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Reactionary thought in America is typically associated with states’ rights. Fascism, on the other hand, by definition involves a direct tie between the country’s leader and the nation as a whole. If the GOP takes power and successfully implements the Orban Option, how would this contradiction be resolved?

There would be a substantial degree of decentralization. Slightly reformed red state governments could be relied upon to impose and enforce the religious and racial tests that would be at the heart of the new regime, while censorship would be handled at the national level. But what about the blue states?

The military would have to be purged and used as an occupying force, but that, by itself, would not be enough to run the blue states. Local collaborators, mostly from rural areas, would have to be recruited. Finally, talented reactionaries would have to be mobilized in red states in large numbers, carefully organized, and sent to the blue states to run state and local governments and crush any remaining opposition.

Think of carpetbaggers, only in reverse.

Assume that the Biden boom is still in full swing in 2024. Do the Republicans respond by nominating someone (e.g., Josh Hawley) with a similar populist agenda and fight the election purely on culture and identity issues?

I doubt it. The GOP would effectively be conceding that regressive tax cuts and deregulation aren’t always the answer, and that not every election is a rerun of 1980. The rank and file might already accept that, but the intellectual and institutional leadership does not, and probably never will.

Inertia is a powerful thing. My guess is that it will take at least two election cycles to put an end to the enduring image of Reagan and morning in America within the GOP.

This is far from a given, but assume that the Biden economy is a roaring success. How will the GOP respond?

Here are the choices:

1. Whine about the deficit and how we’re burdening our grandchildren.
2. Ramp up the culture wars to 11.
3. Engage in vandalism and hostage taking. Demand massive spending cuts in exchange for voting to keep the government open and increasing the debt ceiling. Stick to your guns when Biden refuses and see if he blinks.
4. Pick a presidential candidate with a genuinely populist economic agenda similar to Biden’s in 2024, and fight the election on cultural/identity issues.

#1 and #2 are a given; they’re already doing that. I will address #4 in my next post. The one you should be really concerned about is #3. That issue will come up in a few months. My prediction is that the base will be pushing for a showdown over the debt limit, and that the possibility of default will dominate the political discussion for weeks, if not months.

Inspired by the performance of our economy in 2019, the availability of cheap money, the persistence of inequality, the structural issues exposed by the pandemic, and the fear of the Orban Option in 2024, Biden has staked his political future on an attempt to grow the welfare state at the expense of the wealthy. This isn’t socialism; it is pure populism, as opposed to the faux variety offered by Trump and the GOP.

While this program has a sound basis in economics, it is based primarily on a bet about the electorate. It raises two questions:

1. Will a significant number of reactionary white workers eschew identity politics and vote their economic self-interest if the economy is roaring and wages are rising in 2024?
2. Will Biden lose the votes of affluent blue-leaning professionals with his tax increases and potential losses in the markets?

The math is simple: the increased reactionary worker vote has to exceed the decreased blue professional vote for this gamble to succeed.

What is the prognosis? I’m cautiously optimistic, but nobody knows for sure.

How will the GOP respond? I’ll discuss that in my next post.

Following Nikki Haley, Tim Scott argues that America is not a racist country. It would be easy to dismiss his comments as an opportunistic effort by “Uncle Tim” to suck up to his party’s base for self-interested reasons. It may even be true. However, let’s evaluate his opinion on its merits and see where it goes.

I will start with three propositions on which all parties to the debate should be able to agree:

1. Black people were enslaved prior to 1863 and subjected to ferocious and wide-ranging legal discrimination until the middle 1960s.
2. There are no government regulations anywhere in the country today which facially discriminate against black people.
3. By any indicator you care to name–wealth, unemployment, incarceration, education, drug use, and violent deaths, just to name a few–black people are significantly worse off than white people today.

The obvious question to ask a member of the GOP, such as Scott, is why #3 is the case. For a Democrat, the answer is easy: it is the lingering effects of #1, in addition to some ongoing racism today. That argument is both logical and factually plausible. Some Republicans might privately think that the correct answer is that “black people are worse off because they are inherently inferior,” but, in spite of their frequent harangues about PC, they know they cannot say such a thing in public. The Democratic response is also unacceptable, because it makes the case for affirmative action. The GOP member is consequently driven to take the position that decades of poor social policy driven by the Democrats have caused the problem. If you could just take the hammock of dependency away and force black people to stand on their feet without assistance, the inequality problem would disappear.

This is the Paul Ryan argument. It has no basis in logic or experience. The American safety net (at least pre-Biden) is about as far from a comfortable hammock as you can get, and the GOP has already had numerous opportunities to implement its position over the past several decades. Was there any improvement? None that I can see.

The bottom line is that the overwhelming evidence indicates that there is still plenty of as-applied racism in this country, and that the vestiges of hundreds of years of discrimination cannot be disposed of quickly. You don’t have to be woke to see that.

Yesterday, we packed up our car and made the long drive to our North Carolina mountain home. Spring is in full swing here, as opposed to Florida, which only has the wet and dry seasons.

It occurred to me this morning that part of the emotional appeal of Easter is the fact that it takes place during the spring; the theme of death and resurrection is manifested in the natural world at just the right time. But what happens in the Southern Hemisphere? Would Easter have the same meaning in the fall?

I would think not.

The principal ideological battle in the 2020 primaries was between Medicare for All and Medicare for More. Biden vigorously defended the latter as being more affordable and politically feasible. His families plan, however, rejects Medicare for More in favor of increased Obamacare subsidies. The left is predictably annoyed. What is going on here?

Reality and politics have intruded, as usual. The medical interest groups so strongly opposed to M4A also object, if less vigorously, to M4M. The GOP is also waiting to pounce on anything that looks like a structural change to health care. The medical groups, on the other hand, have no reason whatsoever to campaign against additional subsidies, and it will be hard for Republicans to oppose a bill that doesn’t change the structure of health care–it just makes it more affordable, even for older, more affluent people who typically vote for the GOP out of self-interest.

Given the magnitude of the threat that today’s GOP presents to our political system, you can understand why Biden puts politics ahead of policy. It may not be brave, but it is definitely prudent.

According to Politico, Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene are going on tour together to hunt RINOs and liberals! The tour, as is only fitting, opens at The Villages.

It sounds like one of those summer tours featuring two aging classic rock groups. It’s perfect! My only question is, who has to be the opening act?

When a politician you admire is accused of wrongdoing, there is a natural inclination to initially deflect or dismiss the allegations. It is effectively a presumption of innocence for your side.

For centrists and most leftists, the presumption is rebuttable. If evidence accumulates that the allegations are true, you accept that conclusion and take a position as to what constitutes an appropriate remedy.

If you’re a reactionary, however, the opposite is true. The more compelling the case, the more you dig in and blame the “deep state” and the MSM for maligning your hero. Hence, Tucker Carlson on Matt Gaetz.

The results in elections in Florida and elsewhere suggest that Americans generally support positions held by Democrats, but do not trust Democrats to deliver them properly, typically due to identity politics. Biden and his agenda, however, poll very well. What accounts for the difference?

As Andrew Yang once noted, making ambitious positions sound moderate is Biden’s superpower. Another way to put it is that Americans feel more comfortable with new wine when it comes in old bottles. Particularly, of course, when the bottle is white.

In Biden’s congressional speech

He spoke of success within reach.

He laid out his plans

So we all understand

And he didn’t suggest we eat bleach.

Dripping with humanity, and speaking softly and plainly, Biden made the case for his massive spending programs tonight. Unlike his two immediate predecessors, he neither soared nor savaged. He framed the overriding issue as winning the future against autocrats by building a more modern economy based on the interests of the poor and the middle class, not the wealthy and large corporations. It was an extremely effective speech.

If you’re a Republican, how do you respond to the spending programs? Do you say that there is no problem, for example, with the cost of child care, when the public knows perfectly well that there is? Do you say that the private sector can provide this service at a price everyone can afford, when it is clear that it doesn’t? Do you say we don’t have the money to pay for it, when the program comes with a popular funding source? Or do you just lie about what’s in the program, call it socialism, and go back to talking about meat quotas and the Harris book?

We already know the answer to that one.

The rabid right has had quite a week. First, we had the story, breathlessly quoted on Fox News and by various reactionary luminaries, that Biden had a plan to limit our meat intake. Second, the NY Post apparently directed a reporter to write a bogus story to the effect that the government was handing out copies of the Kamala Harris book at the border. Once again, the right-wing outrage machine went into overdrive. The problem, of course, is that both stories were demonstrably false.

That doesn’t appear to present a moral issue for the Murdochs, who clearly want to be taken seriously, but not literally. For them, the narrative is set; it is just a question of supplying the supporting facts, as with Hearst and the Spanish-American War. Whether those “facts” are literally true is not particularly relevant; the only thing that really matters is the narrative. Anything that doesn’t fit the narrative is by definition either false or meaningless.

When Trump lied, as he did over 20,000 times while in office, at least everyone knew his history and reacted accordingly. For other GOP politicians and media outlets to lend their better reputations to lies is a different matter altogether. One can only hope that the Murdochs can, at some point, be persuaded that it is ultimately in their best interests to maintain some reasonable degree of journalistic ethics and objectivity. Right now, I don’t see it.

Back in the heyday of IS, I predicted the group would burn itself out fairly quickly as long as the forces of order reacted with intelligence and restraint. This was based on previous terrorist flurries at the beginning of the twentieth century and during the 1970s. I was right. Islamic terrorism hasn’t been completely extinguished, but it is no longer the overriding concern that it was five years ago.

So why don’t I have the same level of confidence regarding right-wing extremism? For the following reasons:

1. They have far more public support;
2. They have infiltrated law enforcement and the military;
3. They are armed; and, above all
4. They are convinced the left is on a path of sending them to concentration camps. The Islamic groups thought they had already seen the worst of times, but the right-wing extremists think, not only do they have a divine right to rule, they are fighting for their own physical and cultural survival. If you genuinely believe that, you are capable of almost anything.

Bret Stephens predicts that the left will ultimately divide over the demands of its woke faction. Is he correct?

As long as the Orban Option is looming as a real possibility, no. The liberals and the identity determinist left are united on opposing right-wing identity illiberalism. Wokeism is by far the lesser of the two evils; it doesn’t have guns, red state legislatures, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral College on its side–only Twitter and a few minor publications.