Cromwell

Around the beginning of the year, Ron DeSantis was fairly energetic in his efforts to get his elderly and relatively affluent supporters vaccinated. Since then, not so much. DeSantis has emerged as one of the national leaders in the battle to protect the rights of the unvaccinated to make the rest of us sick and curtail our freedoms. At this point, it would be fair to call him the best friend of the virus.

Perhaps the virus should be his running mate in 2022.

When DeSantis is asked about the inevitable explosion of cases in Florida, he either blames illegal immigrants or shouts indignantly that we aren’t going to have any more lockdowns. The first is demonstrably false; the latter is logically absurd, as the whole point of mandates is to avoid lockdowns.

Now, DeSantis apparently has a plan to kill two birds with one stone by offering children who refuse to comply with public school mask mandates vouchers for private schools. What a great idea! I can’t think of any better way to discredit voucher schemes than to turn private schools into virus incubators.

Just imagine: masks could be the new form of segregation in Florida schools.

Mitch McConnell, to his credit, is not a counterrevolutionary. Why should he be? His agenda consists of shoving business tax cuts and conservative judges through the system. He can do that today without blowing up the system. Hence, his apparently sincere condemnation of Trump and the rioters after January 6.

The problem for Mitch is that he has lost control of the GOP to Trump and the culture war right. There is no obvious role for Mitch and the PBPs once the Reactionaries have imposed the Orban Option. He and the donor class will just have to shut up and hope for the best.

Does Mitch understand that a GOP dominated by the extreme right is as dangerous to him and his business constituents as the left? Does he have a plan for heading it off?Mitch is no fool, so I’m guessing the answer is yes.

Bernie Sanders was very open about it during the 2020 campaign; he wanted America to look like Denmark. Denmark is an impeccable liberal democracy with better public services and less inequality than we do. It also has higher taxes, a little less personal freedom, and fewer incentives for excellence than we do. Which system works better is a matter of personal taste.

For most of history, the American right would have recoiled at the notion that a foreign nation should serve as a role model. Today, with America a lost cause (as they see it), the reactionary right has embraced Hungary as the New Jerusalem. Hungary is a land characterized by a declining population, rampant corruption starting at the top, a rigged electoral system, a totally politicized judicial system, and mediocre growth rates. Reactionaries love it for all of that because Orban is a vibrant nationalist and culture warrior.

Which country sounds more appealing? You decide.

Trump proved during the 2020 campaign that he has no policy ideas, only whims and prejudices. As a result, if he runs in 2024, his “platform” will be to turn America into Hungary by destroying liberal democracy. He has nothing else to say.

But remember, he is a man on golf cart, not horseback. If he wins, he may well be too lazy, disorganized, and vain to get the job done, unlike some of his other GOP compatriots.

So there is the irony: the most likely instrument of our destruction may actually, in the end, prove to be the downfall of the Orban Option.

Shortly after the election, I did a post which pointed out the disconnect between the GOP’s policy positions and the actual objectives of the right (censorship; school purges; religious tests). Almost on cue, state legislatures started passing bills that corresponded to these reactionary wish lists.

In addition to this, some reactionary intellectual leaders have figured out that they can’t get everything they want through our current system of government. They are calling for a counterrevolution of some kind, but not prescribing how it would happen. How long will it take before we start seeing a much more widespread and dangerous militia movement in response to these calls for action?

Things are moving fast. I hope I’m wrong, but my guess is that the right will start openly threatening violence before 2024.

If you’re a social conservative, you look around America and see nothing but filth. Pornography, homosexuality, and adultery are everywhere. The government needs to impose traditional values by force, even over the objections of the immoral majority if necessary, to create the virtuous society. Sure, they will complain at first, but in the long run, they will be grateful for it. And you, of course, will no longer have to view a parade of horribles that offends you to the core.

Since social conservatives have no qualms about forcing people to be virtuous, you would think they would support vaccine mandates. But no! In matters involving life and death, it is freedom of choice, not saving lives, that matters most.

This is, of course, rank hypocrisy. And if you think the libertarian left is open to the same charge, remember that sexual morality and public health present different issues. The former is filled with debatable gray areas, but there is no moral or intellectual case for the victory of the virus.

For all of his obvious weaknesses, Trump was occasionally praised by serious commentators for his view that America was more than the sum of its over 300 million individual parts. In other words, he was allegedly a communitarian, not a libertarian. Is there any merit to this?

No, for two reasons. First, Trump’s taxing and spending policies were all standard GOP fare—catnip for PBPs and CLs, not CDs and Reactionaries. Second, the only kind of community that Reactionaries support is one in which they have complete economic and social control over everyone else. You can hardly expect the identity left to buy into a vision of a single, unified America in which they are only given a subordinate part.

Millennials like to assert that they have little in common with the failed, corrupt Boomer generation. Is that true?

Consider the recent phenomenon of prominent Millennials stepping away to protect their mental health. My parents—members of the Silent Generation—would have snorted with derision at the idea that this was a noble act; they would have gritted their teeth and gotten on with it. Boomers take the argument more seriously—after all, the Clinton Administration famously had more people with experience in therapy than the military—but ultimately side with our parents. Millennials give priority to their own well-being over notions of duty and patriotism.

What we have here is a vector, with Boomers in the middle. As with civil rights issues, Millennials have simply taken the Boomer position a step further to the left. The difference is of degree, not kind.

Mitt Romney, a PBP, was the Republican nominee in 2012. Trump only had a plurality—not a majority—in the primaries in 2016. Today, however, the Reactionaries are a clear majority faction, and they have been radicalized. That was the great “accomplishment” of the last four years.

It is no longer permissible for a GOP politician to express doubt in public that Trump actually won the election. If Trump decides to run in 2024, will reactionary state and local politicians take the next logical step and vote to overturn a Biden victory?

The pressure put on them by the base will be enormous. It really depends on how many PBPs manage to get elected at the state level in 2022. Any place where Reactionaries represent a majority of legislators is a potential trouble spot, because they will probably be pledged to do whatever is necessary to assure a GOP victory regardless of the actual outcome of the election. If the Democrats and PBPs are a majority, however, the election is probably safe.

The bottom line is that 2024 is likely to result in either an irrevocably divided GOP, or a shattered nation, if Trump is the nominee.

If you were to ask Bolton and Barr why they chose to work for such a flawed, dangerous man, they would probably tell you that they were attracted to a pure ideological reactionary—“Good Trump”—and they thought the angry narcissist “Bad Trump” could be managed.

They were blind. There is no “Good Trump”: the bad one is the entire package. And if he runs in 2024, his platform will be to finish off liberal democracy in America to get even for his loss in 2020. That would be the only possible logic behind his candidacy. He doesn’t stand for anything else—not even the dictatorship of the Reactionaries, although there would be a large element of that in his next term.

The evidence clearly shows that poverty has declined dramatically as the result of the various Covid mitigation payments over the last several months. To the GOP, this is no cause for celebration. Government programs only cause dependency, they say. “Good” poverty forces people to work harder and ultimately propels them to prosperity.

In reality, minimum wage jobs are usually the gateway to more minimum wage jobs, not the middle class. That’s the point, of course. The GOP represents business owners, retirees, and investors, not workers. In a perfect right-wing world, everyone who isn’t a capitalist in one way or another would have a low-paying job with no benefits and would be completely at the mercy of employers.

On the female gymnast named Biles.

You have certainly heard of her trials.

They call her the GOAT.

Does that stick in your throat?

They’d be wise to shut up for awhile.

On the Tokyo Olympic Games.

It’s a chance to find fortune and fame.

We expect you to win.

If you don’t, it’s a sin.

We’ll be looking for someone to blame.

When I was growing up, the MSM—effectively, the owners and operators of a handful of newspapers, TV networks, periodicals, and movie studios—decided what was and wasn’t worthy of public discussion, and what was and wasn’t respectable opinion. It was censorship of a sort, but it gave everyone a reasonable degree of choice, and it wasn’t enforced by the government. It kept a diverse nation from flying apart, but it wasn’t oppressive. In short, it worked.

Today’s landscape is very different. The MSM have given way to the lawless internet. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want the job, partly because it costs him money, and partly because he doubts his legitimacy as an unelected national censor. Lots of other people doubt it, too.

This situation is unsustainable. It will not last. The government is going to step in sooner or later; in fact, it is already happening in red states with ambitious governors. Unfortunately, that means the stakes in elections are going to get even higher, and the culture war is going to get even more vicious.

Elizabeth I barely survived a bout with smallpox in 1562. Based purely on genealogical principles, Mary Stuart would have been her successor. Would the Queen of Scots ever taken the English throne?

There are arguments both ways. Mary was viewed as a politique in 1562, she had a kingdom behind her, there was no single obvious Protestant candidate, and the Council would have been divided. The Mary Tudor precedent would have given her additional hope. On the other hand, unlike Mary Tudor, the Queen of Scots was a foreigner, and the leading English nobles would have been in no mood to repeat their experience with a Catholic Queen. They probably would have reached an agreement on a male Protestant candidate fairly quickly.

In the end, it probably would have come down to Mary’s willingness to provide guarantees that would have satisfied the Protestants. It would have been an unstable situation at best, and in the long run, as in Protestant Scotland, it could not have worked.