Quotulatiousness

June 27, 2023

Adam Kinzinger seems to admit that the “Patriot Front” are really federal agents

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

Tom Knighton on the weird MAGA-versus-“MAGA” confrontation:

A while back, a group calling itself Patriot Front showed up. Dressed in dark shirts and khaki pants, with ball caps and masks hiding their face, Patriot Front started engaging in some very … questionable behavior.

Almost immediately, they were labeled as feds.

Virtually no one believed they were who they claimed to be. They were openly Nazi-like, even providing the Hitler salute, all without the usual trappings of the neo-Nazis we typically see.

Well, recently, the Proud Boys clashed with Patriot Front.

The Proud Boys have been accused of being all kinds of things, too, including racists, yet it’s clear from the video shown that the Proud Boys aren’t fans of Patriot Front. Instead, you hear jeers calling them “racists” and “Nazis”.

The altercation got physical and a couple of the Patriot Front members were unmasked.

Enter former Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who offered up this hot take:

The video shown there is, in fact, the video in question, and Kinzinger’s comments have riled a lot of people up.

After all, he’s basically admitting that Patriot Front is a federal law enforcement operation.

Is it?

Probably, though I’m not sure Kinzinger would be read in on such an operation.

May 15, 2023

“Donald Trump is, as a performer, in a class of his own. From the second the show began, he was in command: withering, funny, sharp, powerful.”

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

I didn’t watch the CNN broadcast that Andrew Sullivan is reluctantly praising here — he still hates and fears Donald Trump, but he has to acknowledge the man’s abilities:

The reason so many are freaking out about CNN’s astonishing ad for the Trump re-election campaign this week is that he was on tip-top form. Donald Trump is, as a performer, in a class of his own. From the second the show began, he was in command: withering, funny, sharp, powerful. He may be one of the most effective and pathological demagogues I’ve ever encountered: capable of lying with staggering sincerity, of making up stories with panache: shameless, and indefatigable.

Now think of Joe Biden, peace be upon him. He can barely get a sentence out without a mumble, a slur, or a confused expression. He seems frail and distant. In a direct contrast between the two old men, there will surely be some voters — and maybe many — who simply back the man who seems capable of doing the job vigorously for four more years. There hasn’t been this kind of contrast since Clinton-Dole (and Dole in 1996 was sharp AF) and Reagan-Mondale (it took Reagan’s debate genius to destroy the concern). Trump, in stark contrast, bulldozed the host Kaitlan Collins, who was far more in charge of facts and details than Biden will ever be.

Shamelessness has a huge appeal. It’s why we can’t see a production of Richard III without at some points egging on the child-murderer. And I confess that watching the deposition conducted by Robbie Kaplan, he got me. When Trump says to Kaplan, after dismissing Carroll as “not his type”, “You would not be my choice of mine either, to be honest with you. I hope you’re not insulted”, I LOLed. It was disgusting — but how could you not laugh at the effrontery?

At one point in the CNN show, Trump took the performance up a notch — sympathizing with E Jean Carroll’s husband:

    He was a newscaster, very nice man. She called him an ape, happens to be African-American. Called him an ape — the judge wouldn’t allow us to put that in. Her dog or her cat was named “Vagina”, the judge wouldn’t allow to put that in.

Sorry, but the way he delivered the word “vagina” was worthy of a good stand-up. And the affect — the lone ranger telling the truth while prissy elites tut-tut — channels a vast swathe of the public mood.

The issues are also turning Trump’s way. As Title 42 expires today, a huge influx of fraudulent “asylum” seekers is on the verge of overwhelming what border we have left — some with court dates as far away as 2027. Virtually none will be deported ever. A Marine veteran has been charged with manslaughter after manhandling an out-of-control black man on the subway: a trial that’s catnip for the right. People have vague memories of a pre-Covid economic boom and associate it with Trump. Ukraine will be an increasing headache for Biden, as horrible decisions loom at some point if Ukraine can’t win full liberation of their country.

Biden is tethered to Kamala Harris, who will be seen by many as a possible president by default if Biden kicks the bucket in a few years. And she is an even worse politician and manager than Hillary Clinton. The MSM has spent the last few months attempting to destroy the only viable alternative to Trump, DeSantis, because they’ve actually convinced themselves of a looming “Biden blowout“.

I say the emergency is still here; that Trump is more likely than not returning to the White House as of now; and the interlude of these few precious years when this monster wasn’t daily assaulting our constitution, sanity, and our sense of decency is over.

Get used to it; and strap yourselves in.

November 19, 2022

American political parties from 1865 down to the Crazy Years we’re living through now

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

Severian responds to a comment about the Democrats and Republicans and how they have morphed over the years to the point neither party would recognize itself:

“The Third-Term Panic”, by Thomas Nast, originally published in Harper’s Magazine on 7 November 1874.

A braying ass, in a lion’s coat, and “N.Y. Herald” collar, frightening animals in the forest: a giraffe (“N. Y. Tribune”), a unicorn (“N. Y. Times”), and an owl (“N. Y. World”); an ostrich, its head buried, represents “Temperance”. An elephant, “The Republican Vote”, stands near broken planks (Inflation, Repudiation, Home Rule, and Re-construction). Under the elephant, a pit labeled “Southern Claims. Chaos. Rum.” A fox (“Democratic Party”) has its forepaws on the plank “Reform. (Tammany. K.K.)” The title refers to U.S. Grant’s possible bid for a third presidential term. This possibility was criticized by New York Herald owner and editor James Gordon Bennett, Jr.
Image and caption via Wikimedia Commons.

I find this extremely useful. I’d add that the postbellum parties do shift ideologies fairly regularly, as PR notes, such that even though they’re still called by the same names, they’re nowhere near the same parties, 1865-present.
I’d add some distinguishing tags for ease of reference, like so:

DEMOCRATS:

The Redeemers of the “Solid South”, 1865-1882, when their main issue was ending Reconstruction and establishing Jim Crow.

The Grover Cleveland years, 1882-1896: Still primarily an opposition party, their main goal was reining in the ridiculous excesses of the Gilded Age Republicans. As one of about 100 people worldwide who have strong opinions on Grover Cleveland, I should probably recuse myself here, so let me just say this: Union Army veterans were to the Gilded Age GOP what the Ukraine is to the Uniparty now. They simply couldn’t shovel money at them fast enough, and the guys who orchestrate those ridiculous flag-sucking “thank you for your service” celebrations before pro sporting events would tell them to tone it way, way down. Cleveland spent most of his presidency slapping the worst of this down.

[How bad was it? So bad that not only did they pass ridiculous giveaways like the Arrears of Pension Act and the Dependent Pension Act — think “Build Back Brandon” on steroids, times two, plus a bunch of lesser boondoggles — but they got together every Friday night when Congress was in session to pass “private” pension bills. These are exactly what they sound like: Federal pensions to one specific individual, put up by his Congressman. Grover Cleveland used to burn the midnight oil vetoing these ridiculous fucking things, which makes him a true American hero as far as I’m concerned].

The Populist Party years, 1896-1912: They were more or less absorbed by the Populist Party — William Jennings Bryan ran as a “Democrat” in 1896, but he was really a Populist; that election hinged entirely on economic issues. They still had the “Solid South”, but the Democrats of those years were basically Grangers.

The Progressive Years, 1912-1968: They picked up all the disaffected “Bull Moose” Republicans who split the ticket and handed the Presidency to Woodrow Wilson in 1912, becoming the pretty much openly Fascist entity they’d remain until 1968.

The Radical Party, 1968-1992: The fight between the Old and New Left, or Marxism vs. Maoism.

The Boomer Triumphalist Party, 1992-2000. It’s an Alanis-level irony that Bill Clinton was the most “conservative” president in my lifetime, if the metric for “conservatism” is “what self-proclaimed conservatives say they want”. This was our Holiday From History, in which “wonks” reigned supreme, tweaking the commas in the tax code while occasionally making some noises about silly lifestyle shit.

The Batshit Insane Party, 2000-Present. The years of the Great Inversion. Today’s Democrats only know one thing: Whatever is, is wrong.

REPUBLICANS:

The Radical Party, 1864-1876: Determined to impose utopia at bayonet point in the conquered South, they started asking themselves why they couldn’t simply impose utopia at bayonet point everywhere. They never did figure it out, and we owe those awful, awful racists in the Democratic Party our undying thanks for that. This is the closest America ever came to a theocracy until The Current Year. Morphed into

The party of flabbergastingly ludicrous robber baron excess, 1876-1896. In these years, J.P. Morgan personally bailed out the United States Treasury. Think about that. FTX, meet Credit Mobilier. You guys are pikers, and note that was 1872. William McKinley deserves a lot more credit than he gets in pretty much everything, but he might’ve been the most fiscally sane American president. Only Calvin Coolidge is even in the ballpark.

The Progressive Party, 1900-1912. For all the Left loves to call Republicans “fascists”, for a time they were … or close enough, Fascism not being invented quite yet. But the Democrats coopted it under Wilson, leading to

The Party of (Relative) Sanity, 1912-1968. Before Warren G. and Nate Dogg, there were Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, the only two contestants in the “American politicians with their heads screwed on straight” competition, 20th century division. Alas, superseded by the

Anti-Left Party, 1968-2000. Want to punch a hippie? Vote for Richard Nixon. Or Gerald Ford. Or, yes, the Gipper.

The Invade-the-World, Invite-the-World Branch of the Uniparty, 2000-Present. Wouldn’t it be nice if Bill Clinton could keep it in his pants, and wasn’t a walking toothache like Al Gore? That was the essence of W’s pitch in 2000. Our Holiday From History was supposed to continue, but alas, 9/11. Some very special people at the State Department got their chance to finally settle their centuries-long grudge with the Cossacks, and, well … here we are.

By my count, the longest periods of ideological consistency ran about 50 years … and I’m not sure if that really tells us much, because it makes sense to view 1914-1945, if not 1914-1991, as THE World War, which put some serious constraints on the ideology of both sides.

Trend-wise, what I see is one side going nuts with some huge moral crusade, while the other side frantically tries to slam on the brakes (while getting their beaks good and wet, of course). Antebellum, it was the proslavery side leading the charge, but if they’d been slightly less excitable in the late 1840s, the abolitionist lunatics would’ve done the job for them by the late 1860s. If you know anything about the Gilded Age, you know that they somehow presented the truly ridiculous excesses of the Robber Barons as some kind of moral triumph; this was, after all, Horatio Alger‘s America. Progressivism, of either the Marxist or the John Dewey variety, is just moralizing gussied with The Science™, and so forth.

The big difference between then and now, of course, is that the grand moral crusade of The Current Year is open, shit-flinging nihilism. The “opposition”, such as it is, is also full of shit-flinging nihilists; they just don’t want to go before they’ve squeezed every possible penny out of the Suicide of the West. So … yeah. We’re overdue for a big ideological change. And we shall get it, never fear; we can only hope that we won’t have to see it by the light of radioactive fires.

April 20, 2022

De Tocqueville once called it “sleeping on a volcano”

Filed under: France, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Joel Kotkin looks at the first round results of the French Presidential election and wonders how long the working classes are going to put up with everything the elites dish out:

Whatever the final outcome, the recent French elections have already revealed the comparative irrelevance of many elite concerns, from genderfluidity and racial injustice to the ever-present “climate catastrophe”. Instead, most voters in France and elsewhere are more concerned about soaring energy, food and housing costs. Many suspect that the cognitive elites, epitomised by President Emmanuel Macron, lack even the ambition to improve their living conditions.

The French elections reflect the essential political conflict of our time. On one side, there is a powerful alliance between the corporate oligarchy and the regulatory clerisy. On the other, there are two beleaguered and angry classes – the small-business owners and artisans, and the vast, largely unorganised service class. The small-business class generally tends to favour the populist right, whether in America, Australia or Europe. These people want the government out of their business and to be left alone. Meanwhile, workers tend towards the populist left, which promises to relieve their economic pain.

The common feature is the politics of anger and resentment. In the first round of the French elections, a majority voted either for Marine Le Pen and other rightist candidates, or for the old Trotskyist warhorse Jean-Luc Mélenchon and other candidates of the hard left. The establishment parties, like the centre-left Parti Socialiste and the Gaullist Républicains, were left way behind. The ultra-green Parti Socialiste mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, won less than two per cent – a pathetic performance from the onetime ruling party. Intriguingly, voters under 35 went first for Mélenchon and then Le Pen, leaving the technocrat Macron in dismal third place among the young. Macron only won decisively among voters over 60.

We may, as de Tocqueville put it during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, be “sleeping on a volcano”. A still inchoate rebellion from below against the concentration of wealth and power above seems to be gathering momentum. Across the 36 wealthier countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the richest citizens have taken an ever-greater share of national GDP in recent years as the middle class has become smaller. Heavily in debt, mainly because of high housing costs, the middle class “looks increasingly like a boat in rocky waters”, suggests the OECD.

One key indicator of the declining middle class is rates of home ownership, which are stagnant or plummeting, particularly among the young, in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. In the United States, the chance of middle-class earners moving up to the top rungs of the earnings ladder has dropped by approximately 20 per cent since the early 1980s. Life expectancy in the US has dropped to the lowest levels in a quarter of a century.

April 7, 2022

The EU only cares about democracy as long as the voters make the “correct” choice

Filed under: Europe, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Tom Slater points out the most recent proof that the EU’s principled defence of democracy fades out quickly when the voters don’t vote the way they’re “supposed to”:

Remember the other day when the European Union was pretending to care about sovereignty and democracy? When Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine had supposedly united European elites in their staunch, unflinching belief in a people’s right to determine their own destiny and shape their nation? You’ll be shocked to learn that they didn’t really mean it, at least if their reaction to the Hungarian election is anything to go by.

On Sunday, Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party won a landslide victory. Already the longest-serving EU leader, Orbán is now heading into a fourth consecutive term, with a two-thirds majority in parliament and an increased mandate. United for Hungary – an opposition coalition stretching from ex-communists to ex-fascists – defied the raised expectations of Euro elites and put in a dreadful showing, capped by gaffe-prone leader Péter Márki-Zay failing to win his own constituency race.

In the election, Orbán presented himself as a doughty defender of Hungarian national identity and interests against a meddlesome European Union and international set. Budapest and Brussels have been locked in a years-long battle over alleged “rule of law” breaches and LGBT rights. The EU is currently withholding €7 billion of coronavirus recovery funds from Hungary as part of a bitter legal standoff. In this, Márki-Zay was an all-too-willing foil, arguing that his government would be a “grand prize” for the EU.

In February, the European Court of Justice rejected a challenge by Hungary and Poland, upholding the legality of withholding funds from member states if they fail to adhere to “core values”. It sent a clear message to the Hungarian electorate in the run-up to the election: reject – or at least humble – this troublesome government or else. Now that Hungarians have politely refused to be pushed around, the European Commission has said it will press ahead with the formal mechanism that will deprive Hungary of the funds indefinitely.

Meanwhile, the European liberal media took a break from piously intoning about the defence of democracy in Ukraine to decry the election result in Hungary. Timothy Garton Ash even linked the ballot-box revolt to the barbarism in Bucha. “The Ukrainian horrors are clearly far worse than the Hungarian miseries, but the two are fatefully connected”, he wrote in the Guardian, accusing Orbán of being a Putin stooge. “Europe should now get tough on both the Russian enemy without and the Hungarian enemy within.” A Guardian editorial similarly called for swift EU action against this pesky central European state.

March 21, 2022

Republic to Empire: Sulla A Failed Reaction

Filed under: Africa, Europe, History, Italy, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 10 Feb 2021

In 120 BC, Rome was a republic with touches of democracy. A century later, it was a divine right military dictatorship. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this transformation with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
(more…)

March 1, 2022

One of the amazing features of Trudeau the lesser’s reign has been the Liberal Party’s abandonment of Canadian nationalism

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

In The Line, Andrew Potter points out an interesting historical quirk where Canadian practice has long been at odds with most other western democracies:

On social media, it was common to see people lamenting this co-optation of the Canadian flag, with some wondering if it was even acceptable to fly the flag any more.

The reason this has been so disconcerting for so many is that a long-standing feature of the Canadian political landscape has been that the nationalists were predominantly on the left. As the author Stephen Henighan noted years ago in his essay “Free Trade Fiction”, this made Canada close to unique among industrialized, developed countries in the West, where the nationalists tend to be on the right. Left-wing nationalism is typically a feature of post-colonial states, where the fight for independence or liberation from colonial oppressors gets wrapped up into a nationalist narrative.

The reason left-wing nationalism has been so appealing to Canadians was precisely because of our weak identity and ongoing concerns over assimilation, first into the British empire, then later into the American continentalist project. If there’s a founding document of this tendency it is Margaret Atwood’s Survival, but it is prefigured by books like George Grant’s Lament for a Nation and finds its popular expression in everything from Heritage Minutes to the famous Joe Canada ad for Molson beer.

The left-wing focus of Canadian nationalism held sway from the end of the Second World War until about five years ago, and it was hugely consequential for Canadian politics. Most obviously, it helped establish the Liberals as the natural governing party. By making support for Liberal policies synonymous with defending Canadian independence, and by treating Liberal values as Canadian values, the Liberals were able to effectively frame their conservative opponents as un-Canadian.

On the continental policy front, it served to place a pretty clear barrier to deep political integration with the United States. In a 2005 essay that looked at the prospects for political co-operation between Paul Martin’s Liberals and George W. Bush’s Republicans, Joe Heath noted that the big obstacle to Canadian participation on things like Ballistic Missile Defence was the fact there was virtually no ideological overlap between nationalist groups in Canada and the U.S.

[…]

Today, things have completely reversed. A major catalyst for this shift was the decision by Justin Trudeau, when he came to power in 2015, to make denigrating Canada central to his Liberalism. It began when he started issuing formal apologies for past wrongs, at an unprecedented rate for Canadian federal governments. Then there was his acceptance of one of the findings of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, that Canada committed genocide against Indigenous peoples. Then there was his decision last spring to order all federal flags to fly at half-mast after the reports of the unmarked graves of hundreds of Indigenous children who died while in the supposed care of the residential school system. The flags remained lowered for months, until pressure from veterans groups and the approach of Remembrance Day forced his hand and he ordered the flags raised.

Whatever the merits of any of these initiatives taken on their own, taken as a whole they set a recurring tone from the government, that Canadians were a fallen people. There is no question that dumping on Canada is a deliberate strategy for the Trudeau Liberals. What is less clear is whether, in persuading Canadian leftists to dislike their country, the prime minister realizes the forces he has unleashed in the process.

January 30, 2022

Fighting progressive illiberalism with populist illiberalism

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

In the free-to-non-paying-subscribers segment of this week’s Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan laments the ratcheting illiberal tactics of both the opponents and supporters of Critical Race Theory in American schools:

I’ve spent a lot of time these past few years concerned with left illiberalism, especially the replacement of liberalism with critical theory as the guiding principle of our republic. But at the same time, of course, right illiberalism has gone into overdrive, in a polarizing vortex. Being a conservative liberal, or a liberal conservative, is becoming close to impossible. And this week, as I pored over a mass of bills to ban the praxis, pedagogy and content of critical theory in public high schools, I felt as if I were being tossed between the blue devil to my left and the deep red sea to my right.

One core point: the illiberalism is real on both sides. Not always in equal measure, now or in the past, but definitely on both, feeding off each other. And in public education, once again a battleground in the culture war, it seems quite obvious to me that the left bears the burden of responsibility for the conflict.

Critical theory’s long march through the institutions reached its peak some time ago in higher education — and has gone on to capture media, corporate America, medicine, the federal government, tech, science, and every cultural institution. Over $14 billion have been spent on philanthropic “equity” initiatives since the summer of 2020 alone. Of course children’s education would be affected. What hasn’t been? And of course critical theorists aim directly at children. The woke, like the Jesuits, understand the value of instilling certain concepts at a very young age. How else to transform the world?

That’s why Ibram Kendi has bequeathed the world not just one but two books on how to rear “antiracist babies”. The publisher says the new one, Goodnight Racism, “gives children the language to dream of a better world and is the perfect book to add to their social justice toolkit.” My italics. Another recent book, Woke Baby, instructs toddlers to be “a good revolutionary”, and another one explains how “activism begins in the cradle”.

You truly think that in school districts where teachers are saturated in equity training, whose unions invite Kendi to be their keynote speaker, that this is all being made up? Just peruse through all the “equity” conferences, courses, syllabi, lesson plans and curricula that now dominate public ed. Many parents found out only because they overheard what their kids were being taught online during the pandemic. Or you can just surf the web as the woke dismantle schools for the gifted, abolish SATs, describe merit as racist, and lay waste to excellent schools merely because too many Asian-American kids are succeeding in them.

What we’re seeing now is the reaction to this left-wing power grab. And — guess what? — it’s a right-wing power grab. If the left has stealthily changed public education from above, the right has now used the only power they have to fight back — political clout in state legislatures. 122 separate bills have been introduced since January 2021, 71 in the last three weeks alone. They all regulate speech by teachers in public schools, but many are now also reaching into higher education — a much more fraught area — and outright book banning. The bills are rushed; some appear well-intentioned; others are nuts; many are very vague, inviting lawsuits to clarify what they can mean in practice. In most cases, if passed, they will surely chill debate of race and sex and history — and increasingly of gender, sex and homosexuality — in high schools. And that’s a bad thing for liberal education.

November 23, 2021

Tucker Carlson’s new book The Long Slide

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

Wilfred M. McClay reviews Carlson’s collected essays for First Things:

Tucker Carlson has become such a fixture in the world of cable-television news that it’s easy to forget he began his journalistic career as a writer. And a very good one at that, as this wide-ranging and immensely entertaining selection of essays from the past three decades serves to demonstrate. Carlson’s easygoing, witty, and compulsively readable prose has appeared everywhere from The Weekly Standard (where he was on staff during the nineties) to the New York Times, the Spectator, Forbes, New Republic, Talk, GQ, Esquire, and Politico, which in January 2016 published Carlson’s astonishing and prophetic article titled “Donald Trump is Shocking, Vulgar, and Right”. That essay has been preserved for posterity in these pages, along with twenty-two other pieces, plus a bombshell of an introduction written expressly for the occasion. More of that in a moment.

The first response of many of today’s readers, particularly those who don’t like the tenor of Carlson’s generally right-populist politics or the preppy swagger and bubbly humor of his TV persona, will be to dismiss The Long Slide as an effort to cash in on the author’s current notoriety by recycling old material to make a buck. That was my assumption when I first opened this collection. But the book has an underlying unity, and a serious message. It evokes a bygone age, an era of magazine and newspaper journalism that seems golden in retrospect, and is now so completely gone that one must strain to imagine that it ever existed at all. The simple fact is that almost none of these essays could be published today, certainly not in the same venues: They are full of language and imagery and a certain brisk cheerfulness toward their subject matter that could not possibly pass muster with the Twittering mob of humorless and ignorant moralists who dictate the editorial policies of today’s elite journalism.

Carlson’s writing style reflects the influence of the New Journalists such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson, who brought a jaunty, whiz-bang you-are-there narrative verve and high-spirited drama to the task of telling vividly detailed stories about unusual people and places, generally relating them in the first person. Carlson’s prose is not as spectacular as Wolfe’s or as thrillingly unhinged as Thompson’s. But it has its own virtues, being crystal clear, conversational, direct, and vigorous, never sending a lardy adjective to do the work of a well-chosen image, and never using gimmicky wild punctuation or stretched-out words to fortify a point. He’s a blue-blazer and button-down-collar guy, not a compulsive wearer of prim white suits or a wigged-out drug gourmand wearing a bucket hat and aviator glasses. But many of Carlson’s writings give the same sense of reporting as an unfolding adventure, a traveling road show revolving around the reactions and experiences of the author himself.

Carlson usually shows a certain fundamental affection for the people he writes about, even if he also ribs or mocks them in some ways. In particular, there is none of that ugly contempt for the “booboisie” and ordinary Americans that one finds, for example, in the pages of H.L. Mencken, and in a great deal of prestige journalism. Instead, he reserves his contempt for the well-heeled know-it-alls who genuinely deserve it. In that sense, the Carlson of these essays does not seem very different from the Carlson of today. He always has been a bit of a traitor to his class, and commendably so.

November 12, 2021

More on the populist success of Hungary’s Victor Orbán

Filed under: Economics, Europe, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last week, Scott Alexander looked at a couple of recent biographies of Hungarian politician Victor Orban (linked here). He got some quite interesting responses from his readers, including a long Twitter thread from Lyman Stone, which he’s converted into plain text for ease of reading:

I won’t make you read it all in tweet format. He continues:

1) Dictatorship and democracy. The arguments about Orban cheating in elections might be totally true. I dunno. But that’s sort of irrelevant. Neutral opinion polls nobody disputes show he would have gotten 2/3 under almost any system.

His crude poll share was about 60% before the 2010 election, but given the threshold effects, he’d likely have ended up at a supermajority under almost any system. And as @slatestarcodex [says], a lot of the initiatives that the EU most despises under Orban are initiatives that *everyone agrees* have supermajority public support among Hungarian voters.

Moreover, I agree with @slatestarcodex that if public opinion turned in Hungary, Orban would probably turn on a dime too. The dude loves power. But that should inform our read of what’s going on in Hungary. *Hungarians wanted* a right-nationalist authoritarian leader, *and so they voted for one*, and the electorate has *wanted* recurrent intensifications of that regime. So is it a dictatorship? Or is it a democracy?

This gets at the problem with “democracy” as a concept. Hungary is undeniably Democratic: there is widespread public support for the regime, which is selected by elections, the results of which are a decent approximation of trustworthy and neutral opinion polls. But I think it’s still possibly reasonable to call Orban a dictator. He wields enormous *personal* power, there are few checks on his power, and he uses power to create a *personal* clique of supporters to perpetuate that power and enfeeble the competition.

But this is the point: Democracy and dictatorship aren’t opposites. In fact, they are natural companions! So much so that before the 20th century, “democracy” was often used *literally as a synonym* for “authoritarian and demagogic rule”! Orban is a great example of why the word “democracy” came into ill repute in the past: because it was widely understood that “the people” (often pejoratively “the mob”) will often vote for a strongman to stomp his boot on the face of disliked others. That’s not so much a disagreement with @slatestarcodex as just a comment where I think the modern western liberal mindset obscures understanding the phenomenon of populist leadership.

2) Why admire Orban? Here I think @slatestarcodex misses some important stuff, perhaps because his biographies miss it. Yes, Orban was incompetent in the 90s. So were MOST immediate post-Soviet leaders! And while Orban may have been corrupt, you can compare the personal wealth of the Fidesz clique to the cliques that looted Russia or Ukraine and realize that Hungary got a better class of corrupt leaders than much of eastern Europe. Moreover, Hungary actually had competitive elections with changes of power and leaders who *respected* those results! Maybe they were dirty but, like, it happened! This wasn’t universally true!

So why might Hungarians admire a dissident-cum-parliamentarian who competed for their votes and when defeated responded democratically by adapting to try to win the next election? Because … duh?

But it’s not just that. The big factor that’s absent in all these culturalist accounts of Hungarian politics is … the economy. Hungary went from below-average unemployment rate for its region under Orban 1 to way above-average under the socialists to again below-average under Orban 2.

This is extremely important. A part of Orban’s appeal is that, whether by coincidence or art, he has managed to preside over periods where Hungary’s economic performance was better than a lot of its neighbors, and often fairly obviously so. That is, supporting irredentist nationalism in the form of Orban hasn’t imposed costs on Hungarians: they aren’t like facing sanctions or something or enduring deep economic hardship to stand by their dictator. He’s delivered (comparatively) good times!

So when you have a leader who 1) seems marginally-less-corrupt than regional peers, 2) delivers marginally-better-results than regional peers, and 3) adopts policies that are widely popular … that leader will be popular! Duh!

Update: Fixed broken link.

November 6, 2021

Choose your college roommates well

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Scott Alexander on the unlikely rise of Victor Orbán:

Viktor Orbán at the European People’s Party Summit in Brussels, December 2018.
Wikimedia Commons.

Some are born great. Some achieve greatness. And some are Victor Orbán’s college roommates.

Orbán: Europe’s New Strongman and Orbánland, my two sources for this installment of our Dictator Book Club, tell the story of a man who spent the last eleven years taking over Hungary and distributing it to guys he knew in college. Janos Ader, President of Hungary. Laszlo Kover, Speaker of the National Assembly. Joszef Szajer, drafter of the Hungarian constitution. All of them have something in common: they were Viktor Orbán’s college chums. Gabor Fodor, former Minister of Education, and Lajos Simicska, former media baron, were both literally his roommates. The rank order of how rich and powerful you are in today’s Hungary, and the rank order of how close you sat to Viktor Orbán in the cafeteria of Istvan Bibo College, are more similar than anyone has a right to expect.

Our story begins on March 30 1988, when young Viktor Orbán founded an extra-curricular society at his college called The Alliance Of Young Democrats (Hungarian abbreviation: FiDeSz). Thirty-seven students met in a college common room and agreed to start a youth organization. Orbán’s two roommates were there, along with a couple of other guys they knew. Orbán gave the pitch: the Soviet Union was crumbling. A potential post-Soviet Hungary would need fresh blood, new politicians who could navigate the democratic environment. They could get in on the ground floor.

It must have seemed kind of far-fetched. Orbán was a hick from the very furthest reaches of Hicksville, the “tiny, wretched village of Alcsutdoboz”. He grew up so poor that he would later describe “what an unforgettable experience it had been for him as a fifteen-year-old to use a bathroom for the first time, and to have warm water simply by turning on a tap”. He was neither exceptionally bright nor exceptionally charismatic.

Still, there was something about him. To call it “a competitive streak” would be an understatement. He loved fighting. The dirtier, the better. He had been kicked out of school after school for violent behavior as a child. As a teen, he’d gone into football, and despite having little natural talent he’d worked his way up to the semi-professional leagues through sheer practice and determination. During his mandatory military service, he’d beaten up one of his commanding officers. Throughout his life, people would keep underestimating how long, how dirty, and how intensely he was willing to fight for something he wanted. In the proverb “never mud-wrestle a pig, you’ll both get dirty but the pig will like it”, the pig is Viktor Orbán.

Those thirty-six college friends must have seen something in him. They gave him his loyalty, and he gave them their marching orders. The predicted Soviet collapse arrived faster than anybody expected, and after some really fast networking (“did you know I represent the youth, who are the future of this country?”) Orban got invited to give a speech at a big ceremony marking the successful revolution, and he knocked it out of the park.

He spoke about freedom, and democracy, and the popular will. He spoke against the older generation, and the need for a rupture with the crumbling traditions of the past. And also, he spoke against the Russian troops remaining in the country — the only speaker brave enough to say what everyone else was thinking. The voters liked what they heard: in Hungary’s first free election, he and several of his college friends were elected to Parliament on the Fidesz ticket.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t a very good liberal MP.

Separated from his pomp and platform, he was just a 27 year old kid without a lot of political experience. There was a glut of liberal democrats in Hungary — the country had just had a successful liberal democratic revolution — and Orbán and Fidesz couldn’t differentiate themselves from the rest of the market. Most liberal democrats wanted cosmopolitan intellectual types; Orbán — despite his herculean efforts to lose the accent and develop some class — was still just a hick from Hicksville. During the next election, Fidesz did embarrassingly badly.

So Viktor Orbán got everyone from his liberal democratic party together and asked — what if, instead of being liberal democrats, we were all far-right nationalists?

Wait, what?

September 10, 2021

By Gandhi’s reckoning, the PPC is entering stage three (“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, …”)

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney says that the dying media will have to start taking Maxime Bernier and the PPC much more seriously if the recent “blips” in the polls turn out to be accurate:

To riff off the old song, there’s something happening here, though what it is ain’t exactly clear. Like it or not, we’re going to have to start paying attention to the People’s Party of Canada and its leader, Maxime Bernier. If polls are to be believed, they’re having a great election.

The PPC hasn’t warranted much attention before. It has largely served as a vanity vehicle for Bernier, who probably can’t believe he’s been able to keep himself out of an ordinary job this long. The party is a mixture of populist outreach and pie-in-the-sky pseudo-libertarianism. It has proposed a smattering of policies, but none of them are much more than a talking point or meme. They are often summed up as a “far-right” party — or at least further right than the Conservative Party of Canada — but it feels overly generous to place them firmly anywhere in particular on the political spectrum. Their organizing principle has seemed to be anger with the status quo, and a feeling of alienation from the majority consensus on most political views.

The PPC took just under 300,000 votes in the 2019 election, or 1.6 per cent of ballots cast. It was a rounding error on a fringe, and seemed set to stay that way. This, combined with a history of dogwhistle racism, is why journalists and political analysts paid it little attention (and that includes yours truly).

Something seems to be happening, though. The party has climbed in the polls, with some showing they’ve climbed by a lot. There are important caveats: Some of this can be written off as within-the-margins-of-error blips in the numbers. Perhaps there is some methodological quirk that is causing polling companies to overestimate the PPC’s standing. Maybe frustrated people are parking their vote there for a time but will come back to one of the traditional parties when actually making their x on a ballot.

So yeah. There’s all kinds of ways to rationalize this into a nothingburger, if you’re so inclined, but the fact remains there is a trend, consistent across different polls, from different companies, and over an extended period of time. It really does seem as though the party is set to double, triple or maybe even quadruple its support, relative to the last election. The latest Ekos poll has them at nine per cent. That’s an outlier on the high side, but if they came even close to that, the PPC would eclipse the Green Party of Canada’s best-ever showing. By a lot.

My friend John Wright is a pollster with decades of experience, and the executive vice president at Maru Public Opinion. He called me this weekend to tell me that something was up with the PPC’s numbers — I’d already realized the same, at least on an intuitive level, but he had the numbers to back it up. His numbers are broadly similar to what’s showing up in other polls. I asked him what he could tell me about the typical PPC voter, and he said there isn’t a ton of information about them, but pulled what data he could find.

The typical PPC supporter, based on polls as recent as last month, is … pretty normal, actually, at least demographically. They are fairly evenly distributed across every segment of Canadian society. No province has a wildly high or low number of PPC supporters (Alberta was a bit higher than the others, but only a very small bit, and with an overall small sample size). They are found fairly consistently across all age groups and economic and educational classes. The only really notable divergence in Wright’s numbers was on gender lines — men are twice as likely to support the PPC as women.

September 1, 2021

QotD: The power of nationalistic feelings

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are “only doing their duty”, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.

One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

September 4, 2020

Shinzō Abe

Filed under: Government, History, Japan, Politics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kapil Komireddi on the achievements of Shinzō Abe, “the man who saved Japan”, who served four non-consecutive terms as Prime Minister between 2006 and 2020:

Shinzō Abe, Prime Minister of Japan, 2006-7 and 2012-20.
Official portrait from the Government of Japan under Government of Japan Standard Terms of Use (Ver. 2.0)

To appreciate the achievement of Shinzo Abe, who on Friday announced his decision to resign as Japan’s prime minister because of faltering health, consider the state of the country he inherited. Between 2007, the year Abe vacated the prime minister’s office after serving exactly for a year, and 2012 — when Abe staged a spectacular comeback — Japan had seen off five prime ministers in rapid succession. In fact, with the exception of Junichiro Koizumi, no Japanese prime minister had completed the full four-year term since 1987. A debilitating fatalism had seized Japan: a nation that had risen from the ashes of World War II to become the richest economy on earth after the United States was becoming reconciled to the prospect of irretrievable decline.

Such a posture may have struck some as virtuous. To Abe, it was sacrilegious. The scion of a storied political dynasty, he wanted Japan to become a “nation which can withstand the raging waves for the next 50 to 100 years to come”. Abe nursed a lifelong grievance against what he described as the “terrible” Constitution drafted by the Allied forces after Japan’s decimation in 1945. His greatest political aspiration was to revoke the clause that shackled Tokyo to pacifism as a form of punishment for the sins of imperial Japan. In a land where singing the national anthem with enthusiasm can be seen as a symptom of hawkishness, Abe approached voters with a pledge to “take back Japan”. As a campaigner, he was a populist before the word entered common usage. Once in office, however, he evolved into something altogether different.

The ideological passions that animated his politics were almost instantly subordinated to the higher cause of dispassionate service to Japan. As democracy after democracy fell to populists, Abe, the original populist, travelled in the opposite direction: a rare leader in the democratic world who did not allow partisanship to consume him. Abe did not disavow his conservatism: he aligned it to the challenges before him. The upshot? In the eight years since his return to power in 2012, he presided over the longest period of economic expansion in Japan’s post-war history and the lowest unemployment rate in at least a quarter century. He introduced free preschool and day care for children between the ages of 3 and 5 and created the conditions for the entry of a record number of women into the workforce.

Imparting stability to Japan was the preliminary act. As Tobias Harris reminds us in his important and outstanding new biography of Japan’s outgoing prime minister, The Iconoclast, Abe did not hesitate to dispute and dismantle the dogmas of his own side to pursue policies — such as the guest worker programme — he believed were imperative to securing Japan’s future. He deployed, Harris writes, “his power to defy his conservative allies and open Japan to the world”. At the same time, he strove to be conciliatory with all those who did not vote for him, regarded him with implacable suspicion, and marched against his “militarism” on the streets. This perhaps explains why, despite protests, criticism and scandal, he was able to lead his conservative Liberal Democratic Party to a series of comfortable victories at the ballot box and cement its position effectively as the default party of government in Japan.

March 4, 2020

QotD: Tax cuts “for the rich”

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

I keep hearing about how tax cuts are “giveaways” for the rich. Never mind that some rich people will see their taxes go up. This is philosophically grotesque. The people saying it may be more civilized and restrained than the pro-government mobs in the streets of Caracas, but it’s still basically the same idea: “The People” or “the nation” own everything. The state is the expression of the peoples’ spirit or of the nation’s “will”, and therefore it effectively owns everything. Thus, taking less money from you is the same as giving you more money.

This is why populism and nationalism, taken to their natural conclusions, always lead to statism. The state is the only expression of the national or popular will that encompasses everybody. So, the more you talk about how the fundamental unit of society is a mythologized collective called “The People” or the nation, the more you are rhetorically empowering the state.

Sure, the Constitution begins with the words “We the People,” but that is not a populist sentiment — it’s a statement of precedence in terms of authority: The people come before the government (not the European notion of the state). The spirit of the Constitution is entirely about the fact that The People are not all one thing. It places the rights of a single person above those of the entire federal government! It assumes not only that the people will disagree among themselves, but that the country will be better off if there is such disagreement. No populist frets about the tyranny of the majority. American patriots do.

But if you recognize that humans create wealth with their brains and their industry and that it therefore belongs to them, you’ll be a little more humble about the state’s “right” to take as much as it wants to spend how it wants. Human ingenuity is the engine of wealth creation, and there is no other.

But that doesn’t mean government doesn’t play a role. Because, as I said, there will be no wealth creation if there is no rule of law. There will be no investment or ingenuity if there is no guarantee that you will be able to collect on that investment or reap the benefits of your innovation. Without such an environment, the biggest mob wins. And when the mob wins, children starve to death in what should be one of the richest countries in the world.

Jonah Goldberg, “America and the ‘Original Position'”, National Review, 2017-12-22.

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