After the failed January insurrection, any possibility of a second try is in a nose dive. Michael Anton was yet another of the Trump advisors whose connection to the current insurrection situation requires a reexamination of the chaos promoted by people like the two Steves: Bannon and Miller. In 2016, Anton described the stakes for conservatives, even if he was cribbing from Star Wars’s Yoda: “Do or do not, there is not try”.
2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.
Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.
claremontreviewofbooks.com/…
Apparently the odds were better with Trump, since we have some distortion in the justice system and the deaths of 400,000 in a pandemic that Trump was willing to trade against his reelection. Like most Trump advisors, they each got more than a Scaramucci’s worth of benefit for associating themselves with the worst president in American history. Even the White House press corps misses the chaos.
(2016)
Trump’s vulgarity is in fact a godsend to the conservatives. It allows them to hang their public opposition on his obvious shortcomings and to ignore or downplay his far greater strengths, which should be even more obvious but in corrupt times can be deliberately obscured by constant references to his faults. That the Left would make the campaign all about the latter is to be expected. Why would the Right? Some—a few—are no doubt sincere in their belief that the man is simply unfit for high office. David Frum, who has always been an immigration skeptic and is a convert to the less-war position, is sincere when he says that, even though he agrees with much of Trump’s agenda, he cannot stomach Trump. But for most of the other #NeverTrumpers, is it just a coincidence that they also happen to favor Invade the World, Invite the World?
Another question JAG raised without provoking any serious attempt at refutation was whether, in corrupt times, it took a … let’s say … “loudmouth” to rise above the din of The Megaphone. We, or I, speculated: “yes.” Suppose there had arisen some statesman of high character—dignified, articulate, experienced, knowledgeable—the exact opposite of everything the conservatives claim to hate about Trump. Could this hypothetical paragon have won on Trump’s same issues? Would the conservatives have supported him? I would have—even had he been a Democrat.
Back on planet earth, that flight of fancy at least addresses what to do now. The answer to the subsidiary question—will it work?—is much less clear. By “it” I mean Trumpism, broadly defined as secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy. We Americans have chosen, in our foolishness, to disunite the country through stupid immigration, economic, and foreign policies. The level of unity America enjoyed before the bipartisan junta took over can never be restored.
claremontreviewofbooks.com/...
But many feel a yawning sense of emptiness and disappointment at what the ebbing Trump tide left behind. “I think everyone probably misses the ease of it, having so many willing leakers,” said the young White House reporter. “It made you think that you were better than you were. It made you think you were a really good reporter, but really, are you? I think we had an inflated sense of our abilities and it was all a fraud. Now everyone is exposed and everyone is dogshit. Where are the great stories? They don’t exist. I can’t remember the last time I read a great story that really revealed something about the Biden White House.”
ckarchive.com/…
In a few months there will be more clarity despite the cynicism that no one is going to be held accountable for the chaos of the past five years. Orthodoxy will be opposed wherever it appears and Trumpism is an autocratic blip in a declining historical moment that in China, demands even more of a historical nihilism that is finding an audience elsewhere.
In a similar choice between Marsha Blackburn and Taylor Swift, the voters of Tennessee might actually come to their senses in a couple of years. Like Prohibition and moonshine, it’s not about Trumpian blather but does resemble “Prohibition's own sense of almost paralytic ideological bewilderment”. Like Prohibition, wariness of moral intervention and political economy will end Trumpism.
Only Trumpist idiots would scapegoat trans-people and also claim that bog-standard sociology was some “critical race theory” promoting white genocide, revealing that the same idiots were actually parroting the antisemitism and racism of earlier centuries requiring multiple Reconstructions. Similarly, Prohibition had simmered as not only a response to alcohol’s threat to the social order and to the effectiveness of capitalism. In China similar challenges have come over the decades with revivals of interest in Mao Zedong thought.
In a modern China grappling with widening social inequality, Mao’s words provide justification for the anger many young people feel toward a business class they see as exploitative. They want to follow in his footsteps and change Chinese society — and some have even talked about violence against the capitalist class if necessary.
The Mao fad lays bare the paradoxical reality facing the party, which celebrated the centenary of its founding last week. Under President Xi Jinping, the party has made itself central to nearly every aspect of Chinese life. It claims credit for the economic progress the country has made and tells the Chinese people to be grateful.
At the same time, economic growth is weakening and opportunities for young people are dwindling. The party has nobody else to blame for a growing wealth gap, unaffordable housing and a lack of labor protections. It must find a way to placate or tame this new generation of Maoists that it helped create, or it could face challenges in governing.
[...]
New catchphrases among the young reveal this Mao-friendly mind-set. With wages stagnant, young people talk about a “consumption downgrade.” Their employers work them so hard that they call themselves “wage slaves,” “corporate cattle” and “overtime dogs.” A growing number are saying they would rather become slackers, using the Chinese phrase “tang ping,” or “lie flat.”
Those attitudes have helped make the five volumes of “The Selected Works of Mao Zedong” popular again. Photos of fashionably dressed young people reading the books on subways, at the airports and in cafes are circulating online. Students at the Tsinghua University library in Beijing borrowed the book more than any others in both 2019 and 2020, according to the library’s official WeChat account.
“I’ll definitely reread the ‘Selected Works’ again and again in the future,” a young blogger named Mukangcheng wrote on Douban, a Chinese social media service focused on books, film and other media. “It has the power to make a person searching in darkness see the light. It makes my weak soul strong and broadens my narrow worldview.”
www.nytimes.com/...
Every generation has its nutters, we just have to identify them soon enough and not elect them.
According to prohibitionist doctrine, Americans had once been pure. A nefarious trade had robbed people of their reason and corrupted domestic and social integrity. The 18th Amendment represented a millennial triumph inaugurating personal self-restraint and national solidarity. To police compliance was contradictory. It made no sense to enforce a cure that would naturally take effect.
But even with the saloon effaced, there continued to be both a demand for alcohol and a traffic to meet it. The Volstead Act had built in wholly inadequate safeguards against the reproduction of the trade.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...
When they finally corner Trump: a recount, and his “old job back.”