religionists that they didn’t leave the Left, the Left left them. He said that their kids read below grade level and Democrats don’t give a damn. When financially you’re against the wall and your kids cannot bloody read you don’t tend to listen to baloney about gender fluidity.
What’s true about the Democrats is true about Republican traditionalists. Patriotism, yes, but my country cannot be working against me because even woefully uneducated Republican voters will see it. Republican politicians, like their Democrat counterparts who scorned them, saw their Republican voters as credulous fools. But they just are not that dumb, and in misunderestimating them, both parties screwed up most heinously.
So what happened? A political entrepreneur, having seen a niche in the political ecology hitherto unattended, attended to it. In this case, Trump took a novel and audacious approach, he did a hostile takeover of the Republican party. Who would have thought? Few saw it coming, and those who saw what was up discounted his chances, except our esteemed host who nailed it. It could have happened to the Democrats, but their opponents were the weaker and more tempting target.
JMG, my most sincere condolences.
@Bogatyr, there’s just one single flaw with the whole idea to undermine the US dollar. It’s small but fatal.
The plan hinges on being able to borrow dollars from the Saudis by offering them a higher interest rate than the FED does.
Why, if that’s the case, all the FED needs to do to unravel the whole thing is to raise it’s interest rates to a point that’s higher than what China can offer to pay. That’s it. Nothing else is needed.
I’d just like to extend my sincere congratulations to America on the successful election. I’m really happy for you all.
Scotlyn, This shows slightly different results than what you’re quoting: https://ballotpedia.org/Results_for_minimum_wage_and_labor-related_ballot_measures,_2024
with 5 states voting on minimum wage (not Arizona, but Nebraska). Arizona’s case is in that article (and is different from the rest).
Minimum wages:
Alaska: $10.85 increased to $15.00 by 2027.
Missouri: $12.30 increased to $13.75 by 2025
Nebraska: $14.35 – ballot initiative seemed to be about requiring employers to give paid sick leave.
Massachusetts: $15.00 except for tipped workers and their ballot pertained only to tipped workers.
California: $16/hour (defeated raise to $18.00) – the second highest in the country. We’ve had similar measures on ballots throughout the years and they’ve always passed.
I think the general feeling is that increased minimum wages lead directly to higher prices as employers pass costs along – and that inflation is good enough at that already. Keep in mind that if minimum is $16.00 for an unskilled, entry-level position (in theory anyway), it’ll be higher as employees gain experience and responsibilities.
There’s also the fact that California is really hard on small businesses for a number of reasons. See https://x.com/chefgruel/status/1859368482951004648 for the latest – as CA somehow lost the federal funds (to scammers and grifters) given for unemployment benefits during covid, defaulted on the loan, stuck someone in a federal labor position who could ok the default, but left businesses on the hook for repaying it, without their knowledge or consent, just a “hey, here’s your much higher payroll tax bill!”
CA: watch this space for failed-state status. I can’t speak for Massachusetts, but I’d assume they’re in a similar situation, with too much spending on pet projects, too much money lost to fraud, too many businesses suffering under lax crime laws and Byzantine regulations.
and also my deepest condolences to JMG…
Ecosophy, if the Democrats had been smart they would have changed their policies to reflect some of the concerns of ordinary Americans. If Hillary Clinton had had the basic common sense to say, “You know, these policies are wrecking a hundred million lives, why don’t we rein in illegal immigration a bit and do some things to bring jobs back to this country?” she’d be finishing up a second successful term right now.
Helen, if we are in a Great Unveiling, I shudder to think of some of the things that will be unveiled.
Nachtgurke, there’s that!
Dylan, duly noted. You’ve made your prediction and I’ve made mine; now we’ll see who’s right.
Nachtgurke, please do make good use of the sign. I’d like that sort of thinking to become a little more common.
Enjoyer, thank you for this.
Grover, in the 15th century the common people also produced a lot of content themselves, in the form of folktales and ballads. Once printing came along, broadsheets with the latest ballads and scandalous stories were a hot item. It has never been the case, and it never will be the case, that all information is created by the elite and disseminated to the passive masses. That’s why the attitude Tomasky displays here is such a crock of steaming shale.
Dzanni, I know. You won’t get Democrats to grasp that, though.
Voola, that wasn’t my take on it, but your mileage may vary.
Dennis, here’s hoping. He had a difficult life and I hope he cleared away enough karma to have a better one next time around.
Renaissance, oh, granted — but I’m not sure they can think that thought without collapsing completely into self-loathing and despair.
Siliconguy, thank you.
Nex, that’s my assessment too. Depending on what the underground facility was and how much damage was done, there may be plenty of cold sweat in elite circles all over NATO just now.
Walt, I know. It’s a hideous situation, and I’m not sure how much of a contribution I can make to changing it, other than to keep on trying to express a narrative more or less in the middle.
Robyn, I’ve read some of C.M. Eddy’s stories! Thank you for this, and I’ll consider following up on it when time permits.
Smith, that strikes me as a very good description of what Trump did.
Bruno, thank you.
Synthase, thank you for both of these.
Llewna 174
> Netanyahu and Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October
We have been here before. Nothing will come of it.
Netiboob will die “of natural causes” as an old man living in the lap of luxury, as will his arse-kissers. He has made sure he is seen as responsible for nothing.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🇮🇱
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG
A fascinating article and series of comments and responses. Thank you.
You seem to have answered this in bits and pieces to previous comments, but I wanted to ask you what you felt the Trump victory would do to the time scale of decline, both in the US and internationally. It seems to me that it might cushion it a bit for the US, though not much. I’m afraid that the drill, baby drill mentality will just drain the remaining US oil reserves that bit faster, and that the Zionism and anti Russian, Chinese, Iranian orientation of the US establishment, either under Trump or whoever will cut off US access to Russian and middle eastern oil. This might make a bit more of it a bit more available to China, India, etc delaying their decline by a couple of more decades. I think the rise of the global south will be aided by the decline of the west, but feel that it will be short-lived due to energy shortages. I would love to see you do an entire post about the updated world energy/geopolitical changes as you see them.
Apropos the chance of a female US president: I always thought Condoleeza Rice would have had a good shot at it if she wanted.
I have always been a believer in the separate American nations. There was a book by that title, though the author’s name skips my mind at the moment. Ideally this could be done without bloodshed as something like the EU or the articles of confederation.
It is funny: I am in Cali at the moment and about to leave, a la snowbird or Persephone perhaps for my six months in Mexico.. Various of my friends have commented on what a good idea it is to leave for four years. It is kind of touching that they think the election is important enough to change my plans, as if I am going to be thrown in prison if I return, or that the current change is only going to last 4 years. It is also a rather naive American assumption that, of course they can move wherever they want and other countries don’t have their own immigration laws. only the Americans get to do that.
Stephen
Sincere well wishes on processing and going through your father’s death, sir. That’s a little too close together for family, and our thoughts are with you.
Regarding Trump as Caesar, since history rhymes but doesn’t exactly repeat, and since this war is being fought with ideas for the most part, I’ll side with JMG in saying Trump crossed the Rubicon. The Democrats seem to agree, and are doing all they can to make sure history sees him that way, in the hopes he will end up as Caesar did. But of course, history has a wry sense of humor too, although I attribute that to more than history.
As for the media self-sabotage, I’ve also observed over the past 30+ years, a depressing slide in the quality of all media, leftish, rightish, and centrist.
What used to be hard news, i.e. a collection of *all* available facts presented in an order of importance, albeit with some disparity as to which facts are more important according to different leanings, and opinion, i.e. a stated point of view supported by certain facts, but which also acknowledges facts which mitigate against the thesis, have both been increasingly replaced with what amounts to propaganda, i.e. a story focused primarily on a person or group that evokes a powerful emotion, supported with only a paucity of carefully-curated facts to lead the reader, like a horse on a halter, to a specific conclusion and then gives them a good whack on the butt to get them galloping off in the appointed direction. I now skip through most newspapers by simply ignoring any item that begins with a personal example of something because I know that what follows, while factual, will be lying by omission and will mostly be tugging at my heartstrings, not my head. About 90% of TV news decades ago became nothing more than opinion telling the audience what they are supposed to conclude and think.
That’s why the legacy news media is failing, and flailing: They are not giving their audience a full array of relevant facts from which the said audience is credited with enough intelligence to draw their own conclusions.
Edward R. Murrow and his compatriots delivered hard news, even when personalizing a story to bring it home. They had grown out of the age of ‘yellow journalism’ and felt people should be properly informed to make better choices. They trusted their audience.
Obviously, as you’ve pointed out before, if the story being told doesn’t match the experience of the person, then they stop trusting those telling the story. And the mainstream media have long been pushing propaganda, rather than truthful facts, in this new age of yellow journalism. People flock to whoever is telling them what they want to hear.
It started with Fox News which has always been explicitly pushing a particular viewpoint, facts be damned. They made money telling certain people what they wanted to be true… a lot of money. So it wasn’t long before everyone else was following suit. Tell people what they wish was true, not was IS true.
But the predicament begins back in 1973 (I think), when the FCC dropped the requirement for a TV or radio station to present the news as a public service as a condition of receiving a license. News went from being a cost of doing business to being just another program that had to generate revenue or be cut. Once the news had to compete with entertainment for eyeballs and therefore ad revenue, it started to become infotainment, titillation was the order of the day, and quality degraded accordingly.
Of course, as you’ve pointed out repeatedly, this polarization is typical of an empire in its last days, so it’s not entirely the media’s fault: they are just one part of a very large puzzle.
Lex Fridman just published a podcast on Youtube with Javier Milei. In it Milei talks about all the reduction of inflation that has happened since he began slashing bureaucracies in Argentina 11 months ago. He also called himself a minarchist and said that he just met with Trump. Milei is quite excited that Trump appears to be talking about following his lead. We will see soon enough if Trump’s actions speak louder than his words. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NLzc9kobDk
Bruno #219
No, you’ve missed the point – which admittedly was made more clear in the linked article than in my summary.
With dollar bond issues from non-US governments, higher rates than the US generally represents more risk. One of the notable things people are commenting on with regard to this is that the Chinese have been able to match the US rate, indicating that the market views them as just as safe an investment as the US. Even at this low rate, their offer was massively oversubscribed.
Why was that? The Saudis already have vast sums of dollars. Raising the US interest rate would give them somewhat more. But so what? They already have the problem that they don’t have anything to spend it on. The US doesn’t produce much of anything that they want, other than military systems which recent events have shown to be expensive and under-performing. More and more, what they want is things like high-speed trains which they would need to get from China – but China won’t accept payment in dollars.
That’s the other key feature of this deal. The Chinese haven’t offered this bond issue globally. They’ve only offered it in Saudi Arabia, specifically so that the Saudis can offload their dollar stockpile. Expect more issues to follow, given how over-subscribed the first was.
The US can, of course, offer higher rates – but if they do that it would be globally which would have significant consequences. It would, for a start, force the UK and EU banks to raise their own rates, which wouldn’t go down well domestically. If the US were to offer its own geographically-limited debt in the Middle East, well, the whole point is that the way the Chinese offer is structured suits the market better, because the market doesn’t want more dollars, they want fewer.
Ultimately, the reality is that Saudi financial managers with millions of dollars at their disposal have opted to to take advantage of this Chinese offer, regardless of what we here think. It’s happening, and it will be something to watch. in the future
Robert —
Re US coins. There are also the Susan B. Anthony dollar and the Sacagawea dollar. Among others. Dollar coins, just don’t seem to do very well, either because they’re too bug or too confusing.
It turns out there’s a whole series of presidential dollar coins that started in 2005. And an American Innovation dollar coin coin series as well. And a Native American series. I’ve never seen any of them, and probably won’t, since at the moment they are being minted only for collectors.
I wonder if I can find a bank that will provide me a hundred or so of the Sacagawea dollars, or the Native American series.
Hi JMG —
Your insightful post and some of the sources you linked to made me think of a trove of handwritten letters and White House memos between FDR, various subordinates, and some of his local female friends and neighbors in Hyde Park, NY, concerning the establishment of the Vanderbilt estate there as a National Park. A few of these exchanges concern the hiring of my grandfather to oversee the greenhouses. My grandfather was a lifelong resident of Hyde Park and, along with FDR, he was a member of the local Odd Fellows lodge. If family lore is believed, both were also Masons.
As a young man, my grandfather was trained in the family floriculture business. He worked in and eventually oversaw the Vanderbilt greenhouses and gardens, providing all the daily cut flower arrangements on the model of an English great house. When Frederick William Vanderbilt died in 1938, my grandfather (and many other people) were out of a job.
In 1940, as the estate opened as a park to the public, a local woman FDR appointed as its first superintendent urged the president to get my grandfather back in his old job. This letter reads two small-town friends discussing a mutual acquaintance — and they were.
One lone federal bureaucrat indirectly included in this communication chain was polled for his opinion and vigorously protested that my grandfather was a well-known and incorrigible Republican — worse, the estate staff was already packed with other hardshell “German Republicans.” Nevertheless, my grandfather got the job and eventually ran the place, apart for a time back in the army, even though he was in his 40s in the 1940s. His German family had been in America since 1720 and founded Emaus, PA a generation before Ben Franklin started a series of fake news presses aimed at suppressing the stream of newly arriving radical pacifist Moravians there like my ancestors, who Franklin described as swarthy and incompatible with the English and Dutch. Too late — they voted him out of the colonial legislature.
My grandmother was a recently minted German-American, arriving in New York in the 1930s. My family has photos of her and my grandfather with the Roosevelts for tea, even though the Roosevelts knew very well these were not political supporters. My grandfather was a passionate Wilkie supporter and did not want another war with Germany. He was probably an early Ron Paul type of libertarian — a paleoconservative nationalist OG who had no use for college-addled managerial experts drawn from the Anglo-Dutch blue blood classes. They weren’t yet as inclusive as the WASP acronym suggests — no eastern and southern Germans need apply.
This piece of history is striking to me for how exceptions were made when one could not get a job in the WPA for example (which was also involved at the Vanderbilt estate) without being a card-carrying Democrat. FDR was simultaneously able to build and command the American federal bureaucracy while also being an authentic and pragmatic small-town villager, a role he loved and repaired to as often as possible. The soft power of small collisions of friendship (AKA “conflicts of interest” and nepotism) seems extremely healthy. Such exceptions and alternatives could co-exist even in polarized times. It’s unimaginable now that a president could have access to both the “public transcripts” of the mass media, as well as the private or hidden transcripts of a small town community. FDR could still be authentically all things to all people, and it’s likely the channels of empathy and cooperation afforded by occult societies made it possible. Otherwise, the identity politics of class, ethnicity, and church — lower, German, and Lutheran on my grandfather’s part — upper, Anglo-Dutch, and Episcopalian on FDR’s — would have prevailed.
Clearly liberality and broad-mindedness are qualities that can and always have operated in every type of regime. It’s not the institutions, processes, official procedures and “norms,” or even etiquette that make a good community or democracy — it’s more about people letting each other be people. This requires many exceptions, tolerances, and forbearances that leave room for humility, respect, and gratitude amid divisive conflicts. We’ve lost that capacity, no matter who is in charge.
Dear Mr. Greer, my condolences on the death of your father., and my deepest sympathy. My father had a hard life also, and my heart still aches for him quite frequently. Can I have your permission to light a candle for him and say a prayer? I am sorry for your loss.
Hello JMG! Good day, how are you? As you mentioned, taking political forms according to their own culture and political needs seems to be the realization of Alexander Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory. Apart from that, can you give me a few examples from British-American conservative right-wing media sites? I would like to mix them up as well, thank you.
@JMG:
“I felt a lifting of the energies more than a week before the election”
Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about over on Dreamwidth. You’re far from the only spiritual person I’ve seen say this.
Folks may be surprised, amused, to know, if they don’t know, that while every time there is a big Republican victory in the USA, the usual left-wingers make a lot of noise about moving to Canada, in fact the same thing in reverse happens here in Canada: thousands of right-wingers look dreamily southwards and say they’re finally doing it, they’re finally going to look for work in the USA with a view to eventual permanence.
The difference this year being, that I’ve never before seen so many people who seem really serious about it. The energy coming from down there is just so compelling at the moment, in comparison to ours which more than ever feels like a fetid, stifling cave.
As I said at Dreamwidth, it may just be the contrast effect, where white looks all the whiter next to black, but it seems the energy hasn’t lifted here at all, yet. I’m still hopeful that it will, perhaps in some way that I don’t even expect.
Addendum to my reply to Bruno (sorry JMG, hopefully the last on this subject but it’s relevant to the preceding discussion, and important)
Bruno: there’s another really important point I need to add, which is the overall context and reasoning for this deal.
For decades, Saudi Arabia has been a client state of the US and a promoter of fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam – to which end, it has (allegedly, at least) funded jihadist groups around the Middle East and beyond. As a part of this it’s been at daggers drawn with Iran and other Shia countries and groups.
That is no longer the case. Under the current Crown Prince, the state is moving away from Wahhabism and promoting a more liberal Islam. Women’s dress codes are being relaxed, and women can now drive cars. They are promoting tourism in the country.
Politically, the Saudis have buried the hatchet with Iran through Chinese mediation, and are now exchanging courteous high-level visits. They’ve signed a military cooperation agreement with Russia. They’ve conducted joint naval exercises with all of these countries.
The point being: the Chinese bond issue isn’t a financial exercise, as your original comment and my first response discussed it. It isn’t about making more dollars for the Saudi bank balance.
Rather, it’s part of the process of the Saudis moving away from the United States, a relationship which they don’t feel benefits them any more. The deal is a mechanism by which China is helping the Saudis to offload their dollars and so reduce their exposure, or vulnerability, to US ‘punishment’. As I see it, anyway. Probably the Saudis,are on their way to joining Iran and the UAE in the BRICS, which will be interesting.
Hey JMG
Firstly, condolences for your father. At least he managed to have a fairly long life, rather than leaving the world too soon.
Secondly, I am not sure if you are already aware, but David Brin has just published his take on the meaning of this year’s election. As is usual with Brin, he manages to have some genuine insights into why the election turned out the way he did, but “Ruins” it with his insistence on assuming Russia is somehow pulling the strings and his usual condescending attitude.
Another thing I wanted to draw attention to is his suggestion that Biden could do one last thing to undermine the coming Trump administration, which is to offer an amnesty for any “People of influence” who have been blackmailed by foreign actors (presumably Russia) into undermining the American government. I think it goes without saying that Trump could do the same deal to the Democrats detriment.
https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2024/11/so-what-lessons-did-we-learn-and-what.html
Trump ending the Century of the Self and starting the Century of the Other… a champion who will lead our society in abandoning toxic egotism and selfishness and embracing instead generosity, respect and compassion for the other… well, that made me laugh out loud.
@gnat:
“Wise people, and people who value Freedom (self-determination) sufficiently, will choose hardship over the alternative”
Thanks for this, I said precisely the same thing to an irl friend of mine recently who was moaning about the collapsing State of Things.
I said I view that as a positive. Would you prefer that the government continues to have the money to oppress you?
John, my condolences for you, too.
—————————————————————————————————————————
Walt 213:
“It’s not the particular outcome, but the extreme polarization in the first place, that disturbs me”
I agree. And I would say more about it, the polarization leaves quickly to the “friend-enemy dialectic” (Carl Schmitt), which is the favourite politics in the totalitarian regimes, and dyiing “democracies” like the Germany Weimar in the 30s.
there’s happening the same s**t in my country, government satanize no-woke ideas as far right or fascists, and the “Conservatives” are in full lawfare mode to reach the power. So they both are trying to polarize and tension more and more the street people. This cannot finish well…
Hello, Archdruid and the commentariat.
I am an outsider to American politics (being non-American), but based on what I have seen and read, it appears that the situation there is a dual class war — two class wars going on at the same time, and these are related to one another.
At the outset, it appears that this is a class war between the wage-earning working class and the salaried managerial-bureaucrat caste, but I think these are both proxies for a different pair of belligerents, who are fighting the real class war in America. These two would be the New Rich and the Old Rich, both segments of the investing caste of plutocrats who use lobbying and deep pockets to drive the nation towards their vested interests.
The Old Rich is the segment of the plutocrat caste who made their money off the New Deal, the Economic Boom of the 50’s, and in the case of some of the oldest families, the Gold Rush. The New Rich rose to wealth after the fall of the Soviet Union, rising on the back of The Internet, Globalization, Business Process Outsourcing, the Software Boom, and of course, Immigration. This second class is brutal, calculating, and cruel. It has fortified itself in Silicon Valley, and commands vast assets. The New Rich have always known that they would have a reckoning in store with the Old Rich eventually, and to acquire enough wealth to stand a chance when that reckoning comes, they have mercilessly exploited the American working and salaried classes, cutting labor costs and driving down the bottom lines with any and every means necessary.
Traditionally, the Old Rich used the Republican leadership and the church as their frontispiece to push their interests. The Democrats were largely the party of the educated middle class (i.e., the Managerial Bureaucrats). But since the early 2000’s at least, this entire class has become a proxy of the New Rich class to help them fight cold wars of class interest. Accordingly, the Democrats have become their frontispiece.
With the cumulative effect of three events in this century — the fall of the Church from public prominence under the barrage of liberal attacks, the rise of globalization and outsourcing as major alternatives to industrial development at home, and the growing importance of Software as a source of big money — the power of the Old Rich has been dwindling steadily. With the real estate collapse of 2008 and the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2012, this decline has become a serious threat. So it appears they have changed tack, finding the only rational ally they can have under the circumstances.
The rise of globalization has hit the Old Rich, whose power stems from manufactories and assets at home. They are natural allies of the displaced working class, and the rise of Donald Trump is a natural result of this alliance. This is my hypothesis. It is lent credence from the fact that most right wing outlets switched to support for Donald Trump come 2015. Trump could not have single-handedly owned enough cash to out-pay Cruz, Bush, and all the rest of them. In other words, deeper pockets have backed him. Since there was no sudden change in ownership or leadership of Right Wing media prior to 2015, we can conclude that the existing leadership masterminding the Republican party has switched its policy and strategy, from moral posturing and elitism to populism and polemics.
JMG,
” It has never been the case, and it never will be the case, that all information is created by the elite and disseminated to the passive masses. ”
I don’t know, TV almost got it done…but my point was that everyone wants to be more involved in the conversation these days, and not having a comments section seems to me like a brilliant way to keep being left out of it. FWIW, I certainly won’t ever read anything else by that author!
Hi John Michael,
You’re cool. Hey, I can’t believe the Harry Potter books keep coming up time and time again over the years. Truthfully, one peek at the cover art determined my path, and it wasn’t on the Harry train. From memory it was a cartoon character of a kid who’d probably not even cut it with the Scooby Doo gang, and he appeared to be floating and there was a wand and as Tolkien once wrote: Some other stuff. Just say no. 🙂 The standards of cover art have fallen in these enlightened days!
Having an open mind used to be the hallmark of the intellectual, but like good cover art, those days are done – for the moment. It’s quite confronting to conduct a dialogue with someone who believes they are correct when their assumptions are not open to discussion and analysis. Little wonder there is an apparent replicability crisis. Your guidance and good grace over the past sixteen years has been a salutary lesson on many fronts. Nowadays if I see the conversation has strayed in a dogmatic direction, I simply let it go whistling past me.
Sara would have gotten a laugh out of this one. So with courses now, I’ve noticed that they run for say, 2 hours, and you’d think that you’d be awarded 2 hours of credit towards your requirements. There’d you’d both have been wrong, somehow the officially recognised credit is only for 1 hour. Dunno about you, but I dislike supporting such systems. Raises some questions, doesn’t it? Far out!
On a matter of strategy, a little eerie whisper suggested that many of the cabinet choices are actually a pretty smart move. Your political history has some examples of let’s just call them by the correct description: Executions. In this instance, I’d have to suggest that if such a thing were to happen, the remaining folks may produce some unexpected consequences. And to take all of them out, or a large chunk, would look way too much like a coup. That could also have unpredictable consequences.
Just an odd thought there.
Enjoying your writing, since 2008! 😉
Cheers
Chris
Hi Michael Gray,
Thanks for the laughs, and it’s reassuring to me that you never been over heard saying such a thing – that we’re aware of!!! 🙂
Hope your garden is doing well.
Cheers
Chris
@Walt #213:
“. I like almost all the people in my town, so I refuse to entertain the notion that half of them (or perhaps all of them) are wicked or foolish”
Very nice comment. I think something that is underappreciated is that when people keep their vote to themselves, it’s frequently not out of fear or shame but because they genuinely feel the way you do – they realize that neighbourliness is more important than some petty bickering about politics. It’s encouraging in a way.
To my mind it’s also all related to the way that covid was so shocking because I’m not used to people being at each other’s throats over, well, over anything, like they were.
But enough about that. I’m going outside to cut down some trees, making some raised beds for next year.
>I don’t think that Trump is going to get anything accomplished in his second administration
And a lot of the people who voted for him can see how rigged it is in the Imperial City. That’s not the point. He promised to make their lives miserable.
>In this case, Trump took a novel and audacious approach
Not only is he a good salesman, he is a good speculator as well. He’s not a bureaucrat, that’s for sure. Although there was a time back in the 90s when he was on the ropes. I was vaguely aware of him back then, and he came across as a joke. But that’s what you get paying attention to the media.
Much of the hatred you see against him is instinctual. They know he isn’t one of them. And they fear and loathe him because of that. Then again, will mice and cats ever see eye to eye on anything?
“Corporate liberalism”—that’s a new one. I like it!
Stephen, Trump’s election will do precisely nothing to change the time scale of the decline of industrial civilization. From that high-level perspective, all this is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Elections matter only because we don’t live on a timescale of decades and centuries; we have days and months and years to get through! I’ll certainly consider a post on where we are in the global energy predicament, and another on the geopolitical situation, once the Wagner sequence is finished.
Celadon, thank you for this. With regard to Trumpius Caesar, it’s very easy to get caught up in details; other examples of Caesarism in history didn’t necessarily have a Rubicon (or even a rubicund) moment. I think his overall place in the historical sequence will be Caesaresque.
Renaissance, that’s why I avoid all North American media. Some overseas media isn’t quite so useless.
Clark, here’s hoping!
DK, I suspect a lot of the difference is simply that the US is so much more crowded than it was in FDR’s time. In 1940 the US had only 132,000,000 people — maybe a third of its current population. In a less crowded nation, village-style interactions were easier to sustain.
Heather, thank you, and I would appreciate it.
Yiğit, I recommend skipping the media sites and going straight to the forums. https://communities.win/c/TheDonald/ is one of the better places to lurk.
Bofur, interesting. Many thanks for the data points!
J.L.Mc12, thank you. As for Brin, that’s too funny. He really can’t let go of looking for Boris Badenov and Natasha under every piece of furniture, can he? Of course you’re right that the same game can be played both ways…
Eyrie, the non sequiturs that come from my readers are among the most entertaining and informative things I get to read here. I’d encourage you to read my post over again and see if you can find any slightest hint that I imagine the Century of the Other as a time of “abandoning toxic egotism and selfishness and embracing instead generosity, respect and compassion for the other.” (Hint: you won’t.) The Century of the Other will be a century of war–a period of painful readjustments as those who think they’re on the right side of history find out the hard way that history has its own ideas and plays no favorites.
Chuaquin, thank you.
Rajarshi, exactly — that’s what I was getting at by talking about the replacement of the failing bureaucratic-managerial elite with a rising entrepreneurial elite.
Grover, TV allowed the corporate elite to think that they almost got it done — then they found themselves scrambling to deal with one unruly counterculture after another. You’re right about the lack of comments sections, though — audience response has become a major public feature these days, where it used to be a little less open.
Chris, thank you! I’m sorry to say you’re right about good cover art, too — oh well.
Blue Sun, I’ve been looking for a good label for the system for a while, and that one finally satisfied me.
JMG:
Neptunesdolphins, ouch. That’s got to be harrowing to watch. I wonder how much of it is that you’re in DC, where a lot of people will be losing their jobs under the new administration; as Machiavelli said, people will forgive the murder of their fathers sooner than the loss of their wealth.
Me: Well, everyone is sort of pondering their fates. Some will retire, since there are a lot of people who are eligible. Many will be pensioned off. Some are panicked. The problem is that the region (VA,DC,MD,WV) is thought to be recession proof with all the federal money sloshing around.
However, the devil is in the details. Covid emptied the downtown, and the Feds, who are pushing green economy, ordered everyone back to revitalize the downtown. (Funny that.) The downtown is still a ghost town since people decided to defy Fed i.e. Presidential orders. Meanwhile, the war between upscale white people and poor Black people has heated to flaming. Flash point – bike lanes, which the upscale people want and everyone else thinks are a pain. (I mention race since it is a major deal in D.C. a very major deal.)
What I am personally dealing with hatred. Being told that people who wanted lower food prices are killing off all the gay people. We should be ashamed of ourselves. I have heard of the “Rainbow Mafia” and the “Rainbow Reich” but never experienced it before. I guess J.K. Rowling was so far off.
My own bewilderment lies in the fact that well-educated and good people could have such hatred towards others. I expected better. Anyway, the other thing is that I discovered that the principle religion of Neo-Pagans is Progressivism. The Gods and all that are just window-dressing make everyone edgy and counter-cultural. I had thought that people would go to their faith.
“The standards of cover art have fallen in these enlightened days!”
I don’t know; I for one have mortifying memories of the covers of all the (not at all racy) fantasy novels I read as a teenager seeming to feature busty women in dubious poses popping out of the laces of their anachronistic period costumes—and often these women bore no resemblance to the physical descriptions of any character in the novel itself. Sci-fi was usually even worse, as it tended to feature skin-tight metallic leotards. I used to hide the books in one of those zip-up Bible covers when I was in public because they looked so dodgy! But I clearly wasn’t the target audience for those covers, and at least they weren’t so bland, so I might concede the point.
Currently the federal deficit creates 27% of the federal spending. At least 60% of the budget is Social Security, Disability, Unemployment payments, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, Veteran benefits- categories that are difficult to freeze spending, let alone cut, 13% military, 13% interest payments on debt, everything else the federal government does is the remainder. Elon Musk may eliminate the Education Department – 3% and reduce overall staff and make government more efficient – which would be a near miracle, but a large deficit would remain unless taxes are raised – as between helping the poor, elderly and veterans and the interest payments at least 70% of the spending is quite hard to reduce. The high tax Swedes have a debt to size of the economy around 30% as compared to the over 100 percent of the USA. Americans want more government than they are willing to pay for.
Restoring the decayed industrial base of the USA is an at least ten years or more project.
And if the economy goes south, inflation continues, and the financial system goes haywire in the next two years as could possibly happen Trump would probably lose Congress to the democrats. The challenges Trump faces are immense. The USA Titanic is a difficult ship to turn aside from the iceberg.
Interestingly, this election and the alliance of Elon Musk with Donald Trump might finally be the death of the God of Progress. CNN just ran an article titled, “Elon Musk has pledged to settle Mars. A prizewinning book offers a reality check.” That’s a shift.
For me the big problem I have with Trump is the blindness to the sickness of our biosphere and the call for us to be healers and tenders of it instead of just users. I have my own differing problems with his opponents and some hopes on what this electoral change may accomplish. But the needed vast re-engineering of our technologies and economic system to a life giving place is beyond the ken of either side. At best we will be forced there via a “Long Descent”. And the whole subject of the UAP or UFO’s is there bubbling along. https://roddreher.substack.com/p/the-uap-cover-up-uncovered-a-bit
Yes, we are moving into mystery with the world structure we have known for decades changing.
Eva, regarding “who votes for hardship?”
Perhaps people who realize that hardship is coming and it’s better to take it facing forward. And those who know that we should’ve taken it earlier so as to make it less painful in the time to come. But we didn’t. We continued to spend, federally, to bail out banks, fund government growth in all realms, generate wars… and create a morass-like “healthcare” system.
Take a look at the federal budget for 2023 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expenditures_in_the_United_States_federal_budget#/media/File:2023_US_Federal_Budget_Infographic.png), which is funded in large part by debt (see 1940-2021 debt here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States#/media/File:USDebt.png) and recognize that our economic woes are government-caused: inflation is the devaluation of currency. There’s too much currency sloshing around in a wealthy-people’s effort to live the lives they “deserve” and to stave off the hardship that comes as a result of too much currency.
Do I think Trump is going to fix this? No. Does it need to be fixed? – well, yes though it’s not really fixable at this point; it’ll either be eased somewhat by serious cutting of government spending (of as yet uncreated currency aka debt) and thus a reduction in debt, or slammed into us by hyperinflation, which’ll take the currency out of circulation in a rude way.
And that serious cutting of government spending?
The low-hanging fruit is the waste in spending for defense, and medicare and medicaid (and probably education) – federally funded by debt and income taxes. Social security is funded by payroll taxes and doesn’t contribute to the federal debt (see my comment above about who actually pays payroll taxes), so isn’t touched in this scenario (despite all the claims to the contrary). Current levels of defense and medical spending – on resource-wasting projects will come back to bite us. … actually that habit is biting us now.
It’s going to get a lot worse no matter who is president. Maybe a small stomach-dropping fall in quality of life can be smoothed over, though, prior to the other lurches downward, if government spending is voluntarily slashed. … in spite of the wails of everyone who’s been trained to think we deserve lives without hardship.
Goodness, do you think the party goes on forever? Collapse now and avoid the rush isn’t just a cute slogan – it really means, get used to what it’s like to live with (what’s considered) hardship now so it’s not so painful later.
@ Temporary Reality #221 Thank you for the link. 🙂
Taking it in detail, state by state.
Nebraska – I had not included it because its ballot made no actual reference to minimum wage. It did, however make reference to the right to accumulate sick leave. In this red state, voters approved this worker friendly measure.
Whereas the vote in Arizona did relate to minimum wage, but it was phrased in a negative way – asking whether tipped workers could be paid less, not (as in other states) whether they should be paid more. In this red state, voters rejected the worker unfriendly proposal, which would have potentially reduced the tipped workers minimum wage from $11.35 to $10.77.
Alaska. In this red state voters approved three worker friendly measures, one to increase the minimum wage to $15.00 by 2027, one to permit the accumulation of sick leave, and one to protect employee free speech rights in the workplace.
Missouri. In this red state, voters approved two worker friendly measures, one to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2026, and one to permit the accumulation of sick leave.
California: In this blue state, voters rejected a worker friendly measure to raise minimum wage to $18.
Massachusetts (most egregious of all to my mind): in this blue state voters *comprehensively* rejected a proposal to raise the current tipped worker’s minimum wage, on a phased basis, from $6.75 to $15 by 2029.
I do not see any reason to change my conclusion, which is that, at least at this juncture in time and place, the voters of red states are viewing worker friendly measures with a great deal more enthusiasm than the voters of blue states.
The “Paper of Record ” The NY Times did an own goal attempting to prove RFK was wrong,
““Mr. Kennedy has singled out Froot Loops as an example of a product with too many artificial ingredients, questioning why the Canadian version has fewer than the U.S. version,” read the original print of The New York Times’ reporting. “But he was wrong. The ingredient list is roughly the same, although Canada’s has natural colorings made from blueberries and carrots while the U.S. product contains red dye 40, yellow 5 and blue 1 as well as Butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT, a lab-made chemical that is used ‘for freshness,’ according to the ingredient label.”
https://thefederalist.com/2024/11/18/the-new-york-times-fact-checks-itself-in-fumbled-fact-check-of-rfk-froot-loops-claims/
That’s a big ‘although’.
It’s not new though, Bari Weiss had this to say when she quit,
“But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter
The November 19th issue of the Wall Street Jungle had a long article on the internal state secession drives, “Red counties in blue states seek divorce.”
The three listed were: “New California” = the entire state except for the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Stockton;
“New Illinois ,” = all of Illinois except Cook County. My take: Chicago as an independent city-state on the outskirts of Illinois as in “Retropia” sounds plausible to me; and finally, that tired old “Greater Idaho” proposal, apparently all Oregon east of the cascades. Accoriding to Jean Lamb in Klamath Falls, which she’s pretty sure doesn’t rally want to be part of Idaho, the local sentiment is “Let them move to Idaho, then.” As I said, that one’s nothing new, and so far has gone nowhere.
The other two aren’t really seceding from California; they’re just in favor of kicking out the two major candidates for independent city-states on the coast.
Any ideas of how viable that would be?
P.S. According to the Associated Press, Gaetz has stepped down from the Attorney-General nomination, and has been replaced by Pam Bondi.
PPS: JMG, you mentioned War. For the past several weeks, my mind’s-ear soundtrack keeps coming up with a rousing rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and the image of the massed Union armies marching south in the spirit of a holy crusade. For what that’s worth.
JHK notes that the Swamp creatures are already slithering their way into the new Trump Administration:
In the Weeds of the Swamp
https://jameshowardkunstler.substack.com/p/in-the-weeds-of-the-swamp
“Ever hear of an outfit called Cipher Brief? Of course not. Cipher Brief is sort of the McKinsey of blob-world (a.k.a. the “national security” network), a combination Human Relations / Public Relations firm, totally spooked-up with former CIA officers. Quite a few of the spooks who signed the infamous letter in October 2020 that said Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation” are contractors there. They all knew the heinous laptop was genuine, though, and they did it anyway to queer the election for “Joe Biden.” Why? Because. . . Trump.
“One Cipher Brief operative is a character named Dan Hoffman, a retired CIA ‘clandestine service’ officer who ran the agency’s Middle East Bureau, among other things. He’s now a sometime talking head on Fox News. Hoffman has scuttled his way to the sidelines of the Trump transition team, trying to punk them on personnel.”
It goes downhill from there. Not surprising to me!
My condolences for you father’s death. A friend who went through that before me gave me some good advice – “Everyone is going to be a bit crazy, including you.” And in all three of our cases it was an expected death with hospice in place. Sorrow, Drew C
I want to comment you all that somewhere in the internet, I read some days ago, an American leftist who worte something about this: Trumpism exists because American Constitution is aged and anachronic. WTF??
I don’t remember the web and neither the “intellectual” who wrote that call to the “post-trump Constitution”.
I know I didn’t dreamt it.
If somebody remembers who wrote that dangerous antidemocratic aberration, I’d be pleased. Thanks in advance…
JMG,
Thank you. I’m afraid I touched a Clay Shirky-shaped nerve with my comment!
My own father passed away a year ago, after a few years of fading bodily and mentally, it felt like a late ripe apple falling off the tree. Blessings for you during this next meaningful time.
Courtesy of Jean Lamb: “Matt Gaetz pulled out when November turned 21. “
Aaron Good, author of American Exception, wrote a series of three articles that offer an interesting critique of what he sees as the hollowness or lack of force in Adam Curtis’s documentaries. I don’t think Curtis’s work is wholly without value, but I found this perspective a valuable complement to it: https://www.kennedysandking.com/reviews/deep-fake-politics-getting-adam-curtis-out-of-your-head
(Links to the second and third parts at the bottom of the article.)
Eva (#66) – “Who votes for hardship?” “Hardship, or not hardship?” is not the question before us. The question is “Hardship with distraction and denial (Democratic) or hardship with a plan (Republicans)?” Hardship is baked into the cake either way.
Housing too expensive? That’s something that SOME people lament, but not the wealthy owners of low-end rental housing. Those are the people who are afraid that the departure of undocumented immigrants will impair THEIR property values. I don’t ask about the immigration status of my Spanish-speaking neighbors parking six cars in a neighborhood designed for two per house, but I have my suspicions.
Matt Taibbi posted an essay on Substack yesterday entitled “The Emperor Has No Brains”. Unfortunately, it was subscriber-only, so I can’t provide a link. However, this section seems relevant to this essay’s topic:
“This exclusive culture is failing everywhere — the spinoff by Comcast of MSNBC and CNBC is the latest sign of apocalyptic social change — but anyone paying attention in the last weeks noticed a lack of alarm. With the election over, Wealthistan culture is finally free of any obligation to pretend to care about mass appeal. Now it can be the exclusivity religion it always was.”
Prediction: This will not end well for them. At all.
OtterGirl
So the blue ribbon for the whiniest performative virtue-signaling in the wake of the election (so far) has to go to the Rt. Rev. Susan Goff, retired Bishop Suffragan of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia. A Facebook acquaintance reposted this gem today:
“““““““““““““““`
I confess, Dear God,
that I cannot for the life of me
figure out how to pray for him.
He mocks your beloveds,
and seems to think that he is you.
I cannot for the life of me
figure out how to pray for him
whose god is power,
whose currency is cruelty.
I know, I know,
he is also your child,
made in your image.
I know, I know,
I have promised
to be faithful in prayer.
I know, I do know
what you want me to do.
I just don’t know how.
And I really, really don’t want to . . .
because his name tastes so sour on my lips.
Dear God, the best I can do right now
is to name this aversion.
The best I can do is to want to pray better.
Please hear this stumbling confession of mine.
Please make something of my willingness to try.
Please help me speak his name to you
until I can do it without flinching.
Because although I can’t for the life of me
figure out how to pray for him,
praying for him IS for the life of me
– and for the life of the world –
as much as it is for him.
Amen.
“““““““““““““““`
(having spent 12 years in Christian Day School, I couldn’t resist quoting Matthew 5:44-45, the verse that begins “But I say unto you, love your enemies” in reply to my acquaintance’s post. We’ll see if I get a response; the person who posted it is probably not expecting pushback, especially not one wielding scripture).
JMG,
I offer my condolences to you for the death of your father.
I think the left/liberal obsession with being thrown into camps has a kind of parallel in the affluent right wing gun owners’ obsession with being prepared for when the urban poor come boiling out of the city to loot and pillage. Both refer to things that actually happened in the peculiar historical conditions of Germany in the first half of the 20th century. During the hyperinflationary period of the 1920s, starving urban poor people, mostly young men, did go out into the countryside in gangs to steal and loot food, and a dozen or so years later the Nazi government did put leftists (along with the many other categories of people the Nazis didn’t like) in camps.
In both cases, I believe the root motivation is a desire to look in the mirror and see a hero. The suburban gunslingers want their home to be attacked so they can take heroic action in defense of said home. The leftists, well, you know that ugly little joke about how the highest award in investigative journalism is being assassinated by the CIA? These leftists don’t exactly want to be assassinated, but they want the Powers That Be to react, to take some kind of repressive action, because that would show that they were really Speaking Truth to Power and were therefor heroes.
How many in either group would last even one day if their fantasies came true? Best not to ask.
JMG. Your post reminded me of a few things. First, that Orange Julius was weird and unpleasant, but that I could not help but think about bellying up to the orange Juice bar every so often. Second, that Hillary Clinton was mocked for her laugh, and just like Harris, on election night abandoned her most ardent believers to drown in their tearful sorrows alone, despite promises to be there in person for them. Third, the level of (not) coincidences on a personal level were uncannily stacked and very close by election night. Think: in the old days when you would remember a friend, and the rotary phone would ring with a call from that friend. This had built to an extraordinary crescendo over the past year and has now begun its descent. Fourth, about retribution worries. I can supply my own datapoint. By 2:00 AM Eastern time or so I witnessed News Entertainers of interest at the desks formally major news networks attempt to openly begin conversations with the other news entertainers about how Orange Julius would INDEED HERE AND NOW forthwith begin the process of retribution. They spoke out of exhaustion and disbelief, but the awful fear of some sort of realized reckoning was palpable in the air that night. A physical reconning. I don’t wonder what they felt responsible for. Do you think we should all practice being careful about what we wish for? And practice tolerance? I do. And I think I learned that from you.
“Red counties in blue states seek divorce.”
Considering this map, is it a surprise?
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/map-trump-red-blue-counties-2024/
Big cities are reliably Blue. Why I don’t know. Research on that on the internet keeps turning up the axiom the cities have a more diverse culture and are therefore more liberal. That’s the dictionary definition of liberal, easy going and accepting of others. It does not explain why cities are so determined to have an all powerful State that controls every aspect of your existence.
As you look at the Washington State corner of the map you see the Blue is around where Puget Sound is as well as Whitman county, home of Washington State University. Students there keep hoping for free party money from the Democrats, and the professors want to stay employed and also need the student loan gravy train to keep flowing.
In the old days (30 years ago) the difference between Seattle’s mores and the East Side’s were easily accommodated as the state government didn’t do much. But Seattle and it’s suburbs keep wanting more and more government and they enact what they and have the numbers so they don’t even have to pretend to care what the East side thinks. (I am an East Sider by the way.)
So they stifle east side jobs to preserve quality vacation spots and think we should be grateful for seasonal minimum wage jobs in tourism. They add a carbon tax that penalizes the rural counties and spend the money on the west side. And they complain about how ungrateful we are for the money they do grudgingly allocate to east side projects.
What they want from us is cheap food, cheap vacations, and cheap energy. When we complain they say “The greatest good of the greatest number.” Strict utilitarianism is perfectly happy with 49% slaves. Athens was a slave based society after all.
Personally I’d be delighted to divorce the West Side right down the Pacific Crest trail. Skamania county would have to an election to decide which way to go since the Trail cuts right through it. But the west side is not done asset stripping us yet, so it seems unlikely we can escape. The new governor has already sworn to double down on progressivism.
And to answer one other comment that always comes up, no the East Side on its own could not support the level of government the West Side wants us to have. But we can support the level of government we want.
The West side can’t support the level of government they want either. All the money from the tax hikes, the carbon tax, and the “excise tax” on capital gains is gone with nothing to show for it. If I were crass I’d suggest checking the pockets of the cronies of Inslee, the out going governor. He’s likely to run for President in ’28 by the way.
Politically speaking, both our senators are from the Seattle area, Patty Murray (Boeing) and Maria Cantwell (Microsoft). Cantwell actually knows there is an east side Murray not so much. The State Supreme Court justices are West Siders too. We don’t get much sympathy from them either.
That turned into more of a rant than I intended, you poked a sore spot. Sorry.
Patricia Matthews,
I really hope that the tune in our mind’s ear soundtrack is not worth anything.
Great Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn on Substack this week:
https://www.racket.news/p/america-this-week-november-22-2024
💨Northwind Grandma💨📚👩🏼💻🧞♀️
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Wer here
JMG to begin I am sorry about your loss. Last year I had to watch my dear mother fade away and die it was a harrowing experience, I didn’t even read your writings for a long time.. I will even put up an candle in our church for your father as I did for Sarah earlier . (someone might be of different faith but I belive a lost life is a lost life the same)
But the insanity of what some people are saying here is grating the divorce for reality just reached a new low last night when some idiot on the MSM was loudly proclaimind that:
A Russia doesn’t have hypersonic weapon because something else had hit that city in Ukraine,
B Russia doesn’t have any nuclear weapons (he claimed that because they didn’t fire a nuke at that city proves that the don’t have any)
I literally slapped my face was he being serious ? Those idiots are planing on starting a nuclear war now. Ukraine is retreating and we must stop Trump from getting into office a nuclear war is as good as anything now.
Trump cannot be allowed to take office starting WW3 is now a more preferable option apparently, Do those people have brainrot combined with an echo chamber or something, Are they really that desperate and mad?
Interesting times.
I think what’s happening in the US and international politics is just one layer of many. I come from the Middle East, its very heart actually, and I’d say the traditionalist revivals are partly nationalistic and partly reactionary against the increasing modernization on different levels, but subtly behind that is an ascending culture of youth who are rebelling against the “norm” and actually more libertarian than many would assume, mostly behind closed doors. You’d be amazed to see the Saudi counterculture and intellectuals on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, I’ve been around this community for around a decade and seen its growth, it’s exciting and joyful.
So no, we are actually becoming more open while maintaining our national identity, balance is always the best choice and I hope we keep on doing that. Aside from that, I truly hope America in the near future starts to heal from all the corruption and decline and maintain its ideals.
re: hyperinflation
I sure hope at least some of you wise people took my advice, or the same advice from others, a year ago, which was to park any money you didn’t need right away in gold. Gold is up $715/oz, YoY – 35% – as of yesterday’s market close. Personally, I think gold spot is the surest indicator of where inflation really stands. I don’t think we’ve had 35% inflation in the last 12 months, TBH; more likely, gold pricing has been manipulated and suppressed by short interests for years and just finally broke out. This bull run is annihilating the short positions.
Fortunately, you haven’t missed anything more than the opening inning. I think most of the run is still in front of us. When facing hyperinflation there’s no real logical endpoint to the value of gold in terms of the inflating currency. Trump and Musk, et al, are doing their best to redirect wealth into cryptocurrency, probably recognizing that the BRICS coalition has a lot more gold than the official numbers suggest, and revaluing gold to erase debt, based on the idea that the U.S. owns most of it, would bury the dollar once and for all. The crypto play could at least appear to succeed temporarily, but I think most folks here understand where crypto is headed in the longer term – back to its original value of zero. Gold will lose value eventually too, but that will require significant global population contraction I think, and we’re not there yet.
I’m not under any illusion that a modern American lifestyle can be perpetuated by hoarding gold, but in the short to medium term I think it can accomplish certain things financially, under inflationary circumstances. For example, my immediate goal is to get my house paid off 20 years early, so I can focus on more important things than making enough money to pay for a house! Like converting it into 3 apartments for my immediate family members, so we can all live conveniently downtown, within walking distance of services, and split expenses/taxes three ways.
Anyway, hope you are all well.
Cheers.
My condolences on your loss archdruid. All hail the traveler. As someone whose parents have long since passed into ancestorhood, I see them even more clearly now, with so much love and respect, and gratitude for having chose me. Blessings
Joan 270: To both left and right wing people who love apocalyptic scenaries for their heroic fantasies, we could say to them…Be careful with that you desire!
@Jennifer Kobernik #270 – Fandom has been making fun of that one for a long time, such as the song “There’s a bimbo on the cover of my book.” Those covers were made to catch the eyes of teenage boys, their first primary market.
@ Dennis Mitchell #252 – I think my 17-year-old grandson has asked me for that book for Christmas. He and his dad subscribe to every science magazine ever published, many of them out of the UK.
The problem I now have is trust. I’ve been reading, and enjoying, your series on The Ring, ignoring the stuff on magic, but now comes this. And now I have to ask myself: do I hold my nose & continue reading the Wagner articles, or do I stop. I don’t know, but I think this article has so corroded any trust I might have had that I must look elsewhere. Which is sad, but, probably, for the best.
Listening to your “Suicide of Science” chapter yet again (from your 2016 Dark Age America book) in the wee hours of the morning brought me to check out your posts again. Wow! This one is spot on! Thank you! I had so been missing your educational commentaries that make sense of what otherwise seems nonsensical in American culture and politics. It is all right on schedule , yes, along the bumpy trajectory of ongoing civilizational collapse. Factoids that support your argument: (1) While I voted for the write-in candidate “Giant Meteor” in the 2020 election, I enthusiastically voted for Bobby and Tulsi in this one — meaning Trump. Meanwhile, my wealthy classic Republican brother (we’re both in Michigan) switched parties the other way; so we cancelled each other out. (2) When DOGE was announced, I suddenly saw an opportunity to achieve something real for “the environment” that I have been working on (with some success) for exactly 20 years via a citizen network (not an NGO!) that we call Torreya Guardians. If curious, check out my new video titled “DOGE for Endangered Plants: Cut costs, Get results, Follow our lead.” BTW: I was one of your blurbers for “Dark Age America.” My late husband, Michael Dowd, was also a blurber (and he was your volunteer reader for its audio version). He had also endorsed your “After Progress.” But I couldn’t on that earlier book: I was a professional science writer, and I just couldn’t. But thank goodness, I had had enough of my own wake-up to the dark side of institutional science to blurb you in 2016. Please do keep posting an occasional commentary that helps us in America gain and maintain a calm clarity on why what may seem to others as outright crazy and wrong or even evil is actually commonsense understandable if one simply reflects on history and jettisons our own generational and species hubris.
“a new low last night when some idiot on the MSM was loudly proclaimind that:
A Russia doesn’t have hypersonic weapon because something else had hit that city in Ukraine,
B Russia doesn’t have any nuclear weapons (he claimed that because they didn’t fire a nuke at that city proves that the don’t have any)”
Wer #275;
This nonsense is more spread than you must believe. Some years ago I met in internet a spanish conspiracy theorist (whose name I don’t remember and neither I don’t want to remember it), who told whoever payed attention him that nuclear weapons didn’t exist, because Einstein and Oppenheimer were jews (sic). So the USA and Russia and China and so on have fake nukes for exhibition and frightening their enemies. Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were fake too, ahem ahem. What a fool!
>gold pricing has been manipulated and suppressed by short interests for years and just finally broke out
You’ll know when they’ve lost control of the gold market. It’ll jump $3000 in one day and then the “market” for it will shut down.
>Being told that people who wanted lower food prices are killing off all the gay people
You know, that’s right up (or down) there with “air conditioning is sexist” in terrms of being loopy, past Pluto, out there. As far as “education” goes, all that does is train you to jump through hoops, it doesn’t say anything about how to be a good person. Maybe philosophy does, but I recall whatever philosophy courses offered were almost all optional, not required. Even then, just because you’d lead a horse to water, doesn’t mean he’s going to drink. And by the time you get to college, many students have a semi-cynical view on all the hoop jumping. In one ear, hold on to it long enough for the tests, out the other. And I’ve heard the current generation, they just outright haggle for grades now, they’re not even bothering to jump through the hoops at all.
In any case, my money is on the side that is more sane, that isn’t earnestly saying those kinds of ridiculous things. At some point, paying attention to reality means you survive and the ones that don’t, die.
I will just point out one thing in the article: the piece where the author complains that their enemy’s propaganda is basketball sized and their own propaganda is volleyball sized. And feels compelled to moan and shriek that the other side’s is bigger!!! Not being a jock, they look roughly the same size to me… which makes me think…
The Democrats are in mental meltdown because the Republicans learned all the Dem’s dirty tricks and have just gotten better at them. No attempt to reflect on whether it is moral to use propaganda; or to consider if it is pragmatic to put some limits on the propaganda that is or isn’t allowed in the playing field. This is a pure tantrum thrown at the sight of anything resembling FAIR competition.
This is disgusting beyond comprehension to me. It is exactly like a heavy weight boxer who chess-bits about having to fight ADULTS from now on. If you are reading this and you are one of those people… please accept my mocking contempt. 🙂
I’m increasingly concerned by the independent news I follow about the escalation of long-range weapons with Russia and Ukraine/US/UK. To connect this with your article, the mainstream news has little about it and is focused on tearing down Trump – you literally have to search for it. But they do mention the new long-range hypersonic missile Russia is “testing” if you search hard enough.
Some I’ve been following see this as a direct warning to the UK and US. These new missiles, Oreshnik, are nuclear capable and we’re basically at war with Russia, heading toward nuclear domination that could end Terribly. Further, that this may have to do with deep state wars with the tectonic changes going on and is no accident – the last couple of minutes. Either way its playing with fire.
Does anyone have any more (or different) info on this? I’ve been hearing about this all week, but this morning’s talk was especially bleak.
Here’s the link to which I refer:
https://youtu.be/gHdmVnfihss?si=fii7xMaqIC-JC7yz
As a Massachusetts voter I can add some information about Question 5, the Massachusetts ballot initiative to increase the minimum wage of tipped restaurant workers.
One key (but not entirely decisive, because see below) point is that tipped restaurant workers already earn at least the MA minimum wage of $15/hr. There is a minimum hourly wage of an admittedly quite low $6.75/hr, but if that plus a worker’s tips received (or share of pooled tips) doesn’t reach $15/hr the employer must pay the difference. The provisions of Question 5 gradually increase (over a five year period) the minimum hourly wage while not changing that rule, so if tips stayed the same after passage, some of those workers, at first the ones who are already pulling at least $8.25/hr in tips, would start earning more.
It’s worth considering that wage theft, in the form of failing to pay that required difference (along with crooked tip pooling) are real problems. The employees’ recourse is to file complaints, try to document them, wait for possible action, and risk retaliation. The ballot measure would have made it harder to cheat employees that way. Maybe. Legislative action directly addressing wage theft might be a better solution, given that it’s a problem in many other industries too.
On the other hand, the measure contained another provision that allows restaurants who do pay an hourly wage of at least the state minimum wage to start pooling tips among all employees instead of just the tipped workers, which is not currently legal. Note that under the measure, at the end of the five year period, that would be all restaurants. It’s not hard to imagine that provision becoming a bookkeeping black hole that essentially makes most of the actual servers’ tips disappear.
Another concern is that customers who had only a marginal understanding of the measure would assume that workers were now being paid much more, and would tip far less. Naturally, that was especially a concern for servers who are already making far more than minimum wage, primarily in tips.
Many of the mid-market restaurants in town (there are no Michelin stars here) had “Don’t Take Away Our Tips; Vote No on 5” signs posted. I wasn’t sure, though, whether or not their staffs actually agreed with that, or management had posted them while the employees gritted their teeth. Since I eat out so rarely (not once during the months prior to the vote) I couldn’t get a reliable enough idea of how servers statewide felt about it, so I didn’t vote either way for that ballot question.
In any case, “voters in ‘blue’ Massachusetts…. voted comprehensively against raising minimum wage rates” [per Scotlyn #168] is a misleading oversimplification of MA Question 5 and its results.
@ Siliconguy–
“Research on that on the internet keeps turning up the axiom the cities have a more diverse culture and are therefore more liberal. That’s the dictionary definition of liberal, easy going and accepting of others. It does not explain why cities are so determined to have an all powerful State that controls every aspect of your existence.”
Oh, but it does. It just requires a discussion about the nature of culture that no one is willing to have.
We’re used to thinking about culture in terms of traditions, clothing styles, music, food, and all the other obvious, external markers . But arguably these are the least important aspects of culture. Anyone can join a religion, learn to cook a certain type of food, or listen to certain types of music. You can do this even if the culture that originates it doesn’t want you to. If I wanted to, I could spend my evening conducting a Lakota shamanic ceremony and then making a cajun jambalaya before taking in a Bollywood film.
But there is another aspect of culture that nobody talks about, and that people very often don’t even notice. Every culture is a shared, agreed-upon, but unwritten and unspoken set of *rules.* What is the right way to greet a stranger? How close should you stand to someone when you’re talking? How much should you tip for good service? What about bad service? How should men and women who aren’t family members interact with one another? What’s the best way to stand in line for a movie or a bus? When you go into business, is it okay to undercut others in the same field to try to drive them under, or do you try to match your prices to theirs, to leave enough for everybody?
All of these and countless others form a body of rules that every member of a culture takes in from their family and peers. And– here is the real kicker– most of it is learned unconsciously, and very often it’s all learned in childhood, before we even begin to form longterm memories.
When you have a diverse society that’s actually diverse– meaning three houses on the same block or three apartments in the same building might host three different cultures– you have no way of knowing that everyone is following the same rules. Actually it’s impossible to know this, and– here’s another part of the problem– some cultures’ rules are totally incompatible with others.
The result of a situation like that is that you have to *write the rules down,* and you *need someone to enforce them.* And the more diversity you get, the more rules you have to write down, and the more enforcement you need.
One culture may find it acceptable to undercut business rivals at every opportunity. A lot of people lose their livelihoods, and that drives a demand for regulation.
One culture may find it totally acceptable to refuse to tip even for good service, and now you need to mandatory gratuity or minimum wage laws for service providers.
One culture may find it totally acceptable to “cat call” women in the street, while another culture has a rule that women should become upset if men admit to finding them attractive. The incompatibility is obvious.
All of this is happening at a level of which most people are unconscious at the best of times, and that now has been openly banned from discussion in many parts of our society. And so liberal cities demand, as you say, an ever more powerful State to determine every aspect of their lives. They do this because they need it– having decided that Diversity is Good and that even the old system of neighborhood communities for different ethnic groups is unacceptable, it’s the only possible way they can govern themselves. Everything needs to be written down and enforced by the government, the schools, HR departments and anyone else available. And because they’ve prohibited themselves from understanding *why* they need this level of government control, they assume that everyone must need it– even longstanding, culturally homogenous communities hundreds or thousands of miles away.
In the global south we are happy, Trump’s election will only accelerate the decline of the US empire.
Democrats are better than right-wing populists at plundering the wealth of the rest of the world. Despite their rant to their audience, the truth is that right-wing populists have the same problem as Democrats: they don’t know how to treat others. Others don’t exist. Just as the conditions to improve the lives of Americans don’t exist either. All that wealth is in the elite (of which Trump and Musk are part) and abroad.
By the way, I find it very funny that you say that Democrats are left-wing. Outside the empire we see this as a battle between the center-right and the far-right. Because your state is supposed to have killed all the leftists decades ago with McCarthyism and the red terror. xD
edit: I recommend you watch the gift they showed on Russian public TV, which is directly controlled by the Kremlin. Those photos of Melania look great.
Yes, that is the opinion we have not only of progressive Democrats, but also of all Americans.
Dear JMG,
Condolences on your loss. I am sure there are many other readers amazed at how you keep this blog so regularly maintained in addition to your other work in the difficult times you have experienced this year.
@Robert Mathiesen
Hey mate, thought you might find this amusing.
“Today’s Democrat Party is no longer the party of the little guy or the anti-war party. Democrats are the party of the academic administrator of Brown University.” — WSJ’s Peggy Noonan, during an interview on MSNBC this week.
Jez
I am reminded of an essay written by an astute political observer (I know, a rare bird these days) in late 2015 that Trump is America’s first anti-hero president. It was made after some gala attended by His Orangeness either shortly before or shortly after his successful election. Trump made a point to the elite at this gala that he knows they are polite to his face and happily stay in his luxurious hotels but behind his back they call him a boor. Well – the ‘boor’ is back and thank the gods for that! 😊
But, like you, I see this recent election as much more than about Trump or Harris or even the Donkeys or the Elephants – and I like the ‘very deep waters’ that you present to us –especially the twisted corrupted version of New Thought that was pushed so heavily by the self-proclaimed ‘good, enlightened people’ and ‘history’s actors’ from the 1980s onward. Most of the world is sick and tired of the unipolar world order; let us hope that the new crew soon to be at the helm of the ship ‘USS America’ will have the wisdom to change their course to the multipolar world and embrace the Century of the Other ‘cuz one way or another the Century of the Other is a-coming! And may the ‘rich men north of Richmond’ be taken out to the curb like last week’s garbage.
@Bofur, I fully agree with you regarding the ‘energy’ in Canada. Though I felt significant improvements in the overall energy as soon as The Orange One got shot in the ear and shortly before the latest US election, it was like the difference between being smothered by 37 blankets and being smothered by 35 blankets. As for the (possibly serious) vows made by Democrats to move to the Leftist Paradise of Canada, I can’t resist sharing a brief humorous video on the subject (no guessing as to which Canadian neighbour I more closely resemble!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXHtKqZVzLA. I join you in the hope that things will lighten up in the Great White North sometime soon; we sure could use it!
@ JMG– I was pretty shocked that I’d missed it too. For what it’s worth, the genesis of the realization was as follows:
I was thinking about what the Neoplatonists would make of a situation like this. We all know that they took their political ideas from Plato, and that he seemed to see the people precisely as a matter to be formed, but is that really so?
In Neoplatonic thought, “Nature” is one of the levels of being, above Matter and below Soul. A few nights ago I was reading Thomas Taylor’s dissertation on Aristotle, and he describes the difference between the natural and the artificial in the following way: The nature of a tree is shown by the fact that, if cut it down and plant it in the ground, it will produce another tree. But if you cut it down, make a bed out of it, and then chop up the bed and plant that in the ground, it won’t produce another bed. If it produces anything, it will also (supposing the wood had a seed embedded in it, say) produce a tree. Therefore, the tree is natural, a product of Nature, but the bed is artificial, a product of Art.
And so we see the problem, which is precisely that societies are like trees, not like beds. They aren’t built like beds, but they grow like trees. And so an attempt to reform a society has to resemble medicine, not mechanics.
Of course, that leads to yet another problem… because our medicine has also become disastrous, precisely because it treats the body as though it didn’t have a nature of its own, but was an artefact like a bed, or a “biological robot.”
So what is it, then, that unites the disastrous approaches both of our medicine and our politics? Clearly it’s precisely the denial of Nature, which begins with the attack on occultism and the very idea of the life force that you’ve discussed here more than once. And this is why none of our political systems work. To solve a chronic social problem by throwing bureacracy at its symptoms is identical to solving a chronic health problem by throwing pills at its symptoms. To solve it instead with “revolution” is like murdering the patient and replacing him with a robot. And then we have “Traditionalism,” which is an attempt, once everyone has gotten sick of the robot, to dig up the corpse of the patient, dress it in old-fashioned clothing, and pretend that it’s still alive. None of this works, but it’s what we’re stuck with until we can expand our thinking to include whole systems and the reality of both Life and Nature.
Hi John Michael,
Please accept my sympathy and condolences for the loss of your father. From details you’ve mentioned over the years, I got the impression that he was something of a difficult bloke, and hope that he finds peace. You’ve had a rough year, and I’m impressed with your stoicism. Your voice is very much appreciated here, as well as in other parts of the world. Mate, remember to look after yourself during this time of trials. Sending you some energy, there’s plenty of it down here being spring and stuff. 🙂
Hey, you thought that nobody would notice the Rocky and Bullwinkle reference… Dunno about you, but I learned far more about the internal narrative workings of fairy tales from that show, than anywhere else before, or since!
There was a bit of unintended irony in pointing out that the cover art for Harry Potter put me off the book series (never watched the films either), then making claims about people lacking an open mind. 🙂 Just to clarify, I wasn’t dissing the series, I was merely making the assertion that symbols are a powerful thing, and the cover art very much suggested the series demographic, and I was not to be found in there. For all I know, the series may have been great, but my gut feeling suggested otherwise, so I went with that.
Cheers
Chris
John Michael Greer,
My deep condolences for your loss. I know that what you have learned and practiced all these years will help you through this 1-2 punch, but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone
Jessica
Steve T; that’s an interesting take on the urban situation. Basically it’s high trust vs low trust societies. So in town they are using a huge pile of regulations to fill in for the fact not everyone is on the wavelength by acculturation. Plus living cheek by jowl naturally cuts down on your freedom of action anyway. Add on the one size fits all tendencies of those who want a single set of rules for all situations out of a misplaced sense of fairness (even though there are far too many situations to even begin to build the flow chart), add in the usual control junkies attracted to government and there you are.
An hour ago I ran across the same general idea in a more inflammatory article. Warning, Denninger doesn’t care who he offends,
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=252371
The other thought that flows from that is that the city dwellers are afraid, which has been on my mind for awhile. It’s not just the bombardment of fear from the mass media desperate going for audiences to sell to the advertisers, but they literally don’t trust the neighbors. At least subconsciously they also know how brittle city life is. More fear.
Keep the fear high enough for long enough and they’ll happily surrender their right if only the warlord will the fear stop.
“Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.” — Quote by Sallust. 86-34 BC.
I’m just glad that this election cycle is finally over. No more attack ads on TV or the radio. I’ve seen the reports on the many meltdowns going on among some Harris supporters, some of who are posting video rants on YouTube. I fear for their mental health. Others have figured out creative ways to use these videos. Over at Andre Antunes’ channel he’s turned mental breakdowns into metal riffs.
ELECTION MELTDOWNS GO METAL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mHST4Q4kTU
How would that sound on your local rock station? Maybe it could be recorded by “Voltron of Sanity”!
Joy Marie
I went down to our neighborhood coffee clutch this morning to meet a neighbor to get my handheld radios programmed ( HAM and MURS) and stayed to have a cup.
Yes, the anti-Trumps are wanting to live in fear. The table that had an open seat had 4 other older woman and one guy who lives at the Bahai center up the road. The one woman told me that the winning party wants to take away the vote from Women. Another was worried, even though she is herself retired, about Federal layoffs. A third was worried about Florida having a 6 week abortion ban and how unfair it was, what if the woman didnt know she was pregnant until after 6 weeks ? I pointed out that women were a larger proportion of voting age population and that the various states will figure out what they want and why all the drama about other areas, shouldnt they do what they want ? Bahai guy of course doesnt believe in state or federal level control as we are all one people and we should have an international world level set of rules…. all in all, quite unsettling, I quickly finished my cup and escaped home. Anyway, these women somehow believe that horrible things could happen some of which dont seem to make sense, like why would she think that women could lose their voice and not be able to vote and why does she think that the new vice president wants this ? There are tons of women getting high position jobs in this administration. These also believe that president Trump is a convicted rapist, that COVID shots work, that we didnt go far enough during COVID in terms of restrictions on the unVAxxed, etc…..
There is one thing that bothers me about the election. The collapse in viewership of the left-wing media and the large bump in viewership of right-wing media happened after the election. I would have expected this to happen the other way around: people lose trust in CNN and MSNBC and then vote for Trump out of disgust.
As it is, it seems an awful lot like a significant portion of the American public suddenly changed their entire political worldview overnight to fit the one they now perceive as popular. That’s unsettling to me despite my approving of the direction of the shift.
Joy Marie,
Thanks for posting that YouTube video. I saw that the other day and had a great belly laugh!
“Do you really hate me that much??!!”
🙂
Atmospheric River,
Kinda mind-boggling isn’t it? That level of detachment from reality. That anyone could still think the COVID response should have been even more draconian than it was is hard for me to understand. I wore a mask for a total of about 3 hours through the whole business, and that’s only because I had to go into a hospital repeatedly for my wife, and they forced me to wear it if I wanted to see her. Of course, I probably killed your friend’s grandmother with my cavalier behavior…Wow.
My condolences, JMG.
Dear Mr Greer
I don’t like Trump, I don’t like his manner and the way he behaves. I am worried about what will happen with Israel and Iran under Trump and and that large scale deportation of illegal immigrants will lead to inhumanity. However, when it was announced that RFK was going to head HHS I had the political equivalent of an orgasm. The things that RFK is proposing to do is the most progressive, liberal, left wing, green thing to happen in the last 50 years. He is the one man who can expose the murderous scandal of big Pharma and do something about big food. Trump might also stop the war in Ukraine and prevent a potential third world war.
I still think Trump and Musk etc are delusional about may things like energy.. I remember him in some clip saying something along the lines of deal with big Pharma and big food RFK, but leave the oil alone, we’ve got more oil than Saudi Arabia. So I don’t think we are seeing a return to sanity, but compared to the absolutely insane levels of insanity we have had in the last 20 years, we are seeing insanity return to a more normal level. The election of Trump will not stop decline, but with RFK and what Trump might do In Ukraine he might help to cushion that decline. It could prevent a civil war in America and all the horror that will entail.
And there is another more important point. The day after Brexit you said in the comments section that Brexit is
“quite possibly a significant turning point in modern history, and one that might just enable the industrial world to avoid, or at least postpone the lethal disconnect between the dominant elite and the internal proletariat which Arnold Toynbee warned so presciently a century ago.”
If there is one thing I have learnt in the last 14 years is the importance of that disconnect between the internal proletariat has in bringing down civilisations. Trumps first election might not have happened if it wasn’t for the influence of Brexit. I am so glad of the choice I made during that referendum.
Other Owen,
Yeah, can you imagine telling someone in 1970, when gold was under $40/oz, that one day it would be almost $3000/oz and…people would still be not only successfully selling it, but still buying it at that price?? Even without losing control of the market gold has realized an 8%+ compounded annual return since 2000. Everyone talks about gold being a slow game, but how many investment vehicles can make that same claim?
But yes, I also expect it to jump suddenly at some point, probably in the next year or two. Potentially a lot more than $3000. And the whole point of that might be to bring in the privately held gold from the citizenry, just like FDR did in 1933. Price it high enough and you can have at least some of mine, too! Gold is what humans have always turned to to balance the books…
Cheers.
@Slithy, it’s possible to sense what happened from far away. Something has shifted in your country. Try watching a video of Kamala during the election cycle, from just a few weeks ago. It now seem as a very old thing, something from ages past – it obviously isn’t, but it feels that way – and Kamala herself, far from seeing like a presidential figure, seems like a poor clueless hap, put in a position she was clearly unfit to occupy. Does that makes sense to you?
@Bogatyr thanks for your comments, I will tjink about what you said.
This isn’t really a good time for me to respond to comments, but I wanted to mention something — or rather two things.
The first is that I’ve received a steady stream of attempted comments by Democrats (presumably) who’ve never posted here before, and who want to criticize Trump here. That’s fine, but the great majority of them don’t seem to be able to do it without going immediately to personal insults aimed at me or the members of the commentariat. I don’t permit that here. If you want to join the conversation, you’re welcome to do so, but that requires you to join the conversation, not just fling your hatred and rage at the other participants and stomp away.
Second, just today I’ve had a small flurry of comments trying to insert topics irrelevant to the subject of the post. That’s also not permitted here, except in certain specific contexts — and yes, I get to choose those. (My blog, my rules.) Any attempt at forum sliding, which is the technical term for this sort of misbehavior, will be deleted.
Thank you, the rest of you, for keeping a lively conversation about a controversial topic lively, courteous, and on topic. More later. — JMG
Slithy Toves,
IDK, haven’t the MSM lost a lot of viewership since COVID?
JMG, I figured you felt that way… I remember how you wrote about the imaginary newspaper in Lakeland and I detected a sense of yearning… Or maybe that was just me projecting.
Are you familiar with Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions”? I only heard of it recently, despite it being published in 1987 (later revised in 2008). I wish I’d read it 30 years ago, I might not be bald from scratching my head in puzzlement over why people behave the way they do and why the vast majority of people believe that their own peculiar beliefs are inevitably the only correct ways of being.
BTW, for anyone who hasn’t read it, it’s very detailed in support of his thesis, but can be quickly summarized in the first and last few paragraphs of each chapter.
Jasmine, very well said!
My bumper sticker for this election was:
Kennedy 2024!
….fine…Trump.
For the first time in my 50 years or so I have a positive attitude about potential top-down solutions unfolding from the White House. Not from Trump, but from some of the people around him. Notably RFK, Jr. Day one he’s promised to release the nation from the expensive and extremely harmful fluoride requirement in municipal water supplies. I’m absolutely stoked about that. And that’s just day one. I’ve already spoken with a member of our local water board and he’s promised to get that ball rolling ASAP. I’m also encouraged to see Florida and Arkansas leading that particular charge two months in advance of the actual directive.
Thanks again for your comment!
Regarding Democrat rhetoric, it may amuse you to learn that there is a Reddit community for liberal women, where they fantasize about being raped and sexually abused by MAGA dudes:
https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckingFascists/?rdt=38475
It has over 100,000 members!
Chaquin,
“To both left and right wing people who love apocalyptic scenaries for their heroic fantasies, we could say to them…Be careful with that you desire!”
I was just thinking that the Left in our country is finally getting all that Justice they’ve been asking for!
How ’bout a clean sweep by Team Populist?
@Jez (#293):
Well, Peggy Noonan certainly got that right! And it seems to go for the large majority of the faculty and for many students, too.
I recall your description of a Lakeland newspaper and it seemed to be written with longing… or maybe that was just me?
This essay made me think of the core ideas from two books, the first, “A Conflict of Visions” by Thomas Sowell, and the second, “Lila” by Robert Pirsig, both of which looked at the way society is in tension between those who push for change and those who resist.
According to my reading of this essay, we seem to be in a ten-to-fifteen year social and political earthquake, when the stresses building up are relieved, and there will be some damage from the process.
Right now, we in the Anglosphere have been largely ruled by a smug “progressive” Clerisy who not only subscribe to what Sowell called the unconstrained vision of humanity, but are furthermore lost in the abstract barbarism of reflection that has lost touch with hard reality. Not just a tendency to a more humane liberalism of Murrow’s era that seeks to gently move us in a direction to remove arbitrary restraints on personal growth and general freedom, but an ungoverned Social Justice movement that is pushing a collection of social Motte and Bailey fallacies while ossifying around certain economic policies and pseudo-religious ideas about technology that have left The West increasingly brittle.
I am pretty sure that the Fairness Doctrine and the FCC requirement to provide news, even at a loss, were removed in the certainty that, of course people would understand the value of such behaviour, and of course they would continue them vide any legal requirements because, well, it is obvious people will do the right thing, even at a cost (to them, of course, not to us). Just as in the same way of thinking that presumes people will wholly accept a collection of social justice fallacies, such as the idea of borders are unnecessary (c.f. John Lennon) because, fundamentally, all people are the same deep down, therefore the differences don’t matter, they will naturally adopt the correct behaviours and attitudes (ours, of course).
Trump and the rise of so many other populists seems to be the inevitable earthquake that is needed to relieve that built-up tension. If their cobbled-together collection of gripes don’t seem to make sense, it’s because they are on the one hand restraining some things that definitely need to be restrained while breaking that which needs to be broken.
It is too bad that the voices of reasonable change have long been chased into an obscure corner of the political arena.
Matt Taibbi coined a word that expresses the world’s rich people who don’t give a crap whether people-without-money live or die:
Wealthistan
This term is a keeper.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🇹🇲
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
John, I’m sorry for having bothered you with my off topic questions. Ugo Bardi can wait some weeks…
Good post, JMG. I doubt if I could share it with my US government service brother and his partner, though. They still watch conventional media and believe much of what they hear.
Response to Anna who says:
#86 November 20, 2024 at 6:58 pm “They will not usher a revolution or defeat the bureaucratic state, because they benefit from the status quo as much as the Democratic elite.”
Sadly, I do expect your comment to be largely true. It may possibly take something quite catastrophic to change the situation. But I have hopes for some positive changes, and more to come–simply because of the mood of the electorate.
Hi JMG,
I’m sorry for your loss. Please accept my sincere condolences.
Kind regards,
#188 Do you really think the simple matter of dying will be enough to stop them from being the centre of attention for many years after 2045?
Dear John Michael,
I am so sorry to read about the loss of your father. Prayers and blessings sent to you and your family. Be well.
For Grover;
“MSNBC Viewership Craters 38%, CNN 27%, While Fox News Audience Jumps 41% Post-Election”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/msnbc-viewership-craters-38-cnn-000049984.html
Also, from
https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/week-of-september-30-2024-evening-news-ratings/
While the first week of October marks the high stakes homestretch of the 2024 presidential election, all three evening news broadcasts experienced double-digit drops in total viewers and the advertiser-favored Adults 25-54 demo.
The media are fighting back with their staple, FEAR!
“Researchers say they have identified a previously unknown, potentially toxic chemical in the treated drinking water consumed by millions of Americans.
Chloronitramide anion is a byproduct of the decomposition of chloramine, which is used by treatment plants to disinfect drinking water and kill diseases like cholera and typhoid fever.
After eluding them for years, researchers reported in the journal Science this week that they detected the “mystery” anion in 40 drinking water samples from 10 US systems that use chloramines. More than 113 million Americans drink chloraminated water.”
Just search for chloronitramide, you’ll find plenty of noise about it. Remember, only bottled water is guaranteed to be safe! (That’s sarcasm.)
Like others here, I am perplexed at the mainstream shock at Trump’s landslide. I saw it coming from Trump’s fist in the air moment and predicted it then. Said the same thing a few days before the election. I also felt that energy lift on the day after the election others mentioned.
It may be interesting to note that the illegal immigration issue now echoes the illegal immigration of the 19th century – where white settlers illegally came in such numbers onto native American land that they could not be deported with a mass force of arms and they were so productive in farming, ranching and advancing hunting, timber and mineral interests that the federal government decided to keep them.
I’ll float this idea – America stopped state building. State building may be a good way forward. The five nations of the Oklahoma reservation put forth a state called Sequoyah in 1905 that the whites rejected, but not before retitling the democratic procedures they worked out into the Oklahoma state constitution. On the flip side there are a number of tribes in reservations at the four way point of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona – that could be recognized as a state. I bring these up because with these two states that may make Puerto Rico’s statehood more palatable to those hyper concerned with the electoral political implications of just Puerto Rico. Offered as food for thought – unlike some here I see a renewed state building on the north American continent rather than a crack-up – if we could ever get out of the state building politics of other nations like Israel, Ru-Ukraine, etc.
>The other thought that flows from that is that the city dwellers are afraid
1) City dwellers have a – different – relationship with the state. Everything and everyone is more interdependent in the city. That induces a certain amount of – passitivty? You don’t do things for yourself, you stick to your lane and get someone else to do it for you. Paw your phone. There was a youtube video where this guy was interviewing some Yorkshire guy living in Brittany off the grid and he compared cities to hog sheds. I don’t think he’s completely wrong with that comparison.
2) There’s nothing really dangerous in the city either. You can get into real trouble out in the country if you’re not careful, in a way that really forces you to think about where you are and what you are doing. Or you can watch _Clarkson’s Farm_ and see many many examples of what happens if you DON’T think about where you are and what you are doing :/ That seems to be missing in a city environment. So the first real danger people encounter in the city and they freakout. I’d also claim that it’s that consequence-free environment that breeds screaming bluehairs. It’s a prerequisite, one of them.
>However, when it was announced that RFK was going to head HHS I had the political equivalent of an orgasm.
I don’t think you’ll ever see me have one of those but I will say before you can think about MAGA, MAHA is a prerequisite for several reasons. At the very least and this is something I remember saying 20+ years ago – just get rid of the FDA, they don’t do anything, no sense of security is better than a false sense of security.
It does make me a little bit happy to see the world catching up to things I was saying a while ago. And the opposition to these things – what, you support making people sick and mediocre, instead of healthy and great? You get the feeling at this point “I’m agin it!” is the summary of their thinking.
On people seeming to be going crazy: “—-Half of what we call madness is just some poor slob dealing with pain by a strategy that annoys the people around him” – Lois McMaster Bujold.
For what it’s worth.
My condolences, JMG.
Again, for what its worth: David Kaiser.
http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-usa-2025-germany-1933.html
His thesis: “Well, Trump isn’t Hitler,” though he draws a good many parallels between 1933 and now.
“Praising with faint damns?”
@Slithy:
In re: “[I]t seems an awful lot like a significant portion of the American public suddenly changed their entire political worldview overnight to fit the one they now perceive as popular. ”
My take on this is slightly different. First, I think that the decisive results of the election have made it comfortable for people to say what they have always thought, but were afraid to say out loud.
Second, as for the drop in left-wing media viewership, I have an explanation for that as well. The only reason I have read any legacy media for many years was NOT to “understand what was going on.” Much like the denizens of the defunct USSR used to read Pravda to know what the “official Party line” was, I, too read legacy media to know that the ruling classes expected me to believe and think, so that I would be able to plan ahead and figure out how to deal with it.
Now that the Emperor’s pants have been pulled down, I no longer feel required to care what the legacy media says. Their power has evaporated, and what they say no longer matters as much as it did. So, I can afford to ignore it.
I suspect that a lot of other people are reacting in the same way. That would explain the anomalies you see.
@Chuaquin #239, I’m sorry but not surprised to hear the same thing is also happening in your country. Of course, as you point out, politicians exploiting either side of such divides is nothing new. What I’m looking for is whether there are causes of the phenomena besides deliberate propaganda and rabble-rousing. It’s unlikely that the people who are benefitting from the polarization are going to stop doing it, after all. But there may be other causes contributing, that can be resisted.
@bofur #244, Thank you! Yes, I agree. I hope your cutting and bed-building is going safely and well. Interesting, how large the overlap is between people who think flexibly and charitably that way, and those who engage hands-on with nature.
@all, regarding JMG #307: ” If you want to join the conversation, you’re welcome to do so, but that requires you to join the conversation, not just fling your hatred and rage at the other participants and stomp away.” How disappointing, though hardly surprising. Perhaps one small way we can repay our host for the labor of creating and maintaining this venue is to follow this same injunction, when we’re elsewhere in less congenial surroundings. No doubt most or all of you already do, but I for one can use a reminder sometimes.
Logan Jones – Re: #331. Reddit. I am not a reddit user, but assume that it’s as anonymous as most crowd-sourced sites. So, how do you know that it is what it claims to be, and is not actually men writing with female personas, posing as Democratic-party women fantasizing about MAGA men?
I have come to regard the authenticity of ALL sorts of “romance writing” with deep suspicion. Do female authors just write what they think male publishers will promote, regardless of how in conforms to their own perspective? Do gay men assume that heterosexual relationships are built on the same emotions as gay relationships, and that they can write in a woman’s voice because they have sex with men, too? (I doubt it, very much!)
Thank you to everyone, you’ve given me much to think about.
I do have two questions, though. that jump out.
1) Most of us seem to have an issue with billionaires running the government. Why, then, are we so happy to be led by Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, and other technocrats?
2) And if Project 2025 is not Trump’s platform, can anyone explain why he keeps hiring the people behind it?
Patricia Matthews @ 258. the Gaetz announcement was made about 2 hours after the news of arrest warrants being issued for the PM and former Defense minister if Israel appeared. By an amazing coincidence. The Gaetz announcement knocked the earlier news off the (virtual) front page. Coincidence, or down payment on what Trump owes Miriam Edelman?
Who votes for hardship? Grifters who expect to profit from chaos.
JMG, maybe you’ve written about this already, but I think that one big reason that Trump is feared and hated by the oligarch class and their Blobalist clerisy is not only because he’s tending to, and some would day exploiting, a long untended niche in the political ecology, but because he’s wealthy and can stand on his own two feet.
I had the impression that while Bill Clinton followed the script and deregulated Wall Street and enacted its wish list, while he was prez he was looked down on by those he served. Even if he was an accomplished scholar, he was after all White trash, a hillbilly horndog whose predispositions got him into terrible trouble and who had previously unknown half-siblings surface about every other week. Ok yes I’m exaggerating.
I think that the point one percent only started to trust Bill when he started taking their money hand over fist by giving them private speeches at a quarter million a pop if I remember right. So now never mind his prior follies, this was a man with his priorities straight, you know, someone you can trust.
I don’t know if it was deliberate, or if it was an unspoken understanding on Wall Street, but I think these speeches were like passing the hat for a man, who, while he wasn’t up to their exacting standards, was nonetheless a faithful servant who did them a very valuable service. And a quarter million in those environs is bus fare.
It could have been as plain a message as can be to future political aspirants, follow the rules, do what you’re told, and you too can get obscenely rich. You can come to Washington poor, but there’s no reason you have to leave it poor.
“2) There’s nothing really dangerous in the city either. You can get into real trouble out in the country if you’re not careful, in a way that really forces you to think about where you are and what you are doing. ”
I was about to object strenuously about that, but then I realized I’ve probably internalized the risks of living here so well I don’t see them. In cities, between the people and the traffic I do not feel anywhere as comfortable.
There is also the related point that I have the toolset to deal with most of the risks or potential risks. Spare food, chainsaw, full propane tanks, a machete that would land me an instant prison term in England, a full tool box, torches, a welder, even a sewing machine. The neighbors have tractors.
I did evaluate setting up a bugout bag once, but came to the conclusion it wasn’t worth it, I’m better off staying put. The exception is one of the volcanoes lights off but that would give plenty of warning to pack. And what would I pack? The camper, a self contained tiny home. Go north if Rainier blows, south if Granite Peak lights up. (Granite peak is west of Lake Chelan.)
I hope some of the proposed areas realy can be dealt with as I see them as very interconnected. I wrote a couple weeks ago that I was beginning to wonder if our young people are ( or are becoming) incapable of doing the work we are importing workers to do — not just wont, or need training, but could they be becoming unable to
Im thinking of the interconnections needed, yes, start stopping the illegal unrestricted immigrations — but to keep it that way we need other changes
We need MAHA, make America Healthy, we need citizens healthy enough to be able to work physical jobs. The whole current set of guidelines are a joke as the provided foods may be whole wheat, but full of additives, and boring, and only a short time to eat it. So they cant finish. who wants to eat carrot sticks and prepackaged apple slices every day ? They get 1% fat sugared and flavored chocolate milk.
We need to get rid of the Federal Department of Education and to let State and Local Government do more than teach to the test ( I actually looked at an Oregon School district site and the testing page, and clicked on “example test questions” third grade, wish I had wrote it down. But, that multiple choice question did not make sense to me or my daughter, and the possible answers were not clear. We should not be doing this to our Children. Not to mention that earbuds to connect to a computer are first on the list of required school supply’s starting from the youngest ages) And, besides the 3R’s, they need, somewhere, at school or at home, to be able to manipulate objects, do things with their hands, get that coordination so they can do hands on jobs. We need to bring shop classes back to campus. When I was in high school, we had auto shop 1, 2, 3 and maybe 4, auto body repair 1, 2,3 ( a young person could be trained by graduation with 3 or 4 years, all while taking their other basic classes), electronics shop, 1, 2,3, drafting, wood shop, metal shop, plastic fabrication at all levels, cooking, sewing, as well as various art, music, sports, business math, and all regular academic classes and this was common. We even had most of that in Junior high, so starting in 7th grade. In my county, there is one campus with auto shop, the other students have to have a way to get there, and there is a waiting list, the other shop classes have the same issues.
Companies need to not have the choice of being able to hire temporary Work permitted immigrants, they need to go ahead and have career fairs at the high schools and tell the young people what they have to offer, which means meat packing wages need to go back to what they used to be ( inflation adjusted of course, but that used to be very well paying union jobs, with the line speed slow enough to not be dangerous). They can tell them the wage will be x, and we will train you, and sell the location, a town where home prices are acheivable on the salaries we pay, with a nice Junior college, sponsered by Tyson foods or what have you, were you can take part time classes before your swing shift, etc…..
So, we can only hope, but having a population that isnt all going to type 2 diabetes and obesity, with the ability to use their hands if they want to, the ability to think spatially, etc… the native population needs to transition to some real work and not government managerial jobs ” overseeing” it all ! That is not sustainable. And we are too broke for it
During this election, it dawned on me, where part of the surge or swing in polls comes from. It’s not all of it, but a huge number of people, perhaps one in three or four, are only interested in it like a football game or betting pool. They alternate between a desire to be flattered and a desire to be flattered by picking a winner. They can’t figure out what the issues are and why they matter. These are many of the moderates, or rather, they blend in as moderates. Of course, everyone assumes they can think. Here is Roger Scruton explaining why intellectual people today tend to the Left. He has a great point. https://youtu.be/FYo4KMhUx9c?si=67t2yOJMQML3UNcO. I can’t help but think of the burkean principle, never without strongest necessity, disturb what is at rest. We are in wild times.
The Kubler-Ross five stages of grief:
1 denial
2 anger
3 bargaining
4 despair
5 acceptance
Michael Tomasky had this in his New Republic article:
“If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.”
Which makes me think that poor Mr. Tomasky and his compatriots in the PMC (Professional Managment Class) are in stage one, denial. Rich liberals aren’t the protagonist, history doesn’t arc toward them, their philosophy isn’t infallible. It’s not even very popular with anyone outside the PMC. They were soundly defeated in an open election where they deployed every arrow in the establishment’s quiver against the bad orange man, overwhelmingly favorable media coverage for VP Plan B and overwhelmingly hostile coverage of Orange Julius, widespread censorship of misinformation, tons of celebrity endorsements, lawfare, lone gunmen, etc. And Michael Tomasky is lamenting that the situation could have been prevented if only the only people with agency had shown some agency and done what they were told to do.
It takes some serious devotion to maintain that level of cognitive dissonance while writing a lucid argument. It’s also interesting that he never addresses what “action” could be taken by the rich liberals. Probably because they did, in fact, take some unprecedented actions and failed. The way that I see it, this is a classic emotional self defense mechanism, denial.
On a related note, I think that we need a new term for NPCs (Non Player Characters) who believe that they are the protagonists, something like The NPC Agency Fallacy. The irony is just too rich to let this one go by without a suitably derisive appellation. The “I support the current thing” meme is good, but it needs another layer of “because I uncritically internalize everything the MSM tells me and I’m the only critical thinker smart enough to have agency.” We’ve got some time to come up with something good, the century of the other is just getting started.
I was fascinated by an article on the independent candidate leading Romania’s presidential election. In particular this bit:
‘Georgescu lacks an agenda, Andrei said, and has a vague and populist manifesto with positions that are “beyond the normal discourse.” His stances include supporting Romanian farmers, reducing dependency on imports, and ramping up energy and food production.’
I suspect what they consider ‘beyond the normal discourse’ is probably what dominates the man-on-the-street’s discourse!
>have come to regard the authenticity of ALL sorts of “romance writing” with deep suspicion.
You’re basically gravitating towards the Dead Internet Theory. Which I think may be a bit overblown but isn’t completely wrong either.
Eva #331
I’m not happy about either of those things; however, I have my own priorities re what I want to see this country do, policies I’d like to see adopted, and changes I’d like made. The policy platform I want to see would not attract sufficient support at this time to win a national election, so I must make do with partial successes. Trump clearly represents the better choice with re to my preferences:
–dismantling of the administrative state;
–strong borders and limited immigration;
–tariffs;
–autotarkic economic policy emphasizing American production of American goods and services by American citizens for American consumption;
–withdrawal of troops from abroad and reduction of the US military to only what is necessary to defend the territorial integrity of the US;
–withdrawal from foreign entanglements such as NATO, SEATO, and the like;
–generally, a reduction of federal power, greater allowance for variations across states, and an emphasis on local solutions to social and economic issues that are developed, maintained, and governed by those localities involved rather than pretentious box-checking elites of Northern Virginia and its environs (or their state-level equivalents for that matter).
I want neither “progressive” nor “conservative” social policy–I want the federal government to remove itself from the lives of US citizens to the greatest extent possible and to stop telling common folk how to live. Let people make their own choices, create their own organizations to suit their own needs (e.g. schools, charities, fraternal organizations, relief societies), deal with the consequences of their own actions, and live their own lives with minimal interference.
Give me a candidate with this kind of platform, regardless of party, and I will vote for him or her.
JMG,
My deepest condolences on the loss of your father. As others have mentioned, it’s been a pretty tough year for you. I would also like to light a candle and say a prayer if you have no objections.
I’m enjoying the comments on this post very much, I could add to the discussion, but that would interfere with my popcorn. 😊 Your analysis of the situation is spot on.
For those on the left/blue side of things, y’all got really lucky. The red portion of the map has been preparing for a domestic insurgency since 2008, 2024 was our last hope and probably the last straw. Medieval sieges come to mind when looking at the map.
This post brought back some good memories, Bro. JMG, of me getting high on ‘frop and listening to my 8-track of Sounds of Dogs Licking Their Buttholes. That was one habitual response to growing up in a fundamentalist young earth creationist home, with solidly working class parents (i.e., sheet metal worker turned contractor and his TradWife) who’d climbed their way into the (very modestly) upper middle class (i.e., able to trade in one or the other Buick when it reached 60,000 miles or so) but still approached the world like flat earthers and expected me to do the same. Growing in that loving yet controlling environment gave me an almost reflexive suspicion of any ideology which is “so obviously superior to the alternatives… that only the deliberate embrace of evil can explain anybody’s refusal to buy into it.” As you have astutely noted and articulated here, the professional managerial class in the contemporary “post-colonial” academy is peddling schist as actual post-coloniality plays out in real-time.
Eva,
Not all of us are comfortable being led by the likes of Elon Musk. I think he’s a subsidy dumpster. And I’ve no use for SpaceX or Tesla. I also don’t think the “drill, baby, drill” idea is going anywhere. And trading our country’s gold reserves for Bitcoin is an absolute crime in my book. It’s all part of the same disease.
But I still think it’s so much better than the alternative that I thank our lucky stars for the way the election went.
@Eva, The answer to your question about why Elon Musk if Americans hate being ruled by Billionaires is simple. Through comics and television Americans have embraced in their minds two different kinds of Billionaires.
The first kind is the sinister greedy Billionaire that only cares about money and manipulating laws and the body politic to keep their wealth and get more. In this category is Larry Fink, Bill Gates, Sheldon Adelson etc.
The second kind is the charismatic Billionaire that got his money by innovation or courage and has been identified has a hero figure who can save the people from various forms of evil including other evil Billionaires. In this category are Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne, and even the hero of the 1930’s pulp fiction books I read as a kid, Doc Savage.
It does not matter what the reality is, or how they actually got their Billionaire Cred. Only the mythical story surrounding them matters. There is no doubt Elon has been a genius in building his own Myth, and that is why Americans are willing to accept him as a leader, savior and Hero.
WHat we will have to be careful of: USA made, right now alot of USA made is made by companies who do not care or support USA workers, but they want the label. So, the meat packing is done in the USA, or the apple is from the USA, or the cool organic dress is sewn in the USA, or the factory is in the USA but all staffed with non-citizens who are not even in process of citizenship, nor would be eligible, they are on temporary work visas. So, this is not helping the working class or giving hope to keep the young from being on Fentanyl by the river. And, the temp. workers are easily exploited and their families are drawing government subsidizes like food stamps or child tax credit, keeping the school money going to english lessons at the cost of paying attention to the native students, etc…
Michael Martin,
I’ve found myself feeling similarly about the legacy media. If I’m scrolling politics on YT and see an interesting headline, but then notice it’s from one of the major news networks, I don’t give it the time of day. I find myself disgusted by the whole lot of them, and don’t want to contribute a single view. Bring me the fringe! I’m only interested in what the freaks and contrarians have to say.
Siliconguy,
Yeah, I’ve never really understood the strategy of “bugging out.” Excepting a raging forest fire or pyroclastic flow coming to a theater near you, it seems like home would be the best place to be in stressful times. Freezer and pantry full of food…all my favorite books…all my favorite people…dry firewood…comfortable beds…
How is heading out into other people’s territory, with a backpack full of MREs, a few simple tools, a tarp, a spool of paracord, and a “garden-in-a-box” gonna be a better situation than the comforts and preparations of home?? Please.
John,
My condolences to you on the loss of your father coming on the heels of your wife’s death. When I was young I lost my brother and then my mother who died of a broken heart just a month after his death so I can empathize with the year you’ve had.
Siliconguy,
Perhaps they meant to say “MSNBC Viewership Craters ANOTHER 38% post-election – the worst slide since people started recognizing their loyalty to the Deep State during COVID.” Just spitballin’ here, though. Cheers.
Pat Matthews, fantastic to see you here! How are you doing? Email KaiserD2@gmail.com please.
For the record, I appreciate the mention, but I’m a political/diplomatic historian mainly, not a social historian. Again, thanks.
@ JMG – I would think the current wars around Israel would graph more neatly on to the East Africa War. At least, if the “will a US aircraft carrier gets sunk?” metric is anything to go by?
Eva, I don’t have a problem with billionaires as an aggregate. I’d rather be governed by Elon Musk than a lifelong career politician who gained power by jumping through the right hoops. Like Nassim Taleb, I think it is more honorable for someone to have gained wealth then enters politics rather than someone who enters politics then becomes wealthy.
Elon Musk has plenty of flaws, but he actually gets things done. He has led innovations. You may think his companies are subsidy dumpsters, but he personally put all his wealth on the line when founding them each time. The subsidies he receives are available to all automotive and aerospace companies anyway, none of which have matched his companies in terms of output; none of them are led by their founders anymore, but by corporate bureaucrats. He went into debt to start Tesla and SpaceX. That is a sign of skin in the game, someone who has genuine conviction in what he does. He is not in it to speculate, unlike some hedge fund billionaires, he actually built stuff.
Elon Musk is a much better candidate for actually getting things done than anyone on the Democratic ballot.
Eva: DO we like and want Musk near the White House? Who is “We” in this sentence? The Right hates subsidies, hates electric cars, and I personally think he should be arrested for allowing (bribing) the NTSB for allowing his self-driving to cause hundreds of accidents, many fatal. In addition, it was only yesterday he was a minor saint and savior to the Left, and was so for many years. Why isn’t he still? He still makes green electric cars. They didn’t mind we was a billionaire then, and still aren’t bothered by Zuckerburg or Bezos. Are you saying the Right is disturbed by the rich (never heard this) but the Left isn’t?
There may be a illustrating case here: they say the Right is a cult, adoring Trump. Actually, no, many are as indifferent to Trump as anyone. He’s a guy. But the accusers don’t believe this because a cult makes a better emotional story. Example: he was boostering his vaccine initiative at a rally, and how wonderful it was. He got immediately booed for that, and not for the first time. Some cult! Some great leader! Try that with Stalin or Manson sometime. The PEOPLE are leading the parade. THEY decided they didn’t support this. They didn’t give a hang whether Trump liked it or not, or how much. So again, he’s a plumber to them. Does he PLUMB correctly, and fix my pipes I want fixed? Yes? No? Then I don’t care about the other things. Trump is not their leader, he is their employee.
That may go with whether he, or Musk, is a billionaire or not. FDR was a Wall St. vulture capitalist like Romney, for example. Presidents are not usually poor. It’s whether they are doing what the people are asking to have done. I don’t ask about my plumber’s retirement investments either: he might be a millionaire and at plumbing rates he probably is. I only care about the job: will he dig this sewage out of my yard or not?
And for the second: IS he hiring people behind Project2025? He hired all the employees of the Heritage Foundation? I didn’t hear about it. Their site: “Project 2025 is a historic movement, brought together by over 100 respected organizations from across the conservative movement”. Since DC is now 99% Blue, the Red are so few they’ve all met each other. –You can see this from some of the commenters personal experience above, or Blinken having “safe spaces” in government to “cope” with that one of the two major parties was just voted in. –There are only two, so if we’re not a one party system, the other one is going to get in, and that’s your job. Because they’re not biased and work for the people and aren’t partisan towards Kamala or Biden at all. So if you hire any of the 10 remaining Conservatives in DC, they are all going to have 6 degrees of separation. Or two. I’m sure any conservative of note has talked to Heritage, just as any new Democrat of note has talked to Open Society or Vote Blue. Because as a think-tank it’s their JOB to talk to you. Just as “Justice Democrats” is their job to talk to, sign up, and ally with new Democratic talent like AOC.
The media uses this language constantly now, so be careful. They are “associated” with. Yes, that word and implication means nothing: for example, they said like Mike Wallace was “Associated” with Assad because he interviewed him once. That is to say, not at all. It’s just a lie. Tucker was “Associated” with Putin – his personal employee, actually, because again, as a journalist, he interviewed him once. …As any journalist would. Therefore the NY Times now works for Tom Cotton because they published an OpEd from him once. …Which was indeed literally said. So I ask again, ARE they associated with 2025? There were 100 plans, will ANY plans from them get enacted? Which ones? Ones to plant trees and stop wars? How would be know not only before they start, but before a single person is confirmed?
As that Trump rally, sounds like if they don’t do what the People want, Team Red will boo them off the stage and remove them. And have. So if there’s a problem, are you not suggesting the problem is with the American People and what the People want, that the People want wrong? They should think and want like you do? But that’s not politics.
@atmospheric river
I don’t know where you start with “edumacation”. I would go even more radical and say that if you have the internet, all you need to be trained to is how to use it properly and you can pick up whatever it is you need, when you need it.
So, you need to the “Three R’s”, and I suppose of those three, reading is most important. Although with more informal instructional and training content coming out in the form of a video, you can argue even that isn’t as necessary as it used to be.
But that isn’t what “education” really is, isn’t it? It’s basically a jobs program, it’s welfare for people with a work ethic. It’s buying a reliable retarded voting bloc that will vote blue no matter how nonsensical things get. I’d claim the world would be better off sending all those “teachers” home with a welfare check and getting rid of schools at this point.
Well, I had promised not to comment more about Trump, but this morning I’ve read something by Simplicius the thinker. I’ve broken my promise for what I could say a good reason:
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/wonder-weapon-mania-dies-down-revealing
This is the best sentence, IMO:
“the real worry is that Trump will do something extremely gung ho and unexpected in order to brandish his ego and ‘restore the US’ image’ and morale. ”
You’ll know SImpllicius isn’t exactly a “Democrat” fan-boy, so I think his pessimist view on Trump future geopolitics isn’t a piece of s**t, so it should be read. I don’t believe in “Don Simplicio” like an infallible oracle, but I think is worth to pay attention to him, even when he doesn’t follow your rosy forecasts…
I’m sorry if I’ve burst your balloon, but I’m afraid the Deep Neocon State’s going to be alive some time more.
More on news media unreliability.
“In a stunning series of events, two leading media organizations—The New York Times and Bloomberg—abruptly shelved coverage of a groundbreaking study that raises serious concerns about the psychological impacts of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) pedagogy. The study, conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) in collaboration with Rutgers University, found that certain DEI practices could induce hostility, increase authoritarian tendencies, and foster agreement with extreme rhetoric. With billions of dollars invested annually in these initiatives, the public has a right to know if such programs—heralded as effective moral solutions to bigotry and hate—might instead be fueling the very problems they claim to solve. The decision to withhold coverage raises serious questions about transparency, editorial independence, and the growing influence of ideological biases in the media.”
Results do not fit the narrative, so suppress them.
https://mishtalk.com/economics/groundbreaking-study-on-dei-cancelled-by-bloomberg-and-new-york-times/#comments
Also from the article.
“This context makes the suppression of the study even more alarming. The New York Times, which has cited NCRI’s work in nearly 20 previous articles, suddenly demanded that this particular research undergo peer review—a requirement that had never been imposed on the institute’s earlier findings, even on similarly sensitive topics like extremism or online hate. At Bloomberg, the story was quashed outright by an editor known for public support of DEI initiatives. The editorial decisions were ostensibly justified as routine discretion, yet they align conspicuously with the ideological leanings of those involved.”
I would like to offer my condolences for your loss.
Bruce
USA Today writes,
“Shockingly cold air funneled directly from the Arctic will be making an unwelcome appearance across nearly the entire eastern half of the country this weekend”
“Northern regions of the East, including the Great Lakes, Northeast and Ohio Valley, may struggle to reach freezing for daytime highs, ”
It’s shockingly cold that the high temperatures in the Great Lakes in late November might be below freezing? I laughed so hard at that. I grew up in Wisconsin where deer hunting in the snow on Thanksgiving weekend is normal. In fact this is what my brother in Wisconsin had to say last week,
“Still very warm for November. Looks like deer season will be brown again.”
I guess ” our warm autumn will be returning to seasonal normals” just wouldn’t sell enough of whatever.
OT: This is just too rich. Angela Merkel has published an autobiography repeating her opinion that Germany can be economically successful without using nuclear energy. Against her, the current secretary of her conervative party, Carsten Linnemann, and the current candidate for chancellor from that same party, Friedrich Merz, want to supply energy by restarting the closed-down fission reactors and through nuclear fusion. Presumably by next year…. LOL!
Rereading “The King in Yellow” – we need an epilogue or codicil entitled “Trump sweeps the nation,” answering the questions posed in the original about its endgame. We missed revolutionary violence and civil war – unless The Establishment starts one, and so far they’re looking pretty dazed and stunned and not doing much of anything of note. What’s on our plate now seems to be Ukraine and Israel – external wars.
And Trump may well even turn out to be his own Augustus.
Someone here wondered why The Changer didn’t choose Bernie Sanders instead. The obvious answer is his age: however vigorous and sharp-minded he is now, he’s not immortal, and the possibility of him dying in office was too great. Even though Jimmy Carter set a record for performance into his 90s. There’s elderly, and then there’s just – plain – old. I see the difference every day in here, where I am. But, yeah. Everyone who could have voted for Sanders in 2016 and went with the more likely winner instead has probably been kicking themselves in the butt for the past 8 years – and crossed party lines at the polls this year. As someone else said, “I didn’t leave my party; it left me.”
Just my $.02
It seems as though the embattled Deep State is prepared to destroy the world, rather than live in a world they do not rule:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/11/no_author/the-deep-state-is-trying-to-start-wwiii/
I know that JMG disagrees with me on this. He (like most people) assume that we are dealing with “rational actors”:
“A Rational Actor is defined as an individual who aims to act in a way that satisfies their desires based on their beliefs, demonstrating a characteristic goal of rationality in the domain of practical reason.”
LBJ and Nixon were “rational actors” in this sense. So is Vladimir Putin.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Deep State seems devoid of rational actors just now. I really do believe that they are determined to end all life on this planet if they cannot be in charge of it. It is similar to an abusive husband, who tracks down a fleeing wife, then kills her, saying: “If I can’t have this woman, no one else can have her either.”
Only an act of God can avert this. Many think that an act of God averted the assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania. We all need to pray that God will act again to save planet Earth from destruction.
RE;, Education. I do personally believe that public education is failing. I actually homeschooled my youngest K-12th. The academic part probably took 1-3 hours a day for most of that time, then some more junior high/high school, but the more than 3 hours time they do on their own at that point. But I disagree about the internet or computer being all that is needed or even most of all that is needed. I think for most children it is stifling their learning. It can be a resource for looking up certain things, you tube videos on how to fix your car, etc…. but not good for teaching young children, and in my household, young children are not allowed on it, at all, until junior high. For word processing mostly, although one of mine was also learning some basic programming in Junior high. The early years they realy need to work on their handwriting and critical thinking. Not waste time using a keyboard too large for them while being fed pablum in place of real learning.
But, as far as public schools in general, at this point I would love to see the federal government totally out of the picture, as defined in the constitution. I know in California we are too management heavy, state department of education, county office of education, the school district superintendent and related offices, then finally the schools. There is alot of reform needed, the 3 R’s would be a great start, not ear buds for computer’s in 1st grade. Homeschooling is a great option, right now it is possibly the only or best way to get humans that can think. But, locally, with the amount of money thrown at it, I would thinkthere is alot of room for improvement if anyone actually wanted public schooling to work
Okay, I’m back, more or less. Between my father’s death and a speaking gig on the weekend just past, keeping up with the commentariat was more than I could do; thank you all for maintaining a high level of courtesy and intelligent discussion here. I should be able to keep up with things from here on.
Thank you, everyone, for your condolences. My father was indifferent about prayer but never asked anyone not to pray for him, so I’ll take that as implied consent; of course you have my permission to pray for me if (as many of you noted) you so wish.
Starting from comment #249:
Neptunesdolphins, one of the things I find most fascinating and horrifying about corporate liberalism is how many people who support it are so quick to turn to incandescent rage and hatred if anything contradicts their belief system. It really does look as though they know they’re wrong, and get furious when this is pointed out.
Jennifer, when were you reading fantasy and SF? I’m thinking of the 1970s, when typical covers were like this…
…or this…
…or this…
…or this.
I freely grant that the pulp era before that, and the era of mass marketing after that, had far too many overendowed women falling out of inadequate clothing — but there was a window of opportunity there, where the art was actually pretty good.
BeardTree, granted. It’s encouraging that DOGE is planning to complete its work by June 7, 2026; the kind of mass layoffs Javier Milei carried out in Argentina might help.
Dennis, ha! It also shows the extent to which corporate liberalism has stopped being for anything and settled for being against whatever its enemies support.
BeardTree, I know. The thing that haunts me sometimes is that neither party has any sense of that — for the Democrats, environmentalism is an empty pose, while for the GOP it’s the enemy. Still, that’s the hand we’ve been dealt.
Siliconguy, that’s impressive in an absurd sort of way. “He was wrong, except that he was right.”
Patricia M, we’ll see. With a cooperative federal government, things can happen. As for the Battle Hymn, oog. That’s not a good sign.
Cyrus, thanks for this.
OtterGirl, here’s hoping!
Sister Crow, I wonder if the worthy retired bishop will ever, in all her days, realize that when Jesus talked about loving your enemies he had exactly this kind of situation in mind, and when he talked about the Pharisees — with their performative virtue-signaling in the service of ego and spiritual pride — he had her behavior in mind. “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.”
Joan, thank you for this. I think you may well be right that it’s all self-regarding posturing as heroes.
Black Tuna, it’s a worthwhile lesson and I’m glad to hear that you’ve picked it up.
Wer, oh, I know. It’s interesting that exactly zero information about the impact site of the Oreshnik missile in Dnipro has been made public. I’ve read that the Russians plan on another launch sometime soon, in retribution for the latest round of long-distance attacks; we’ll just have to wait and see what they do.
Aziz, many thanks for these data points. I don’t claim to know what’s going on in the Middle East in any detail — I don’t speak the languages and I haven’t lived there — so it’s always interesting to hear a viewpoint from on the spot.
Tim, why, that depends on what you mean by “trust.” You can certainly trust me to say what I think, irrespective of whether or not that corresponds to the conventional wisdom. You certainly can’t trust me to cater to your prejudices when they contradict my honest take on what’s happening. If you can’t handle that, by all means head someplace where your feelings won’t be hurt.
Connie, welcome back to the blog. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I hope you’re recovering well after Michael’s passing — that was a shock to all of us. I think you’re right that there are possibilities opening up, and I intend to put some ideas into circulation as we proceed.
CR, well, there’s that!
Llewna, I wish I had some good news for you, but I don’t. As I read it, the British and French governments are in maximum freakout mode, since their little project in Ukraine is collapsing before their eyes and Trump wants peace instead of pursuing their fantasy of conquering and dividing Russia. London and Paris can’t bear to back down, and so they’re pushing as hard as they can, on the assumption that they can bluff and bluster their way into getting the US involved. It’s unfortunately very possible at this point that some Oreshniki are going to pay a social call on British and French military bases…
Ozzraven, the Democrats are as close to a “left” as we have. In the US, even the Communists are center-right.
Ron, hmm. The King in Orange as antihero, the Clint Eastwood high plains drifter of American politics — yes, I could see that:
Steve, granted — but our thinking is also a product of nature. It’s a tree, not a robot, and I’m not sure it’s correct to say that we change it; it might just change itself.
Chris, thank you. You didn’t miss anything in the Potter series. The hours I spent reading three and a third volumes are time I’ll never get back.
Joy Marie, I think that is by Voltron of Sanity! 😉 Thank you.
Atmospheric, wow. Yeah, that does look like a deliberate choice.
Slithy, it was under way before that happened, but yeah, it’s interesting how much of a shift happened afterwards. It’s as though the election gave a lot of people permission to change their minds.
Jasmine, I know. I literally, without exaggeration, fell on my knees and thanked the gods when I heard about it. I know RFK may not make it through the confirmation hearings, but the fact that the window of acceptable discourse has slid that far already is a monumental change and one that I never expected to see in this incarnation.
Renaissance, no, and I’ll have to correct that soon. Sowell is one of the towering intellects of our time.
Logan, that doesn’t surprise me at all. I realized when Fifty Shades of Grey soared to bestseller status among liberal women that a very large number of women in that category are emotionally unsatisfied by the life that modern feminist ideology assigns them; they can pretend to themselves that they’re happy with it in most contexts, but sexual response is notoriously resistant to that kind of inward dishonesty, so a lot of these women are turning to fantasies of being dominated by square-jawed right-wing hunks who will force them to do what they secretly want to do.
Northwind, I like it! “Wealthistan” it is.
Jstn, it’s a project worth considering! California would be much less insufferable if it was broken up into four or five reasonably sized states, just for starters.
Patricia M, thanks for this. Bujold is no fool.
Smith, that makes quite a bit of sense. Those who can’t be controlled by corruption are always frightening to the corrupt.
Atmospheric, you’ll get no argument from me.
Celadon, wild times indeed!
Team10tim, I should have quoted that line in my post. Talk about over-the-top hubris…
KAN, bingo. By “agenda” Andrei clearly means “a set of talking points the privileged classes favor.”
BobinOK, I know. It could have gotten very ugly indeed. Now I think there’s at least a thin chance that we can avoid civil war and a rapid unraveling.
Rage Monster, funny. I figure the “post-colonial” academy spent all its time contemplating colonialism — and what you contemplate, you imitate…
Atmospheric, true. I plan on dropping some ideas into the hopper, to influence this, as we proceed.
David Kaiser, thank you for this and so noted.
Ben, well, quite a few of our weapons systems have already been deep-sixed in Ukraine, but it’s true that if a US carrier gets nailed by the Houthis, the resemblance to my novel could get a lot more exact.
Chuaquin, we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?
Siliconguy, well, of course! We can’t have mere facts getting in the way of our fantasies, can we?
Aldarion, to quote Wolf from the Dreamwidth journal: “The stupid…it burns.”
Patricia M, I think there’s another reason why the Changer had no time for Sanders: he’s as fake as a three-dollar bill with Lindsay Graham’s portrait on it. A “socialist” who’s a millionaire and used his leftover campaign funds from the 2016 campaign to buy another house — what was it, his third? — only pretends to want change.
Michael, your prediction is noted. Now we’ll see who’s right.
@Connie Barlow “Listening to your “Suicide of Science” chapter yet again (from your 2016 Dark Age America book) in the wee hours of the morning brought me to check out your posts again. Wow! This one is spot on”
I have probably gone over that chapter and the following one ‘The Twilight of Technology’ about 20 times! I would put the overall message of those chapters in the top 3 of what I wish many in the world could grasp. I know so many people that work in the science field and they are aware of the issues but also completely miss the core message of “The message on the outside is the one that matters”. Almost everyone I know in the technology field… I suspect they are going to be blind sided by what is happening.
For all the hullabaloo going around these days stuff like what JMG is doing is valuable beyond reason. We occasionally need our own rock of ages to cling too. I think your husband would have appreciated that analogy. 🙂
As an aside. I do miss Dowd’s contribution to the world. Endlessly repeating profound passages, asking you for pronunciation of words, you laughing in the back ground at someone quip, his additional little personal notes on top of everything. I hope you are doing well and that you still carry that fire of post doom, no gloom! Be well.
Hey JMG, I am sorry to hear about your father, especially so soon after losing Sara.
And yeah, the subreddit Logan mentioned was surprising, but not so surprising. After all, witness the success of The Handmaids Tale (which substantially precedes Trump in his politician arc) – in a (western) world where women and girls are taught they should strive to be anything but mothers, a dystopia about a society where (only some special women) are forced into a cruel parody of motherhood thrives. Of course I don’t mean to just poop on women here, there is plenty of toxic media that men in our society buy hook, line and sinker. I’d liken the modern media ecosystem to a grocery store full of nigh-rotten food, where you can tell what nutrient deficiencies people have by what they eat despite the flies and foul taste.
If anything, The Handmaid’s Tale is kind of like Warhammer 40K for women, with the handmaidens as the female analogy of those special adolescent men who are chosen to undergo the physically brutal and dehumanizing (but also rather exciting, from a male perspective) of becoming a space marine.
Good to hear that Elon “Pit Bull” Musk plans to have the DOGE training done before the 2026 elections. Trump doesn’t have overwhelming majorities in Congress and it would only a few uncooperative Republican Congress critters to derail some things in the meantime even before a potential loss of one or both houses in Congress in 2026 if the economy tanks.
I am leery about mass deportations. I have 2 Mexican son-in-laws whose respective parents came in illegally decades ago. Everyone involved is now legal and mostly citizens. One of daughters legalized her husband upon marriage. The parents raised their children well, worked hard, own their homes – the children now adults, run businesses or have educated professional jobs. I imagine many of the current illegals are following the same path. I can’t blame them for taking advantage of our open borders. They are likely to deport a lot of good people and the more slippery bad ones may be elusive to catch. My attitude is that we have to accept the consequences of past bad policies and work with those here, consistently deporting bad apples as they come up and maintaining tight border control and immediate deportation for those who slip through in the future and aiming to accept a number of legal immigrants who will benefit our country.
I really think the porous border was deliberate because the Democrats wanted to shift the demographics of the country in their favor – though the Democrats will never admit that openly!
@JMG: “Michael, your prediction is noted. Now we’ll see who’s right.”
I hope to High Heaven that you are right and that I am wrong. I will gladly eat a plate full of “crow” with great gusto!
@Bruno and @Grover
As JMG has now pointed out, there was a shift underway already, but the post-election shift was, ahem, YUGE. MSNBC was the hardest hit, losing over half their remaining viewership in the week after the election, and others lost about 1/4 to 1/3:
https://www.thewrap.com/msnbc-cnn-fox-news-viewership-craters-post-election-morning-joe/
@Michael Martin
Thank you for this. That could very well be part of it.
@JMG
I feel like at the minimum it’s a vindication of the many guardrails, like the electoral college, that the Framers put in place to prevent a simple majority — many of whom are apparently just going along with whoever is in power anyway — from overruling the will and interests of everyone else.
The flood of words that pour out of this man is astounding and apparently endless. What their point is escapes me but I respect effort.
Justin, hmm! I hadn’t made the connection to The Handmaid’s Tale, but of course you’re right.
BeardTree, it’ll be interesting, in the sense of the apocryphal curse, to see how that policy works out.
Michael, glad to hear it.
Slithy, it really does suggest that the guys who wrote the Constitution knew what they were doing!
Rapier, most people seem to have no problem figuring out the point of my essays. Have you considered remedial reading classes?
“The thing that haunts me sometimes is that neither party has any sense of that — for the Democrats, environmentalism is an empty pose, while for the GOP it’s the enemy.”
You’ve probably already considered this, but it sometimes feels that we’re in an Exodus-like situation where the hearts (and heads) of our leaders are being hardened so that instead of just running into the wall our collective head is being slammed into it over and over again to make sure the message is received.
JMG, Glad to hear you’re well. Much appreciation for your consistancy, insight and humor!
Yeah, I cant figure out why so many women think that Republicans want us to be like the story, The Handmaids tale. It makes no sense, like the other things they believe I posted about the other day here. I did not see the TV show, but I read the book. I read it years ago, but when all the fuss came up, I read it again. Nope, no relation to the real world. It is a story. It is not compelling. It certainly does not match anything IRL. And, it was written by a Canadian author, who set it in the USA, which may explain part of why it is not compelling or believable. The men early in the story that go along with the program, you would not see American men do this to their own wives and sisters, go along with such a thing, Canadians go along with totalitarian directives from their government better than we do. Not to mention that Islam would be more likely than Christianity to treat women that way, not saying they would IRL, but would make a more believable story.
But, yes, these same left leaning women I spoke about before, in addition to believing all the other crazy things, used to go on about the Program and how those Republicans wanted that to happen to women. Even the historic and existing religious poligamous sects in this country would never have such a weird set up or use force in that way. SO, yeah, I think it is more like 50 shades of grey fantasy and not like regular dystopian fiction.
John 363 :
“Chuaquin, we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”
I agree, let’s wait; however I’m quite pessimist…
@ Michael Gray – Your #364 responding to my #282 is a morning delight! You responded to my comment of re-listening to Michael Dowd’s audio recording of “The Suicide of Science” chapter in Greer’s book, “Dark Age America,” by saying this: “I have probably gone over that chapter and the following one ‘The Twilight of Technology’ about 20 times! I would put the overall message of those chapters in the top 3 of what I wish many in the world could grasp. ”
That’s exactly what I needed to hear to boost my commitment to posting segments of that book, plus “After Progress” plus “The Long Descent” onto youtube, with just a few obligatory image overlays. (Those books are the one’s I’ve been listening to again; there may be more; I recall being profoundly grateful long ago for “The Wealth of Nature.”)
My experience is that youtube has an extraordinary ability to “recommend” videos that are spot-on to any recent thread I explore there. In contrast, all those Dowd-narration-of-Greer audios on Soundcloud mostly just sit there; unknown. The new leaders at Postdoom.com (following Dowd’s death) have done a good job of pointing to those audios on their own “Audios” page. But now that Reality in the USA has shifted so profoundly, I would be grateful for more people to stumble onto the calm clarity that Greer consistently offers — by providing the deeper and wider context to just about everything that may strike the good-hearted folks we all know as just outright wrong and evil.
I’ve got another week or so of finishing my usual Fall Tree-Seed communications, and I still have on my plate recording a youtube run-through of the “Challenges and Controversies” long section (which I wrote) on the wikipedia page, “Endangered Species Act of 1973.” But after that, time to post segments of the best of Greer audios (what isn’t the best?!) onto youtube, via the channel of Dowd’s and mine that I still manage.
I think instead of corporate liberalism we need cooperative liberalism. Instead of more traditional liberal principles getting co-opted and recuperated into the AI Borg-Board Skynet hive mind, they need to get co-op’ed and rejuvenated by workers and doer’s and Diggers with dirt underneath the nails flowing and organic. Low key entrepreneurial small is beautiful business populism to balance the plutocratic brutalist cybertruck, bigger is better, entrepreneurial elites coming into power. People who only want to put their corn, or whatever else may be there harvest, into silos, and not silo off their minds to the other side of the aisle. Pluralistic conversationalist and raconteurs drinking the wine of the new weird America. Religiously accepting and universalist in outlook of the ways we can all approach the divine in our own way, reveling in the diversity of not just cultural backgrounds and intersexual intersectionist preferences, but actually on the corner of the intersection talking to people who come by, and happy to agree to disagree again, but still drink an African-American root doctor beer together. People who don’t cut off their family for picking a candidate, and can stuff it for Thanksgiving so we can eat stuffing together. Defenders of free speech even if it is ugly speech we personally abhor. Letting the gunslingers take a crack shot at the empty Coke/Pepsi aluminum or glass drones of the bland uniparty cola we collectively swim in. We the people forming the base of power, and local and state the next layer, and the federal government being the smallest point of the triangle of government. Sex strikes only for monastic celibates who burn with the secret fire. Let’s get it on and let’s stay together. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
Interesting take. It is indeed stunningly tone-deaf for self-righteous advocates of diversity and inclusion to announce their ideology of gender and sexuality as the only acceptable option when it directly contradicts the values of most people on the planet. It almost exactly mirrors the values of the European Americans in the 19th century who set up boarding schools for native American youth to offer them a path into “the only viable culture of the future”, namely a culture trying to exterminate the native Americans’ own culture. Someone should track down the articles in which Europeans wrote in astonishment at the uneducated, narrow-minded, reactionary, and anti-intellectual Native Americans who resisted becoming part of the culture of progress.
And the core delusion of the century of the self (imagine the world that serves the self, you don’t need traditional communities, your don’t need traditional norms of seeking truth and wisdom) is at the heart of the problem of our era. But ‘the century of the other’ is oversimplified. The first outcome with be the century of chaos. Russia isn’t winning in Ukraine. Everyone is losing. Russia will come out of this with some more land and having confirmed it is an existential enemy of Ukrainians, Finland, and the rest of Europe. There is no way that is a win for Russia. Trump effectively channeled the energy of the marginalized in the US. But he doesn’t have a team who can work together and make the compromises necessary to make positive change beyond disruption and chaos. The story of the century to come will be written by the leaders who rebuild after Trump. And it is as likely to be left wing populists or a real authoritarian dictator as it is to be someone in the image of Trump or Harris.
Thanks for your penetrating analysis from a viewpoint outside the mind mushing echo chambers.
About immigration and deportations: For a policy of deportations to be effective and receive public support outside the die hard Trumpists who believe their man can do no wrong, it would need to begin at the top. The basic principle here is you do not ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself. The President would need to inform the clandestine apparatus–some 17 or so agencies–by executive order that there will be no more, as in none at all, resettlement of foreign protegees in the US. I think we all know that ain’t about to happen. Next step would be to order the AG to set up a nationwide task force for the aggressive investigation and persecution of ID theft. Which I hope I need not remind anyone is NOT a victimless crime. Those are steps which could have been taken by any administration that was serious about reasserting control of national borders.
Next would be imposition of a five year moratorium on any migration from anywhere., followed by whatever has to be done to secure borders. Someone please explain why it should be our responsibility to admit family members of people who chose, were not forced, to come here. Then, after those measures are in place, a govt. could address the people here without legal authorization. The first step would be actually to enforce minimum wage laws, which we all know no admin. from either party will do. Then do deport those illegals who do have felony conviction records. The remainder could be given five years to learn basic English, including Grandma and Grandpa, and show themselves to be law abiding people with verifiable work records at minimum wage or more. Because people should not be allowed to come here and undercut other people’s livelihoods.
There was a comment last week, I think it might have been from siliconguy, about farming. As I see it, the purpose of the farm sector of any national economy is NOT to earn foreign exchange (always excepting luxury products like wines and caviar) but to support a healthy and vigorous population. A population which can withstand invasion and win wars. Right now, we do not have such a population. I assert that throughout history, centralization of farming DOES NOT WORK to the benefit of the polity and its citizens. That is true of Roman latifundiae, Communist collectivization, and it is equally true of our own Get Big or Get Out obsession.
Atmospheric River and Eagle Fang Warrior, “sex strikes”, as you, EFW, put it are “for” anyone at all who doesn’t feel like participating. Period. Deal with it.
AR, I doubt anyone thinks Handmaid’s Tale will be imposed here, if only because too many married men have gotten used to the convenience of double wages or salaries. Well, maybe the business community could be persuaded to pay a living wage, such that one spouse can support a family with such luxuries as food, water and shelter. Good luck with that.
What has not escaped our (women’s) attention is what happened immediately after Roe v Wade was struck down. Calls to make contraception illegal. Deaths in hospital of women with the sort of rare pregnancies which do require medical intervention. Women who were married, I might add, not spoiled brats sleeping around for fun. Then there was the interesting factoid I heard repeated in more than one venue about some 35,000 Texas women being sexually assaulted. What the freak? Remind me to remind my daughters and grands, do not travel or go to college in Texas. Take your money elsewhere.
If women truly are ditching their MAGA partners, I submit it is because those women foresee a time when they will have to defend themselves, or go into hiding, or both, and they believe their partners can’t be trusted. I am not going to say they are wrong.