Quotulatiousness

December 2, 2024

“I think we’re moving out of the ‘FA’ stage into the ‘FO’ era on that one, friends”

Filed under: Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In a rare sighting of a Matt Gurney column from The Line outside the paywall, he shares some of his thoughts after attending this year’s Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia:

For those who don’t know, the “Forum”, or HISF, is an annual gathering of military leaders, defence and intelligence experts, and others whose work relates to defence and security issues, from across NATO and the Western alliance broadly. Funded by NATO, the Canadian government and private-sector sponsors, it is something of a jewel in Canada’s defence crown, a chance to bring some very powerful and influential people to a gorgeous Canadian city to wine and dine them, in hopes that they don’t realize our military is a disaster that is largely incapable of contributing to our collective defence. The agenda is always divided into a mix of free time for social networking, off-the-record chats (which are generally the most interesting) and also a series of on-the-record events that can be quoted from, and which are broadcast live online.

[…]

In our latest episode of The Line Podcast, we discussed this at length, in the context of the ICC issuing arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his now-former defence minister. I quipped on the pod that the “rules-based international order” is a lot like the “sanctity of marriage”. It’s something we talk about as if it exists, and we’d all like it to exist, but it really doesn’t. It just doesn’t. It’s an ideal worth striving for, but not actually a thing that exists and can be counted on. The Line had also previously written about our belief that there is no rules-based international order in a prior dispatch, and then ran a counterpoint to that perspective by a reader who disagreed. It was a good counterpoint! It didn’t change my mind.

Shearer tackled the question directly, and so perfectly that I think his answer has changed my view of the situation. It hasn’t changed my opinion, but it has changed how I’m going to describe it. Here’s what Shearer said (I’ve tidied up the quote a tiny bit for clarity, but you can watch the whole thing around the 39-minute mark of this video). For context, the panel was about the so-called “CRINKS” — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, and the challenge they are posing to the Western alliance. I’ll include Coomarasamy’s question, and then show you what Shearer said that made me go “Huh”.

    Coomarasamy: Are we in a world now where we can’t really talk about a rules-based international order, but two separate, competing ones?

    Shearer: That’s a big question. I think the rules-based order, frankly, turns out to have been, in hindsight, a power-based order. It was unchallenged U.S. military power that made possible the liberal order of the last 50 years. With all its benefits for so many countries. Was the U.S. always a perfect hegemon within that system? Occasionally not. It would shift its weight around, and there were consequences from that. But overall, it worked because the United States was a relatively benign hegemon.

That’s it. That’s exactly it. That’s exactly what I have intuitively felt in the last few years, and haven’t done a good enough job explaining. I grasped it in a big-picture intellectual sense, but I hadn’t been able to shrink it down into a single sentence like that. When Shearer said that the rules-based order was, actually, a U.S. military power-based order, it clicked in my brain. That’s the way to articulate it.

For the last few decades, we thought we were living in a rules-based-international order, and planned our lives around that. But what we were actually living in was a global order led by a relatively benign global superpower and preserved by its astonishing military power.

And that world is ending.

The question of our era

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At PJ Media, Athena Thorne asks the most pertinent, relevant question of our times:

Is Donald Trump the Long-Awaited Messiah of the Band ‘Rush’ Era?

Rush in concert, Milan 2004.
Photo by Enrico Frangi, via Wikimedia Commons

Greetings, PJ readers! I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and are still feeling lazy and slovenly. In that vein, here is a tasty morsel of a column from a friend and fellow reader, Kato the Elder. He makes an excellent argument — one with which I heartily agree — that President-elect Donald Trump is the small-L libertarian hero of our time. Enjoy!

    In a particular moment during my precocious, autodidact pre-teen years, I stumbled upon a copy of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged at an estate sale in an old New England barn. There, in a hay-covered stall, I found that dense brick of a book that seemed, in a creepy sort of way, to be waiting for me to pick it up and take it home — consequences be damned. It was like Guy Clark’s song about a haunted guitar, found in a pawn shop, with the name of the next victim to pick it up already written on the case. And, like Guy Clark’s guitar, Atlas Shrugged is one of those cultural objects that once picked up cannot be put down. Who could ever forget, on page 455, where it is asked, “What advice would you give Atlas if he became weary of holding up the world? Shrug.” A libertarian is born. I quickly worked my way through the remainder of Rand’s parables and then the essays.

    Rand’s novella “Anthem” led to my discovery of the Canadian rock band Rush, which had adapted “Anthem” as the rock opera entitled 2112. It’s the story of a man who suffers under the autocratic rule of the Priests of the Temple of Syrinx, progressives who use computers to create a scientific, expert-driven utopia that does not recognize the value of the individual or the right to think and create and dissent. In “Anthem”, it is the protagonist’s discovery of an ancient incandescent light bulb that leads to the discovery of an earlier and freer society and puts the hero on a collision course with the collectivists. In the Rush version, the long-lost incandescent light bulb is replaced with a guitar, but of course it would be, because what kind of crazy government would take away someone’s light bulbs?

    A very strong Randian libertarianism runs through Rush’s music; the heroes of many Rush songs are those individuals struggling, of course, against a government that is determined to pound the individualism and free thought out of its subjects, whether that individual is Tom Sawyer or teenagers living in subdivisions or the teen boy awaiting the world’s applause or the community suffering from mob violence and witch hunts. But Rush, and Rand, are not rejecting the Eisenhower-era type of corporate conformity, but rather the conformity of counter-culture which has taken power and proven the deficiency of the government-expert-knows-best mindset. The epitome of that strain of Randian libertarianism comes in the song “Red Barchetta”, a power ballad about a boy who, in conspiracy with his uncle, escapes to the countryside to race a classic, gas-powered Ferrari against a bland EV car of some kind that has supplanted the freedom and adrenalin rush of gas-powered freedom. Because what kind of crazy government would take away someone’s choice of car?

    I saw Rush in concert at least 12 times, and every concert was full of people who looked like me, dressed like me, and sounded like me. We sang along with Rush at the top of our lungs about the freedom of music and the individualism which is closer to the heart. As we all grew older and grayer and our American society became less tolerant of dissent and more dependent on corporate/government cronyism, we could only wonder whether we would find our Howard Rourke, the nonconformist New York developer and architect of Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, who would lead us to the promised land.

QotD: Intersectionality on campus

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… intersectionality’s intellectual flaws translate into moral shortcomings. Importantly, it is blind to forms of harm that occur within identity groups. For a black woman facing discrimination from a white man, intersectionality is great. But a gay woman sexually assaulted by another gay woman, or a black boy teased by another black boy for “acting white”, or a Muslim girl whose mother has forced her to wear the hijab will find that intersectionality has no space for their experiences. It certainly does not recognize instances in which the arrow of harm runs in the “wrong” direction — a black man committing an antisemitic hate crime, for instance. The more popular intersectionality becomes, the less we should expect to hear these sorts of issues discussed in public.

Perhaps the most pernicious consequence of intersectionality, however, is its effect on the culture of elite college campuses. Some claims about “campuses-gone-crazy” are surely overblown. For instance, judging from my experience at Columbia, nobody believes there are 63 genders, and hardly anyone loves Soviet-style communism. (That said, the few communists on campus tend to despise intersectionality with an unusual passion.) But one thing is certainly not exaggerated: intersectionality dominates the day-to-day culture. It operates as a master formula by which social status is doled out. Being black and queer is better than just being black or queer, being Muslim and gender non-binary is better than being either one on its own, and so forth. By “better”, I mean that people are more excited to meet you, you’re spoken of more highly behind your back, and your friends enjoy an elevated social status for being associated with you.

In this way, intersectionality creates a perverse social incentive structure. If you’re cis, straight, and white, you start at the bottom of the social hierarchy — especially if you’re a man, but also if you’re a woman. For such students, there is a strong incentive to create an identity that will help them attain a modicum of status. Some do this by becoming gender non-binary; others do it by experimenting with their sexuality under the catch-all label “queer”. In part, this is healthy college-aged exploration — finding oneself, as it were. But much of it amounts to needless confusion and pain imposed on hapless young people by the bizarre tenets of a new faith.

Coleman Hughes, “Reflections on Intersectionality”, Quillette, 2020-01-13.

December 1, 2024

“Fellow Canadians, forget your dire financial plight … it’s only a ‘vibecession'”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Humour, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tristin Hopper imagines what Chrystia Freeland might be confiding to her diary after she blithely assured struggling Canadians that no, really, everything’s just fine and dandy and you’re being deceived by “bad vibes”:


Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland speaking.

Monday

As a former journalist, I am fully aware of the awesome power of the press to distort and pervert reality. Here we all are in 2024 Canada. There is food. There is shelter. There is breathable air. The vast majority of us will go through the rest of the fiscal year without being stabbed on public transit.

And yet, to hear the misinformation and disinformation trafficked by the media, you would think we live in some kind of violent, economically depressed hellscape.

Well, this kind of mendacity has consequences: A nationwide hysteria of bad feelings and negative energy. A fanatical devotion to bad vibes in the face of all evidence to the contrary. I don’t purport to know how to cure such irrational malaise, but I will be very surprised if $250 each and some tax-free liquor and Christmas shopping doesn’t do it.

Tuesday

Donald Trump’s threat of 25 per cent tariffs is easily the most serious challenge I have faced as Canadian finance minister. The United States is our largest trading partner, and the suspension of free trade across our shared border would invite economic ruin the likes of which we’ve never seen.

Worse, Trump is immune to our usual strategies. We suggested sending his tariff threat to committee, or having it reviewed by a Crown inquiry, but neither offer was accepted. Rather, they want us to stem the tide of illegal migrants using Canada as a base to enter the United States. They are under the impression — let’s call it “bad vibes” — that this is a problem.

But let nobody say that the integrity of our trade flows are not my department’s top priority. As such, we are immediately introducing a one-time bursary of between $150 and $240 paid to any resident of Canada who can prove they have not attempted illegal entry of the United States within the past 12 months.

November 30, 2024

The mission of DOGE

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

One of Donald Trump’s more interesting announcements shortly after winning the federal election early in November was that he was going to give Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy a formal position to do to the US government’s vast array of bureaucratic organizations what Javier Milei did to Argentina’s bloated national government. Here, scraped from the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, is Devon Eriksen‘s thoughts on how to go about pruning back the “fourth branch” of government:

Since the framers of the Constitution created a federal government with three branches, not four, there are no Constitutional checks on the emergent fourth branch.

Currently, the fourth branch is in many ways the most powerful, and certainly the most destructive, arm of the government.

– It has the privilege of targeting individual citizens on its own initiative, which is forbidden to the three other branches.

– It can interfere their lives in any way it wishes by making a “ruling”.

– The only recourse against a “ruling” is to take the bureaucracy in question to court.

– But the process is the punishment, because this takes months if not years and costs tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

– Until recently, courts have deferred to bureaucrats as a matter of legal precedent. Now they merely do so as a matter of practice.

– But should the bureaucracy lose anyway, the only punishment the court inflicts is that they are told they have to stop doing that specific thing.

– Any fines or legal costs imposed on them punish the taxpayer, not the agent or even the agency.

– And the next, closely related, thing the bureaucracy thinks of to do is once again fair game, until the courts are once again brought in, at further cost, to tell it to stop.

All of this creates a Red Queen Effect.

Citizens must establish their own organizations, and raise donations to engage in constant lawfare, just to retain the rights they haven’t lost yet. And they must win every time to maintain the status quo.

Bureaucrats, on the other hand, can fight endless legal battles using money taken from their victims by the IRS, at no cost to themselves. Any victory they claim, they may keep permanently, while any loss may be refought endlessly simply by a slight variance of the attack.

Obviously, if this system is not changed, all power will accrue to the bureaucracy over time. They will constitute a totalitarian authority over every aspect of the life of every citizen.

This is why the name “DOGE” (Department of Government Efficiency) is a serious mistake.

Look, Elon, I like a joke as much as the next guy, and I do think irreverence is a load-bearing component of checking the bureaucracy, because a false aura of gravitas is one of their defenses against public outrage.

But words mean things.

When you create a check on the bureaucracy and call it the department of government efficiency, you focus the attention, and the correction, on the fact that the bureaucracy is stomping on people’s lives and businesses inefficiently, not on the fact that they are doing so at all.

But the name isn’t my decision. The power of the vote isn’t that granular. I can only elect an administration, not protect it from tactical errors by weighing in on individual policy decisions.

Unless someone with direct power happens to read this.

So, regardless of the name, here’s how an organization might be set up to effectively check federal bureaucracies.

1. DOGE must be responsive, not merely proactive.

Being proactive sounds better in the abstract, but it is much easier for a federal agency to gin up some numbers to fight a periodic overall audit, than it is to fight an investigation of a specific case.

2. DOGE must have direct oversight.

If it must take agencies to court, it is merely a proxy for the citizens whose money is being wasted, and whose rights are being trampled.

Imagine the level of inefficiency, waste, and delay, if your process for addressing bureaucratic abuse simply results in one part of the federal government pursuing an expensive court case against another.

Instead, DOGE must have the power to simply make a ruling, via its own investigation hearing process, which is binding on federal agencies.

Any appeals to the court system must be allowed to trigger their own DOGE investigation (for wasting taxpayer fighting a ruling).

3. DOGE must have the power to punish the agent, not just the agency.

“You have to stop that now” is not a deterrent. Neither is fining the agency, because such fines are paid by the American taxpayer.

DOGE must follow Saul Alinsky’s 11th rule: target individuals, not institutions.

Why?

Because agencies are agencies. They consist of agents.

An agent is someone who acts on behalf of a principal — someone whose interests the agent is supposed to represent.

When the agent is incentivized so that his interests diverge from those of the principal, he will be increasingly likely to act in his own interest, not the principal’s.

This is the Principal-Agent Problem.

An agency is a construct, a theoretical entity. What Vonnegut would call a “granfalloon”.

Agencies do not act, they do not make decisions, they do not have incentives they respond to. Any appearance to the contrary is an emergent property created by the aggregate action of agents.

Every decision, whether we admit it or not, has a name attached to it, not a department. It is that person who responds to incentives.

Agents will favor their own incentives over those of their principal (the American people) unless a counter incentive is present for that specific person.

For this reason, DOGE should, must, have the power to discipline individual employees of the federal agencies it oversees.

This doesn’t just mean insignificant letters of reprimand in a file. It means fines against personal assets, firing, or even filing criminal charges. No qualified immunity.

Yes, you read that right. DOGE must be able to fire other agencies’ staff. I recommend that anyone fired by DOGE be permanently illegible for any federal government job, excluding only elected positions.

4. DOGE investigations must be triggerable by citizen complaints.

This is self-explanatory. It gives DOGE the practical capability to redress individual injustices, and it crowdsources your discovery problem.

Establish a hotline.

5. DOGE must have sufficient power to protect and reward whistleblowers, and punish those who retaliate against them.

6. Bureaucrats must be held responsible for outcomes, not just for following procedure.

Often, procedure is the problem. The precedent must be established, and clearly enforced, that because agents have agency, agents are responsible for using their discretion to ensure efficient, just, and sane outcomes, not just for doing whatever departmental policy allows.

7. DOGE must have an adversarial relationship with the bureaucracies is oversees.

This eliminates the phenomenon of “we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing”.

Following the previous recommendation is almost sure to make this happen.

The point is not for DOGE to address every instance of waste or wrongdoing, it is to make bureaucrats act responsibly because they fear an investigation.

In essence, I am imagining DOGE (or some superior name that better reflects the mission) as an entity with a license to treat bureaucrats the way bureaucrats currently treat citizens.

November 29, 2024

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya nominated as Director of the US National Institutes of Health

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

From the point of view of the establishment, the barbarians are well and truly inside the gates, as President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as the next director of the National Institutes of Health:

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Donald Trump’s nominee as Director of the National Health Institutes.
Photo by Taleed Brown, 2020, via Wikimedia Commons.

Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a “quick and devastating published takedown” of Bhattacharya and his fellow “fringe epidemiologists”.

Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom — and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet. Academic researchers and administrators have mostly refused to acknowledge their mistakes, much less make amends, but Bhattacharya promised yesterday to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again”.

As NIH director, he would wield a potent tool to induce reform: money. Stanford and more than a dozen other universities each get more than $500 million annually in grants from the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. The NIH grants support not only researchers but also their universities’ bureaucracies, which collect a hefty surcharge to cover supposed overhead costs. The federal largesse has helped finance the administrative bloat at universities, including the expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies under the Biden administration, which took into account a university’s commitment to DEI principles when deciding whether to award grants from the NIH and other agencies.

Those priorities are about to change. Trump has vowed to rescind immediately Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to promote DEI. During his first term, Trump threatened to issue an executive order barring universities from receiving federal funds if they suppressed free speech. He didn’t issue that order, but whether or not he does so in his next term, the NIH director will already have the power to consider a university’s commitment to academic freedom in deciding whether or not to award funds.

“For science to thrive and progress, we must be open-minded and allow vigorous and passionate debate,” says Martin Kulldorff, a former professor of medicine at Harvard. “Why should taxpayers subsidize universities that don’t allow that?” Kulldorff, an eminent epidemiologist, lost his job at Harvard after he became an early and outspoken critic of pandemic policies. In 2020, he joined with Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford, to write the Great Barrington Declaration, a critique of lockdowns that was signed by tens of thousands of scientists and physicians.

Bhattacharya, who has a Ph.D. in economics as well as an M.D. from Stanford, hung on to his job as professor of health policy at the latter’s medical school, but his views were taboo on campus. After he and colleagues did a field study at the start of the pandemic showing that the Covid fatality rate was much lower than the doomsday number used to justify lockdowns, they were vilified by academics and journalists, and Stanford subjected them to a two-month inquiry by an outside legal firm. (They were vindicated by the inquiry and also by subsequent research confirming their findings.)

Trump is a deals guy … and Canadian politicians need to negotiate with him on that basis

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In what has turned out to be his final column for TVO, Matt Gurney says that Canadian views on Trump need to evolve if we hope to preserve the overall amicable relationship between the two countries. Trump made his career on making deals … but not many of our political leaders seem to have clued in that this means we need to approach all our post-Biden American affairs with that in mind:

Justin Trudeau meets with President Donald Trump at the White House, 13 February, 2017.
Photo from the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

Ever since the re-election of Donald Trump earlier this month, the most interesting question in Canadian politics has been “Who gets it?” That’s the main thing I’ve been looking for, and I think some of our leaders get it — or are starting to, at least.

Doug Ford doesn’t get it. Or didn’t, anyway, up until Tuesday afternoon.

On Monday night, president-elect Trump announced via a post on his Truth Social app that, as one of his first acts upon retaking the Oval Office in January, he would levy a 25 per cent tariff against all goods coming in from Canada and Mexico until those two countries fix the problems Trump says exist along the border. That’s a careful bit of phrasing on my part, so let me explain: I don’t disagree that there are issues for the United States along both borders. I don’t necessarily accept that the issues are the same on both borders or that Trump has accurately characterized the overall situation. But, in any case, Canada now has less than two months to figure out what it can do, assuming it can do anything, to satisfy the president-elect’s demands.

It’s very possible that we can do enough. Trump is a negotiator and a dealmaker, and we have to see his social-media post through that lens. He is establishing a strong opening position, and we’ll negotiate him down from there. That’s the good news, such as it is. The bad news, though, is that there’s no reason to assume Trump is going to do this only once. After we meet his demands on the border, he could demand that Canada take on more of the burden of the military defence of North America and the Western alliance. After we’ve drafted a bunch of people and launched a fleet of new warships and sent a heavily armed stabilization force to Haiti, he could come after us for our dairy subsidies. Once we give way on that, it’ll be getting tough on white-collar crime or telecom access or airline access. And so on and so on and so on. It’ll be one damned thing after another.

The broad contours of this were clear to me by about 1:30 in the morning on the day after (or night of, if you prefer) the U.S. election. As I keep saying, the party is over. Some of Trump’s demands will be basically utterly bogus, and others may be arguably unreasonable, but some of them are absolutely going to be fair, and Canada has, to my enormous frustration, left itself very, very vulnerable to his brand of pressure. We have utterly failed as a country to adapt to a changing world order by getting this country onto a more serious footing on any number of fronts, especially trade and defence. We were warned by friendlier U.S. administrations, including by presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. We didn’t listen. That was idiotic, and I can only hope not suicidal on our parts. Trump is going to get his way.

November 28, 2024

“Fly the flag, you bigoted rural cis scum!” said the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Apparently just failing to vote for a “voluntary” observation of Pride season is enough to get the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario to impose fines and mandatory re-education sentences on elected municipal officials here in the most tolerant province in Canada:

Emo is a township of about 1,300 people located in the far west of Ontario, along the border with Minnesota.

In a decision handed down last week, the Human Tribunal of Ontario ruled that Emo, its mayor and two of its councillors had violated the Ontario Human Rights Code by refusing to proclaim June as “Pride Month”.

The town was also cited for failing to fly “an LGBTQ2 rainbow flag”, despite the fact that they don’t have an official flag pole.

The dispute began in 2020 when the township was approached by the group Borderland Pride with a written request to proclaim June as Pride Month.

Attached to the letter was a draft proclamation including clauses such as “pride is necessary to show community support and belonging for LGBTQ2 individuals” and “the diversity of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression represents a positive contribution to society”.

Emo was also asked to fly an “LGBTQ2 rainbow flag for a week of your choosing”.

Borderland Pride then asked Emo to “email us a copy of your proclamation or resolution once adopted and signed”.

[…]

The claim of discrimination ultimately hinged on a single line uttered by Emo Mayor Harold McQuaker. When the proclamation came up for consideration, McQuaker was heard to say in a recording of the meeting, “There’s no flag being flown for the other side of the coin … there’s no flags being flown for the straight people”.

As Human Rights Tribunal vice-chair Karen Dawson wrote in her decision, “I find this remark was demeaning and disparaging of the LGBTQ2 community of which Borderland Pride is a member and therefore constituted discrimination under the Code”.

Dawson also ruled that given the “close proximity” of McQuaker’s comment to his nay vote — that too “constituted discrimination under the Code”.

[…]

The Human Rights Tribunal ultimately ordered the Township to pay $10,000 to Borderland Pride, and for McQuaker to personally pay them another $5,000.

This was lower than what Borderland Pride had been seeking; they wanted $15,000 from the township and $10,000 each from the three councillors who voted no.

But McQuaker and Emo’s chief administrative officer were also ordered to complete an online course known as “Human Rights 101” and “provide proof of completion … to Borderland Pride within 30 days”.

The course is offered by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and their latest edition opens with an animated video telling viewers that the Human Rights Code “is not meant to punish”.

November 27, 2024

Trump’s plan to dismiss transgender troops will apparently “gut” the US military

Filed under: Government, Health, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As if the US military services hadn’t suffered enough from their own government, it’s now being widely asserted in the media that Trump’s declared plan to get rid of all current transgender service members will be a desperately hard blow to an already over-stressed military structure:

The news media is calmly warning that Donald Trump is planning to ban transgender servicemembers from the American military, which will absolutely gut the armed forces.

Sample claim, from Newsweek, quoting the leader of an LGBT advocacy nonprofit:

    Abruptly discharging 15,000-plus service members, especially given that the military’s recruiting targets fell short by 41,000 recruits last year, adds administrative burdens to war fighting units.

    There would be a significant financial cost, as well as a loss of experience and leadership that will take possibly 20 years and billions of dollars to replace.

We’ll practically have no military left! It would be like a whole infantry division suddenly just vanishing: 15,000-plus transgendered service members.

You’re going to see this number a lot in the weeks ahead. The New Republic, today: “Donald Trump’s plan to ban transgender people from the military would have a devastating effect: At least 15,000 members would be forced to leave.”

That number comes from a 2018 report by the now-defunct Palm Center, a pro-LGBT independent research institute in California, which reached this conclusion: “Transgender troops make up 0.7% (seven-tenths of one percent) of the military (Active Component and Selected Reserve)”. Their best guess about a total number: 14,707. The media is just rounding that number up to the next thousand.

The Palm Center … extrapolated a lot, let’s say, in good part by multiplying their guess about a percentage, derived from a grossly inadequate survey of a select number of active duty troops, times the total number of servicemembers. Page 4:

    Assuming that the distribution of transgender men and women is roughly equivalent in the Active and Selected Reserve Components, it is possible to derive an estimate of the number of transgender troops in the Selected Reserve as follows. The number of transgender women is .0066 x 652,623 = 4,307 and the number of transgender men is .0091 x 156,080 = 1,420. The total number of transgender members of the Selected Reserve is 4,307 + 1,420 = 5,727. And, the total number of transgender troops is 8,980 (active) + 5,727 (reserve) = 14,707.

Assuming the distribution, it is possible to derive an estimate. That’s the basis of the 15,000 number that you’ll see in news stories. Remember that language.

Similarly, a 2016 RAND study offered these findings (among others), and note the remarkable thing that happens between the first and second paragraph:

    It is difficult to estimate the number of transgender personnel in the military due to current policies and a lack of empirical data. Applying a range of prevalence estimates, combining data from multiple surveys, and adjusting for the male/female distribution in the military provided a midrange estimate of around 2,450 transgender personnel in the active component (out of a total number of approximately 1.3 million active-component service members) and 1,510 in the Selected Reserve.

    Only a subset will seek gender transition–related treatment. Estimates derived from survey data and private health insurance claims data indicate that, each year, between 29 and 129 service members in the active component will seek transition-related care that could disrupt their ability to deploy.

So studies indicate that there are 3,960 transgendered servicemembers, and also that there are 14,707 transgendered servicemembers, and “between 29 and 129 service members in the active component” who will actively seek gender transition services in a typical year.

So it’s definitely somewhere between 29 and 15,000.

November 26, 2024

Orwell is more relevant now than at any time since his death

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’m delighted to find that Andrew Doyle shares my preference for Orwell the essayist over Orwell the novelist:

It is not without justification that Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) have become the keystones of George Orwell’s legacy. Personally, I’ve always favoured his essays, more often quoted than read in full. I recently wrote an article about his essays for the Washington Post, focusing on their relevance to today’s febrile political climate. You can read the article here. I would draw particular attention to the multitude of comments from left-wing readers who are apparently outraged at my argument (actually, Orwell’s argument) that authoritarianism is not specific to any one political tribe. They seem oddly determined to prove the point.

Orwell is unrivalled on the topic of the human instinct for oppressive behaviour, but his essays are far more wide-ranging than that. In these little masterworks, one senses a great thinker testing his own theses, forever fluctuating, refining his views in the very act of writing. The essays span the last two decades of his life, offering us the most direct possible insight into this unique mind.

[…]

I find Orwell’s disquisitions on literature to be among his most rewarding. “All art is propaganda”, he declares in his extended piece on Charles Dickens (1940) [link]. This conviction, flawed as is it, accounts for his determination to focus less on Dickens’s literary merits and more on his class consciousness, which is found wanting. Even better is Orwell’s rebuttal to Tolstoy’s strangely literal-minded reading of Shakespeare (1947’s “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” [link]), which is so rhetorically deft that it seems to settle the matter for good.

Another impressive essay, “Inside the Whale” (1940) [link], opens with a glowing assessment of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1935) but soon broadens its range to cover many contemporary novelists and their approach to social commentary. The title is a reference to Miller’s remarks on the Biblical tale of Jonah, suggesting that life inside the whale has much to recommend it. Orwell puts it this way:

    There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what happens.

Orwell invites us to imagine that the whale is transparent, and so writers of Miller’s ilk may snuggle contentedly within, observing without interacting, recording snapshots of the world as it bounces by. This kind of inaction is anathema to Orwell, whose every written word seems to be driving towards the enactment of social change.

Orwell’s essays often serve as a cudgel to batter his detractors. He dislikes homosexuals, or those “fashionable pansies” who lack the masculine vigour to take up arms in defence of their country. He displays a similar lack of patience for the imperialistic middle-class “Blimps” and the anti-patriotic left-wing intelligentsia, or indeed anyone who adheres slavishly to any given political ideology. His work bears much of the stamp of the old left; that mix of social conservatism and economic leftism that we see most powerfully expressed in his 1941 essay “The Lion and the Unicorn” [link]. Bad writing is also a recurring bugbear; Orwell’s loathing of cliché and “ready-made metaphors” is one of the reasons his own prose style is so effervescent.

[…]

When Orwell pessimistically refers to “the remaining years of free speech”, one cannot help but be reminded of the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of today’s British government. He expresses irritation that more writers are not wielding their pens in the service of improving society. His own work, by contrast, is what he would term “constructive”, profoundly moral, and purposefully crafted in the hope of actuating real-world change. While other writers resigned themselves to a life inside the whale, Orwell was determined to cut his way out.

“Bluesky is going to give us hours of amusement as a platform full of wannabe school prefects all report each other”

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I don’t mean to make poking fun at Twit/X alternative sites like Bluesky a regular thing, but the performative flouncing as progressives announce they’re leaving Twit/X for a more congenial — for which read “censorious” — site continues to amuse.

Bluesky welcomes former Twitter/X luminaries

I’m going to take a pop at a sub-group of flouncers, though, the ones moaning about being called hurty words. This includes a number of individuals who genuinely seem to think it’s their role in life to go looking for nasty bigoted shite, then report it to Twitter’s overlords (and now Bluesky’s overlords as well, if things like [the image on the right] are anything to go by).

“Bluesky is going to give us hours of amusement as a platform full of wannabe school prefects all report each other” seems a fair assessment.

And yes, I have to engage in a little ritual genuflection here, because I have genuinely been called a large number of nasty names in my life. And despite that, dibber-dobbers still give me hives.

If I had a quid for every use of “dyke” (and related) sent my way, I would be matching millions with sundry oil sheiks, and that’s before we get to the ire directed at any columnist with whom ordinary members of the public disagree. I am old enough to have received thousands of abusive letters (about both novels and columns), some of them written in green ink. People are allowed to dislike me and my kind, or to argue that I’ve written a load of cobblers. They’re also allowed to dislike you and your kind. It would be astonishingly easy for me to wander over to Arabic Twitter and report lots of sincere Muslims for saying bigoted things about homosexuals. I don’t engage in this behaviour because I don’t expect the world to be my friend.

Relatedly (and this is directed at ethnic minorities as well as fellow gayers), a lot of folks from “historically disadvantaged groups” have become dab hands at dishing it out over the last twenty or so years. A necessary corollary of this behaviour is “learn to take it”. Yes, that means you. People are not going to stop saying hurty words to each other. People are also going to judge you based on the behaviour of your worst activists and vote accordingly (see recent US election results).

What of the core claims being made? Is Twitter genuinely worse now, a victim of what goes by the name “social media enshittification“?

Well, yes and no. I know many people dislike what Musk has done to Twitter, but when he made “likes” private, he stopped his site being used as a vector for HR vindictiveness (something about which HR mavens have complained, by the way, at least privately). It’s also now substantially more difficult to generate a pile-on using a quote-tweet, as well as possible to read tweets (but without interaction) from people who are hot on the block button.

The latter change has allowed me to establish why Baroness Nicholson had me blocked. I’d always wondered, because she’s had me blocked for as long as I can remember, yet like me, she can legitimately be described as “sex realist” or “gender-critical”. Musk’s change meant I was able for the first time to see an entire thread underneath one of her tweets, so learned that she blocks anyone — friend and foe alike — for swearing. Women who know her socially and get on with her well “IRL” have been blocked for saying “bugger” and “shite” on Twitter.

Well, glad that’s cleared up. Good to know.

The worst change Musk has made involves deboosting external links. This first emerged in April last year, in response to Substack releasing Notes (which Musk considered so derivative of Twitter’s code as to be a “clone”). At first only direct links to Substack were affected. If you had your own domain — as I do — you were fine. However, external link deboosting is now being applied uniformly. Everyone from a local tradesman selling new driveways and conservatories to the BBC and the Spectator now has to make use of some tedious version of “link in following tweet” or “link in bio”.

If Musk doesn’t fix this, he will legitimately lose the journalists and commentators currently on the site. Those people came, originally, to share stuff from their mastheads, and this applies regardless of politics. I first gained a following thanks to professional experience — yes, it was once fine for commercial solicitors to natter on the socials about the Enterprise Investment Scheme and how it related to start-ups and spin-outs etc — and later through Speccie columns along with a couple of books. A tweet from Tim Harford praising my second novel (with a link, bless him) went “viral” and led to thousands of sales. Pieces for the magazine proved popular. Just as I enjoyed Twitter for other people’s links, other people paid me the same courtesy.

Spotted on Instapundit:

November 25, 2024

Andrew Sullivan as an (unconscious?) exemplar of the mentalités school

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I sent the URL to Andrew Sullivan’s article I linked to yesterday to Severian to see what he’d make of it. He certainly didn’t disappoint me:

Founding Questions coat of arms by “urbando”.
The Latin motto translates to “We are so irrevocably fucked”.

Because someone like Andrew Sullivan is the kind of guy he is, we might have a good example to hand of a mentalités approach to History [Wiki]. We can all play along, because the key to a mentalités approach is a version of our favorite game, “For That to Be True”. Let’s see if we can’t ferret out some of Sullivan’s cultural assumptions here, and what that might tell us about our world.

There was something truly surreal about President Biden suddenly changing course and agreeing to give Ukraine advanced long-range missiles to attack deep inside Russian territory in the last two months of his administration. There was no speech to the nation; no debate in the Senate; just a quiet demonstration of unilateral presidential fuck-you power. You know: the kind we’ve long worried about with Donald Trump.

A couple things stand out immediately. The great thing about fags and chicks as pundits is that they’re hyper-emotional, so they always go for the big splashy adjectives. “Surreal”, for instance (and not just surreal, “truly surreal”). Let us instead return to the cool, rational prose of 18th century diplomacy, and term this a volte-face.

They happen all the time, of course. Indeed it’s one of the standard criticisms of representative government — they’re impossible to deal with, long term, because the volte-face is baked into the system. No agreement is so airtight that it’s not at immediate risk of repudiation if one of the other guys wins the next election. This is Diplomacy 101.

So, there’s the first assumption we need to examine: Since this kind of thing does, in fact, happen all the time — as any professional political analyst surely knows — why does this particular volte-face seem so “truly surreal?”

Moreover, it’s not as if the Biden Administration has been the model of consistency up to now. Not only is the diplomatic volte-face pretty common, so is the domestic — again, it’s a standard criticism of parliamentary-style government. And not just during election season. Domestic policy changes with the winds, because that’s kinda what it’s supposed to do. Vox populi, vox dei, at least as far back as the early 18th century, and the populi are notoriously fickle.

So why is this one “truly surreal”? If I were one of those Peter Turchin or Steve Sailer types, I’d plug all the Biden Administration’s policy decisions, foreign and domestic, into an Excel sheet and graph the changes. You know, plotting “variance ratios” against “consistency coefficients” and whatnot. It’d be all over the damn place, for reasons we here in this clubhouse call “The Do Long Bridge” — Brandon is the titular head of government, but there ain’t no fuckin’ CO, and if you look at the spastic incoherence of “Biden’s” policy decisions you’d see it plain as day.

It seems extremely unlikely, to put it no stronger, that a paid political analyst like Andrew Sullivan doesn’t see that. So either he does see it, but is pretending not to, for fun and profit — possible cultural assumption #1 — or he truly doesn’t see it, which would be revealing of cultural assumption #2.

I can’t decide which is which yet, but I can see a common denominator for both. It’s the last sentence I quoted in that paragraph:

    You know: the kind we’ve long worried about with Donald Trump.

There’s a whole world full of embedded assumptions there. Does Trump actually do that — “a quiet demonstration of unilateral presidential fuck-you power”? […] To me, it sure looks like Trump was actually remarkably restrained when it came to unilateral demonstrations of presidential fuck-you power, alas, compared to Biden and especially Obama (he of the infamous pen and phone). And the few times he tried, he got Hawaiian Judged to hell and back. But since I don’t have my Steve Sailer graph to hand, I’m not going to assert that (maybe it’s one of my assumptions — I really want to see Trump exercise some fuck-you power).

And the verb is extremely interesting. They’re worried about Trump doing it; they’ve heretofore not been bothered by Biden doing it.

In search of bluer skies

Filed under: Humour, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Critic, Benedict Spence channels his inner David Attenborough to document the majestic migration of American progressives from their habitual grazing lands to friendlier territory:

What will Twitter do without its smuggest inhabitants?

And so we come to it again. It is that time of year when we put on our David Attenborough voices, and talk in low, slightly wistful tones about the great migration that is about to unfold. Everywuh you look, creatures great and small are beginning their treacherous juhneys across a vast and inhospitable wilduhness to happiuh hunting grounds and more pleasant pastures under the clear blue skies. The hullabaloo that accompanies them is impossible to miss — across the plains, the cries go up from elders to alert the rest of the herd of the imminent departure.

Though some may never return from this arduous trek, most will. Disavow yourself of the mental image of elephants and zebras crossing the African savannah — that’s not what we’re here for. This migration is metaversical in nature: it is time, once more, for people to announce they are leaving Twitter.

This year’s exodus came later than usual, prompted by Donald Trump’s bulldozer of a victory over Kamala Harris in the US presidential election, with grown men and women across the country — and its second largest airbase, the UK — deciding that Elon Musk, the platform’s owner and the Orange Man’s endorser-in-chief, was at least partly responsible for this travesty. Not the economy, you understand, oh no. Nor immigration, nor the preoccupation by Democrats with shoulder-chewingly stupid culture war issues the average voter thinks are at best mad and at worst satanic.

No, no, it is all about Musk — who is at once the world’s wealthiest evil genius and also a gibbering moron, according to people who thought Cacklin’ Kamala was a born winner. Musk, we are told, has ushered in a stream of “hate” ever since buying Twitter and rebranding it 10, warping the minds of the impressionable and irreparably damaging the future of the West by facilitating Trump’s return.

This is not Musk’s only crime, though. He has also tweaked other aspects of X’s features, including the block function, making it possible for those on the receiving end of this internal exile to see the posts of their nemeses again without being able to interact with them. This was for a fair few blockees how they were reminded of the existence of their blockers, many of whom they had long since forgotten. Often, in the same instance, it was also how they learned said blocker was off somewhere else.

Musk has also moved to erode the power of institutions and individuals who lived their lives high on the power of credentialism, and the authority this brought them. The changing of blue tick criteria and the emphasis on community notes now means many who were once feted on the site by virtue of who they were must now work harder for their dopamine. But above all else, Musk has refused to silence a swathe of right wing voices who always existed but lived their X lives in the shadows. The platform became more right wing, and for many that was just too much. Having been reliably told throughout the past year that the crude reply guys were just Russian bots and that their gal would ride over them on a wave to victory, they and their allies over here — the infamous adults back in charge of the UK — are doing the grownup thing and going off in a huff to play somewhere else.

Looking toward the first order effects of 47

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, Government, Media, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter is delighted that his pessimistic election forecast turned out to be wrong and considers what the incoming Trump administration will be doing in the short-term:

There are obvious parallels between the 2024 election, the 2016 election, and the Brexit vote, all of which are a bit awkward for elite theory maximalists. Their position, taken to its extreme, seems to be that only the elite can actually do things, that all political phenomena are ultimately a consequence of elite machinations. Which makes elite theory in many ways the highbrow version of conspiracy theory, the main difference being that they talk about the Cathedral’s systems of power instead of the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and smoky backrooms. And yet, the elite clearly don’t always get their way. In the case of Brexit, the elite were absolutely unanimous in their support for Remain … and the elite lost. Similarly in the case of the 2016 US election. Elite preferences carry an enormous amount of weight; it’s generally much better for a cause to have elite support than suffer elite opposition. But elites are not actually decisive. They can be beaten.

It’s obviously much too early to judge the 47th US presidency, which hasn’t started yet. Cynics expect a repeat of 2016: just as Trump’s promises to drain the swamp and build the wall came to, if not nothing, then very little, so will his promises to deport them all, replace the income tax with tariffs, reign in the universities by going after their accreditation and endowments, drain the swamp for real this time, and so on prove to be so much hot air. So far all we know are Trump’s cabinet picks and other appointments, which suggest that this cynicism might be premature. […]

The new Trump admin shows every sign of gearing up for a Dark MAGA rampage through the Beltway.

If you’re curious about where Dark MAGA came from, why yes it was memed into reality. Aristophanes
tells the wild saga: from in-joke to shitcoin to the hat on Elon Musk’s head.

They aren’t going to just drain the swamp. They’re going to drain it, dry it, soak it in gasoline, and set it on fire. They are going to purge the US government of the useless, the incompetent, the subversive, and the criminal. At least, that seems to be the intention … and given the way the rats are scrambling to escape the ship before it sinks, the regime’s minions, at least, seem to think that plan has a good chance of succeeding. […]

Of course, a lot could happen between now and January. The Democrats might find some convoluted legal pathway to deprive The Insurrectionist of the Oval Office, as Tree of Woe suggested, which of course would initiate a constitutional crisis and probably a civil war. They could assassinate him, which would also probably start a civil war, and which is probably why Trump has been holed up in Mar-a-Lago since the election. Either of these outcomes would probably place JD Vance in the presidency, which is probably much worse for the regime than Trump: Vance is marine corps combat vet who reads Curtis Yarvin and is fluent enough in meme that he probably has a frog alt on Twitter.

[…]

News that suicides spiked after the election is apparently fake, though crisis call centres catering to the Pronoun Jugend did experience a massive increase, and one guy apparently unalived his entire family. They’re still in a state of shock: shaving their heads, vowing to start a sex strike, fleeing to Canada (I do not recommend).

The left are religious fanatics, and religious fanatics don’t give up just because it looks hopeless. It’s also worth recalling that the last time Trump won, the riots didn’t start until inauguration. There’s plenty of time yet, and there are a lot of very wealthy and very influential people who probably feel they have nothing to lose as their precious oxen are in danger of being lethally gored by Dark MAGA on the Washington Mall as a sacrifice to America’s Founding gods, after which they themselves will be hanged from Wotan’s Tree of Liberty. Note that it doesn’t matter if Trump will really follow through with all of this; what matters is if the other side thinks that he will. Ruling out a dramatic escalation in civil violence in the US is almost certainly hasty.

[…]

Another play the regime could make is to just start World War III before Trump takes office, either in order to justify a military coup d’etat, or just to dump a catastrophe in Trump’s lap so that he’ll be too busy dealing with that to drain the swamp. They definitely seem to be ramping things up in Ukraine, with the new strategy of long-distance missile strikes deep into Russian territory. The idea is probably to provoke the bear so badly that it starts mauling NATO countries directly, rather than just chewing through their exhausted national arsenals in the mud of the Donbass. That might work; then again, Putin knows full well that all he has to do is wait a couple months and he’ll be dealing with Trump directly, and Trump is on record as wanting to wind down hostilities as a top priority as soon as he’s in office. Vlad may be a bad man, but he is a very patient bad man.

Assuming that the regime is unsuccessful in baiting Russia into a direct attack on Europe, Trump’s victory probably has very big, tumultuous, and positive implications for European politics. Positive, at least, for anyone who doesn’t hate Europe … and therefore very bad implications for the people currently running the civilizational centre of the human species into the dirt.

The Germans, at least, seem to think so.

Chancellor Scholz’ unstable “traffic light” coalition disintegrated almost immediately after Trump was elected, sending Germany into its own election … in which the AfD is poised to do very well for itself, much to the consternation of Germany’s political class. eugyppius has been doing invaluable work covering Germany’s politics for the anglosphere audience; he provides an excellent overview of the reasons for the coalition’s collapse in this recent interview on the J Burden show.

November 24, 2024

Trump breaks the electoral pattern that had persisted for decades

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Jason Garshfield outlines the “traditional” pattern of presidential elections and identifies the relatively few breaks in that pattern and how Donald Trump represents a major disruption compared to what outside observers might have expected to see:

How The New Republic saw Donald Trump during the 2024 election campaign.

… Yet the symbolic power of the presidency is paramount. We speak of the 1980s as the Reagan Era and the 1990s as the Clinton Era, not the “Tip O’Neill Era” or the “Newt Gingrich Era”. The presidency represents control over the federal government, and ultimately over the spirit and the direction of the nation. It is the highest political prize, and a party consistently denied the presidency will not remain a satisfied player in the system, even if they achieve political success on other meaningful fronts. This is dangerous in a nation where mutual assent is a prerequisite for the smooth functioning of a free and fair electoral system.

Trump’s 2024 victory does not feel as shocking as his 2016 victory did. After all, we’ve seen this show before. But 2024 is a more remarkable coup than 2016. Back then, Trump’s victory did not buck the prevailing trend. This time, he won against that trend and shattered the pattern.

Some have argued that Trump’s indomitable force of personality, demonstrated in the way in which he has refashioned American politics in his image over the past decade, vindicates the Great Man Theory of History. For instance, Yair Rosenberg, writing for The Atlantic in 2022, commented that Trump’s “personal idiosyncrasies — and, I would argue, malignancies — altered the course of American history in directions it otherwise would not have gone”. To Rosenberg, this represented a turn for the worse, but many of Trump’s supporters would say the same, while casting it in a more positive light. As with Napoleon Bonaparte, one cannot confidently state that if Trump had never been born, someone like him would have done what he did.

Elsewhere in this magazine, I compare Donald Trump to the Mule, a character in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation stories who, with his unique superpower of mind control, manages to undo the entire Seldon Plan which had been designed to direct the future of the galaxy. In Asimov’s fictional social science of psychohistory, humans are compared to molecules within a gas: the path of each individual molecule is unpredictable, but the movement of the gas as a whole can be predicted. But the psychohistorians assume that no one molecule can ever have a significant effect on the whole — and they are mistaken.

Trump is a particle that defies measurement. It is as though Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle applies to him: you can know where he is, or how fast he is going, but never both at the same time. Once you think you have him pinned down to a fixed point in the cosmos, he throws your calculations into chaos. This drives his opponents crazy and imbues his most fervent supporters with a near-messianic belief that he will triumph against any odds.

Social scientists tend to hate the Great Man Theory of History because it renders their work entirely meaningless. No matter how strong certain social forces may be, they can ultimately be dispensed with at any time by unpredictable mighty figures. As a result, the future is frighteningly unknowable. But both Great Man Theory and historical determinism have dire implications. Either individuals are irrelevant, or else we live in an unknowable and irrational universe, which unfolds according to no fixed laws. Neither theory allows rationalism and individualism to coexist.

The durability of the eight-year pattern in American politics seems to provide strong evidence against the Great Man Theory. Many of the leaders and almost-leaders of the United States since 1952 have been outsized personalities, yet the sociological paradigm suggests that their personal charisma had little impact on their success or failure. In this view, neither Barack Obama’s charm nor John McCain and Mitt Romney’s lack of charm radically influenced the outcomes of the 2008 and 2012 elections. It was simply time for a Democrat to win, and McCain and Romney might as well not have run. For that matter, both parties might as well have saved their energy and agreed to simply exchange places every eight years — that is, if we accept historical determinism as the driving factor.

Before Trump, only two other figures in postwar America came close to being Great Men. They were the finalists of the 1980 election: Ronald Reagan, who managed to win against the pattern and usher in twelve straight years of Republican control, and Jimmy Carter, who lost the election he should have won. It is debatable as to whether the 1980 election was more a story of Carter’s weakness or Reagan’s strength, but both undoubtedly played a role. Now Trump has become both Carter and Reagan, the unexpected loser of one election and the unexpected winner of another.

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