Yes, it’s real: Trump is collapsing. Can the MAGA faithful save him?
How do you know it’s all wishcasting? When they start with “Yes, it’s real”. They’re pushing that Narrative hard; I guess the faithful really need a pick-me-up.
Even Republicans are unhappy with Trump’s vicious, failing agenda. That doesn’t mean they’re ready to bail
Or, Karen discovers why they’re called “The Stupid Party”. Being unhappy with the GOP’s “vicious, failing agenda” is just what Republican voters do. Here’s a partial list of non-Trump Presidential candidates the GOP faithful have supported this century: George W. Bush (twice). Jeb Bush. John McCain (twice). Mitt fucking Romney. Herman “Godfather’s Pizza” Cain. Ted Cruz. Ben Carson. Marco Rubio. And I’m just talking about the guys who won enough primaries to get noticed. And I’m deliberately not talking about the girls, although The Media rushed to inform us that Republicans took the likes of Carly Fiorina and Nikki “War Karen” Haley very, very seriously (and for the sake of our collective sanity, let us not discuss Sarah Palin’s impact on the McCain campaign).
Notice a pattern there, Chauncey? Milquetoasts at best, obvious fucking Judases at worst. I guess you can’t really say that the likes of Mitt Romney “sold out” his voters, because that would imply Mitt Romney is capable of “selling out”. You have to have a baseline of integrity for that phrase to apply. Metallica can “sell out” (oh boy, can they!); the Backstreet Boys, by definition, cannot. Mitt, Jeb Bush, George W. Bush, Paul Ryan (can’t forget him! he was Mittens’ veep choice), Marco Rubio … that’s the shittiest boy band of all time, and like shitty boy bands they had their moments in the sun, but if that’s not enough to convince you that GOP loyalists simply don’t know when to fold ’em, I don’t know what possibly could.
Trump’s softening support is amplified by growing rumors about his health and reports on his reduced public schedule. Even the mainstream media noticed that he repeatedly appeared to fall asleep during Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting. While he sends out numerous social media posts in the middle of the night, he seems increasingly disconnected from real-world events by daylight. Any appearance of physical weakness or frailty in a man who is nearly 80 years old, threatens to undermine his carefully constructed persona as a vital and dynamic political strongman.
See what I mean about The Stupid Party? We’ve seen this before. We’ve seen it for the entirety of the 21st century, in fact. It’s the “I’m rubber and you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me, and sticks to you!” theory of political discourse. Like kindergartners on the playground, the Left simply cannot let anything go. They must respond by flipping the accusation. “Nah-AH, I’m not stinky, you’re stinky!” is tedious coming from five year olds, and putative adults should never do it, but that’s where we are here in AINO. Knowing that … I mean, Jesus, guys, it’s not hard. All you had to do is accuse Joe Biden of being too vigorous, too competent, stuff like that, and you’d have The Media inadvertently singing Trump’s praises …
But, of course, see above, about “all they ever do is sell out”. Thus landing us in the most hilarious situation of The Current Year, in which the GOP never fails to fail, even when they’re trying to fail. It’s what an intra-squad scrimmage must look like for the Washington Generals — everyone’s trying so hard to lose, but somebody has to be ahead when the buzzer sounds …
When voters are asked which party they will vote for in the 2026 midterm elections, Democrats now lead Republicans by 14 percentage points. That historically large gap suggests that Democrats are well-positioned to win a House majority, and perhaps even the Senate (although the latter is less likely for structural reasons). Democratic voters are also more enthusiastic than Republican voters; if we view November’s off-year elections as a de facto referendum on Trump’s presidency, the results were almost unanimous.
No, that’s backwards. The problem isn’t Trump. The problem is that Trump, personally, pulls voters, but the Republican Party in general does not. “MAGA” will enthusiastically pull the lever for the Orange Man; they can’t be arsed to do it for some generic GOP shitweasel, and do you see why, Chauncey? You’re stupid — so, so stupid — so I’ll spell it out for you: It has to do with the fact that when you’re asked to pull the lever for some generic GOP shitweasel, you are, in actual fact, voting for a generic GOP shitweasel. See how that works?
And again, I know you’re stupid — so very, very stupid — but those of us who don’t enjoy making shapes with pudding have to wonder: If the GOP is so bad, and they’re failing so much, if their agenda is so obviously “vicious”, and whatever else, why do you keep losing to them? I’ll give you a hint. Here’s a far from exhaustive list of major Democrat Presidential candidates in the 21st century:
Joe Biden. Kamala Harris. John “the Silky Pony” Edwards. Howard Dean. Bernie Sanders (twice). Barack Obama (twice). Hillary Clinton (twice). Dennis Kucinich. Al Gore. John Kerry. Pete Buttigieg (we’ll go ahead and say twice, because you know he’s running in 2028). Again, we’re only talking
guys galspersyns who won a primary or three. Notice a pattern there? If the GOP runs only milquetoasts and Judases, you guys always manage to top them by running the most ludicrous, unfathomably corrupt people you can find. Frankly I don’t know how the world survived the contest of George W. Bush vs. John Kerry; the planet’s collective IQ must’ve dropped ten, fifteen points. If the Fake and Gay Singularity were real, instead of a theoretical construct posited by our most jaded astrophysicists, the faceoff between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney would’ve caused our universe to disappear up its own vajazzled asshole, and prolapse into another.Ponder that: Barack Obama was, somehow, the least ridiculous person on that debate stage.
Severian, “The Year-End Blues”, Founding Questions, 2025-12-08.
March 9, 2026
QotD: Why they’re called “The Stupid Party”
November 1, 2025
MAGA is not a monolith, thank goodness
In The Line, Alex Muir looks at Canada-US relations (such as they are currently) and why MAGA not being a monolith is something Canadian politicians need to understand to stand any chance of successfully navigating our dealings with President Trump and his administration:
If there’s one thing that we’ve seen in recent days, as Donald Trump plays an endless game of “deal or no deal” with countries around the world, it’s that the current administration is volatile.
Why? One answer to that question is factionalism — to an extent that has enshrined unpredictability as a core operating principle of the second Trump term.
Canadians are particularly exposed to this. From north of the 49th, it looks like American policy is oscillating between nationalist populism, business pragmatism, tech conservatism, and social traditionalism. That is, however, a misreading. Administration policy is remarkably consistent if you focus on the current rather than the waves. First and foremost, the president and his team obsess over visible status, a game you can play through flattery or strength and symbolic gesture — there are winning examples of both.
In concrete policy terms, the Trump administration expects us to help them on missile defence, border control, and maritime security. They expect access to our resource and energy assets, on their terms. And they want our manufacturing sector to relocate to America. They also expect Canada to know its place as a loyal American ally.
Zoom out to the bigger picture and all the daily clutter can be understood as moves to advance, or at least attempt to advance, those broad goals. And that understanding, in turn, can help inform a successful Canadian response to U.S. actions.
[…]
You cannot understand what is happening today if you do not understand what factions hold sway within this new structure. I recommend thinking of the United States as a monarchy wearing a representative democracy’s clothes. Decisions do not rest in the administrative state, or even in a political party (like Hungary), they rest in the attention of a restless and aging president and those known to have his ear, and his trust. How close to the president a decision-maker is, and who else has a voice on any given topic, goes a long way toward explaining outcomes.
The various MAGA factions colonizing D.C. share several important background beliefs on Canada. First, and arguably most important, they don’t notice it much, and care even less. Second, they assume all foreigners want to be Americans, or are somehow defective if they do not. Third, Canadians look and sound so much like Americans that the latter assumption is magnified.
Fourth, there is a wide streak of Manichaeism in several of the factions that make up the administration, and the MAGA movement more generally. This means resistance, or even evasion, is quite likely to be taken as evidence of ill intent — or even outright evil intent — as opposed to the furtherance of legitimate competing interests. All of these are wrapped up in a fairly magnificent degree of self-involvement. America is so big, so rich, and so strong, that all administrations overwhelmingly focus on domestic issues and domestic politics since nothing that happens outside their borders is generally seen as existential. (Whereas American elections and culture wars absolutely are.)
For Canada, this has meant many things, none of them positive. We’ve seen the rapid (and apparently random) escalation of tariffs (so far mostly on specific goods, or things not explicitly covered by USMCA), plus the endlessly repeated threats of higher duties in response to perceived Canadian provocations. There have been threats and intermittent moves to sideline Canada from vital security relationships, including the Five Eyes and NORAD. Canada has committed to some initiatives in order to satisfy American demands, like intensified border enforcement initiatives and committing new resources to national security priorities. It is difficult, however, to get out in front of a rapidly moving target in terms of the administration’s desired outcome.
And that’s the crux of the matter — what do the factions of the administration see when they look at Canada, and what do they want? Answering that question involves understanding what the factions are. The following summary of the factions within MAGA has been condensed from my other work, and should help Canadians understand the complexity of what we must face.
October 26, 2025
QotD: The rightward political shift of American secular Jews
The shift of American Jews towards conservatism is going to gut the Left, which has historically relied on secularized Jews to supply a much larger share of its leadership and backing donations than their single-digit-percentage representation in the general population would suggest.
I emphasize “secularized” because those are the Jews attracted to non-religious social reform movements. Because of the Ashkenazi genetic advantage in average IQ, they’re disproportionately likely to end up running those movements.
(Idiots, being idiots, think this is evidence of a vast Jewish conspiracy. Nope — you’re just comparatively stupid, and correspondingly bad at competing for leadership positions.)
All this is fine, until the Left’s totalitarianizing ideology takes its inevitable anti-Semitic turn. Oops …
That’s how you got what we’re now seeing, which is a shift in the Left’s leadership towards ethno-racial groups with average IQs down in the 80s. Yes, leadership competition is going to select for the right tail of the distribution, but it’s both thinner and shorter.
Expect to see more stupidity, violence, and short-termism from the new New Left. They’ll probably lose their historically impressive skills at institutional capture and run more riots.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-25.
October 25, 2025
Red tribe versus Blue tribe
David Friedman responds to a recent post by Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten, discussing the differences between the bicoastal “blue” and flyover “red” tribes in US culture and politics:
A pair of images from a search for “Red tribe versus Blue tribe”. I assume this is from a TV show.
One commenter on my post observed that both I and the majority of my readers are culturally closer to the bicoastal elite than to flyover country, to Blue than to Red by Scott’s terminology. That started me thinking about how one could tell. What are the markers for tribal membership? On how many of them am I Blue, how many Red?
Here is my list. “Blue Tribe does X” does not mean everyone in Blue Tribe or even a majority do X, it means most people who do X are Blue Tribe — a marker not a definition. Similarly for Red Tribe. Someone who has many markers for Red Tribe and few for Blue Tribe is probably Red and similarly for Blue.
What You Own
Red Tribe drives a pickup truck, SUV or sports car, Blue Tribe drives an EV or at least a hybrid, probably a Prius. A cybertruck, both EV and pickup truck, codes Red.
Red Tribe owns guns. Blue Tribe doesn’t own guns, thinks that people who do are being stupid.
Blue Tribe owns sailboats, Red Tribe power boats.
Philosophy and Religion
Blue Tribe believe that they are moral relativists, take seriously the “you shouldn’t stop the Eskimo from putting his grandfather on an ice floe to die because in his moral system that is not wicked” argument. Like almost all humans they are actually moral realists, take it for granted that their moral beliefs are true, including the belief that you shouldn’t … Red Tribe are also moral realists but it never occurs to them that they shouldn’t be.
Blue Tribe are atheists, mainstream Protestants, Catholics who use birth control. Red Tribe are Evangelicals, possibly Fundamentalists, possibly Catholic. Preachers of both tribes preach things their tribe already believe in, but different things.
Blue Tribe believe in evolution, take it for granted that all reasonable people, including all their friends and acquaintances, do. Some but not all of them understand it except when understanding it leads to conclusions they don’t like.1 Red Tribe don’t believe in evolution, take it for granted that all reasonable people, including all their friends and acquaintances, share that belief, mostly don’t understand it.
Marriage and Children
Blue Tribe thinks having from zero to two children is fine, three a little odd, more than three weird. Red Tribe thinks there is something wrong with a couple that has fewer than two kids and that more is better.
Blue Tribe marries late, Red Tribe early. Blue Tribe sees a couple meeting in college, marrying after they graduate, as one possible pattern, marrying later than that another and perhaps more prudent. Red Tribe likes the idea of a couple meeting in high school.
What They Do
Red Tribe hunts. Blue Tribe doesn’t hunt and disapproves of people who do.
Red Tribe goes to football and baseball games, watches professional wrestling. Blue Tribe plays pickleball, drives their children to soccer games.
Red Tribe watches television, including soap operas, unashamedly. Blue Tribe watches soap operas ashamedly, leftish talk shows unashamedly.
Red Tribe listens to country music. Blue Tribe youth listens to rap, as do Red Tribe blacks. Blue Tribe approves of classical music but rarely listens to it.
Red Tribe males like to show off how strong they are. Blue Tribe, male or female, likes to show off how smart and well educated they are.
Blue Tribe drinks coffee in coffee shops. Red Tribe doesn’t.
- Such as that intelligence must be heritable or that the distribution of intellectual abilities is unlikely to be the same for men as for women since both are optimized for reproductive success and play different roles in reproduction.
October 12, 2025
A second American Civil War would not resemble the first one
The American Civil War, if you try to look at the big picture, started off with the states dividing as this Wikipedia map indicates (although no state was all secessionist or all unionist, of course):
Union states in blue (light blue for states that permitted slavery), Confederate states in red.
Map by Júlio Reis via Wikimedia Commons.
Potential lines of demarcation today, well, here’s a guess from a few years ago based on county voting patterns, and again it’s still an approximation:
Any civil strife on this modern battlefield will be very unlike the organized Union and Confederate armies of 1861-65 having stand-up battles against one another in the countryside. Tom Kratman wrote about a potential civil war breaking out several years ago and has reposted the first part on his Substack:
I can’t quite shake the feeling that the side that wins any new civil war, to the extent that anyone can be said to “win” such a frightfulness, will be the side that a) engages in as humanitarian a form of ethnic and political cleansing as possible, first, and b) shoots second. I say “as humanitarian … as possible” because, as previously discussed,1 we are not a nation of red and blue states. Rather, instead of red and blue states, we are, as discussed a couple of years ago, “counties and neighborhoods and streets and the couch versus the bedroom after an argument with a spouse or significant other over political matters”. In short, anyone who engages in really harsh internal security measures will tend to drive people who should be its friends over to the other side. Since I’m writing this on behalf of the more or less anti-bolshevik, anti-progressive, anti-SJW2 half of the country, let me emphasize that, when the northeast, the left coast, “Yes, we old retired farts can be bribed by robbing the future” Florida, “Under the Fairfax County Bootheel” Virginia, “Cannot control Baltimore” Maryland, and CorruptionRus Illinois, unchained from the restraints we’ve imposed on them, go full lunatic lefty, let them turn into Beirut of the 80s while we try to maintain something approaching civilization as long as we can. Yes, that means I think it would be easier for us to conquer or reconquer a California devolved into its own civil war if we can avoid the same in our areas.
Note that it’s a fine line we’ll have to try to walk, rounding up those who would turn us into Beirut, without rounding up those whose rounding up will cause their friends and family to turn us into Beirut. My suggestion would be using extreme measures for those who are certain enemies, but safe and comfortable lagering or exile for those about whom there might be some doubts.
Though I may find it distasteful, honesty compels that I not shy away from that other aspect of securing the base areas, ethnic cleansing. If this nightmare comes to pass then ethnic cleansing is going to happen, I am certain, to at least three groups, Moslems, Blacks, and Hispanics. Some of it will probably come in the form of self-exile, but I would be very surprised if more of it isn’t forced. So let me throw a little damper on the KKK/alt-white-wing of my readership, if any; Trump is leading by comfortable margins in Louisiana (over a third Black and Hispanic), Mississippi (close to 40% Black and Hispanic), and Alabama (over a quarter). He’s not leading in those places by the kinds of margins he is without a more than fair sprinkling of Blacks and Hispanics, who will not be much like the rioting for fun and profit thugs of Black Lives Matter (and White Lives Don’t). Those people are us as much as anyone can be. It would be a grievous and perhaps unhealable wound to your alleged souls if you don’t treat them that way.
- http://www.everyjoe.com/2015/01/12/politics/breakup-of-united-states-terrible-idea/#1
- SJW stands for social justice warrior. Unlike many such epithets, this one was coined by the people to whom it applies. Think of idiot PhDs who call canoeing “racist”, the universe of the trigglypuffs, and those who consider eating a taco to be a crime against Mexicans, if not even a crime against humanity, which latter classification expressly excludes whites.
Update, 14 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
July 8, 2025
“One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere”
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Itxu Díaz considers the work of P.J. O’Rourke:
Though P.J. O’Rourke passed away three years ago, his sharp wit and defense of freedom continue to resonate in a world still tempted by interventionist solutions. Reclaiming his work is more vital now than ever. What he told us through laughs and jabs in recent decades has proven to be one of the sharpest diagnoses of the dangers of postmodern left-wing ideology — and one of the most inspired reflections on why we must root our societies in individual liberty, private property, the free market, and the Judeo-Christian values that shaped the West for centuries.
Progressives want bigger government, and often conservatives don’t want it as small as we ought to like. O’Rourke knew all too well that the larger the state grows, the smaller individuals become. He devoted much of his work to explaining this in a way anyone could understand — even those not particularly interested in politics. His words resonate today in a new light, and fortunately, they remain easy to access: the Internet is full of O’Rourke’s articles, and all his books are still in print. The ideas, the jokes — the profound, the outdated, and even the ones that haven’t aged all that well — are still out there, waiting to be discovered by any digital wanderer with a sense of humor and a thirst for sharp thinking. It’s almost frightening to realize that some of O’Rourke’s tech-related jokes would go completely over a Millennial or Zoomer’s head today. And it’s even more pitiful to think that some of his old comments would be cancelled in today’s dull, hypersensitive postmodern world. Perhaps it’s because, as he once said, “One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere”. Incidentally, that’s where O’Rourke found his only point of agreement with environmentalists: “I strongly support paper recycling”.
The hippie student he was in the ’60s lost his enthusiasm for leftist ideas the following decade, as soon as he got his first paycheck from National Lampoon: a $300 check that filled him with joy — until he was told $140 would be deducted for taxes, health insurance, and Social Security. That day, he got mad at the government, and the grudge never faded. Before that, while still sporting what he called “a bad haircut” — think John Lennon’s worst style — he’d decided to tell his Republican grandmother he’d become a communist. Her response threw him off: “Well, at least you’re not a Democrat”.
O’Rourke was never one to romanticize his drug-fueled college days. “Oh God, the ’60s are back,” he wrote. “Good thing I’ve got a double-barreled 12-gauge with a chamber for three-inch magnum shells. And speaking strictly as a retired hippie and former beatnik, if the ’60s come my way, they won’t make it past the porch steps. They’ll be history. Which, for God’s sake, is what they’re supposed to be.”
From his time as editor-in-chief of National Lampoon in the ’70s, we got his account in The Hollywood Reporter, “How I Killed National Lampoon“. The job was a blast, but the environment was hell: “Having a bunch of humorists in one place is like having a bunch of cats in a sack”. As a satirical war correspondent covering every late-century conflict, O’Rourke filled countless pages describing the struggle to find a damn glass of whiskey in the burning countries at the “end of history”. His last dangerous assignment was in Iraq. “I’d been writing about overseas troubles of one kind or another for twenty-one years, in forty-some countries, none of them the nice ones. I had a happy marriage and cute kids. There wasn’t much happy or cute about Iraq,” he wrote in Holidays in Heck.
May 18, 2025
Trump today, Taft a century ago – interfering with Canadian federal elections
In the Coolidge Review, Amity Shlaes looks at the long-ago pre-Trumpian example of US interference in Canadian federal politics:
President Trump isn’t the first U.S. leader to turn a Canadian election with a few remarks. A little over a century back another president, William Howard Taft, managed the same feat.
The story starts in 1908, when outgoing president Theodore Roosevelt handpicked a successor, the lawyerly Taft. Taft won election. But from the eve of inauguration, Roosevelt began to voice doubts that Taft was up to the job. Word got around. Taft reacted to this disloyalty by attempting to prove he was no Roosevelt puppet. Where Roosevelt had invaded nations, Taft would write trade treaties. As Taft biographer Jeffrey Rosen writes, the motto of Roosevelt had been “speak softly and carry a big stick”. Taft’s maxim could have been “speak softly and carry a free-trade agreement”.
Taft’s marquee effort was to be a trade agreement with Canada, then lodged in the ambiguous status of “self-governing dominion”. As Taft noted, the dominion did have the freedom to conduct trade policy. Canada’s prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, was a distinguished free marketeer. The political stars appeared to align. In his enthusiasm Taft praised Canada, practically crowing: “She has cost us nothing in the way of preparations for defense against her possible assault, and she never will … I therefore earnestly hope that the measure will be promptly enacted into law.” Such a treaty, Taft said, would mark a new “epoch” for North America.
In those days, tariffs represented a much more important share of U.S. federal revenues. Selling free trade was no easy work, especially not to Republicans, for whom tariffs were part of the brand. Then as now, trade treaties, unlike peace treaties, required support from both chambers of Congress. But again Taft sang his heart out, not only making the usual case for an “increase in trade on both sides of the boundary line” but also trying out wider arguments.
Early in 1911, Taft infused urgency into negotiations by threatening Canada via ultimatum: Team up with the United States, or there might be a “parting of the ways”. Hunting votes at home, Taft wrote a private letter to the still influential Roosevelt. Appealing to the imperialist in his predecessor, though not very hard, Taft suggested such a treaty might render Canada “only an adjunct of the United States”. Historians debate whether the “adjunct” letter was leaked or stayed private over the course of the 1911 negotiations. Lawmakers on the Hill, in any case, began to speak in similar tones.
Next, Taft called a special session of Congress. Congress warmed to the treaty but pounded the imperialist angle as much as Taft’s main case. “I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions, clear to the North Pole,” thundered the soon-to-be House Speaker, James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark of Missouri.
Such statements did not elude Canadian ears. Some loathed the treaty for pulling Canada farther from Britain; others, independence minded, loathed the idea of trading the thumb of one empire upon them for the thumb of another. By the time Taft signed the Tariff Reciprocity Agreement in July 1911, Canadian reciprocity opponents were on the march. By September, Canada was rejecting in a landslide referendum Taft’s and Laurier’s work.
As The Literary Digest commented in 1912, these flamboyant statements from U.S. politicians were handy weapons for Canada’s treaty opponents. They had put into Canadian Conservatives’ hands “an excellent club with which to cudgel the Liberals and their brilliant leader, Laurier”. Laurier himself was defeated in an election as well, on the argument he was pandering to the U.S.
February 22, 2025
Trump’s movement is not the same old GOP
Lots of comments by and for Canadians in the last few weeks have been of the “running around with hair on fire” school of journalism. Donald Trump has transmogrified from the butt of jokes to the embodiment of everything technocratic Canadian “elites” fear:
Diagram of the “Overton Window”, based on a concept promoted by Joseph P. Overton (1960–2003), former director of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The term “Overton Window” was coined by colleagues of Joe Overton after his death. In the political theory of the Overton Window, new ideas fall into a range of acceptability to the public, at the edges of which an elected official risks being voted out of office.
Illustration by Hydrargyrum via Wikimedia Commons
The re-election of Donald Trump has masked a growing and profound shift in American politics, and ushered in a new era of Republicanism in the United States. Trump’s return is seen by many to be an isolated incident, an aberration from previous conventional norms and one that will resolve once the man himself is gone from power or from this earth.
For these people, the issue is Trump and Trump alone.
I believe that this is a profound misunderstanding of what is happening in America today, and what the future holds.
The old Republican party is gone. In its place is a movement that is built on the foundations of 19th century expansionism; strength and self-interest. It is motivated to settle grievances against the post-war consensus conservatism that it blames — more than it even blames the left — for the decline of the once-mighty American empire. For the New Republican, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were as much responsible as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in ushering in America’s decline.
Donald Trump is the transitionary vessel to carry that movement forward. He is the tip of the spear whose job is to crack open the institutions that the New Republican believes poisoned America for decades. Overton’s Window is wide open for the New Republican now.
It is useful to start with describing the New Republican movement. It is not the previous Republican movement of lower taxes, less state intervention or smaller government. These things may also be part of Trump’s movement, or at least a slice of it, but those are the beliefs of yesterday’s Republicans. Today’s ideology happens to dovetail well into the libertarian beliefs of the tech bros led by Elon Musk. Trump and Musk’s bromance is premised on some shared affection for each other as strong businessmen and leaders. But the alliance is shaky. Libertarian Republicans are only being tolerated by the larger movement because it’s useful in tearing down the structures the New Republican wishes to rebuild.
[…]
The New Republican is a value proposition. He rejects the very notion of normative values, that some countries may have values that are different, and which are to be tolerated even though they may be counter to American interests. There is no space for these values for the New Republican. The New Republican believes American values are superior and should be exported to the world. These values include family, fortitude, hard work, God, self-interest, the proper roles of the (two) sexes and especially, strength. That these values are the “right” values is self-evident to the New Republican, who believes that they should also be for everyone else.
Who are the New Republicans? One should look to Trump’s choices for cabinet — J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Howard Lutnick are good places to start. They all figure to be around — and in control of the party apparatus — once Trump is gone.
Elon Musk is not one of these people. Like Trump, he is the pointy end of a spear, and when the falling out between him and the New Republicans happens, it will not be pretty.
Finally, the New Republican is a lot of Americans. More than many would like to believe.
February 4, 2025
QotD: The American political spectrum
Then on the right you have (4) Right-liberals (“Classical liberals”), who share liberalism with groups (2) and (3) but reject (or at least substantially challenge) the idea that society can be “engineered” with positive results. This group largely left the Republican party between 2016 and the present (though some were already libertarians). Notably, (3) and (4) in the United States tend to share hawkish anti-authoritarian, anti-communist foreign policy views; this is where the foreign policy “blob” lives. To their right are (5) Traditionalist Conservatives. Because the United States was founded as a liberal country, they tend to still hold some liberal views (and respond well to liberal, “freedom-centered” framing) but their main ideological commitment is generally conservative in its literal meaning of being traditionalist, desiring things to not change or to recover that which has changed and there is a willingness to compromise on liberalism in the pursuit of that. This, I’d argue, is where the core of the Republican Party currently exists. Finally, you have (6) Right-Authoritarians, who come in various forms based on the authority they believe ought to structure society, e.g. populist authoritarians are fascists, whereas Catholic religious authoritarians are integralists and so on. But the core idea here is that there exists an authority, be it the “national will” (invariably channeled by an individual charismatic leader and often herrenvolk in nature) or tradition or the church or whatever else, which has a right to structure society which supersedes individual liberties. For our purposes, they key is they generally despise liberalism because it places limits on that authority. They tend to insist that liberalism makes societies weak even as liberal societies pound their favorite dictators into dust over and over again.
To put the spectrum another way, we might think in terms of publications: Jacobin (1) <-> Vox (2) <-> The Atlantic (3) <-> The Bulwark/Dispatch (4) <-> National Review (5); few major publications openly identify as being in (6) in the United States, but you can see editors at The Federalist or First Things platform political visions that [derive] from it. To the degree to which “horse-shoe theory” works it is because the thing that The Left and the Right-Authoritarians have in common is that they believe in an effectively unlimited claim on the individual by the community, whereas the core of liberal ideology is that the social claim on the individual is and must be limited.
Bret Devereaux, In a footnote to “Collections: The Philosophy of Liberty – On Liberalism”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-07-05.
December 14, 2024
Tulsi Gabbard as the Director of National Intelligence
To the left, Gabbard is widely criticized as some sort of Russian pawn, while to many on the right she’s unacceptable as a former Democrat and “girlboss”. Despite this, J.D. Tuccille says President-elect Donald Trump seems quite confident that she’s the right person for the job:
Tulsi Gabbard speaks at the “People’s Rally” in Washington DC on 17 November, 2016.
Photo by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons.
United States President-elect Donald Trump is standing behind Tulsi Gabbard, his pick to be director of national intelligence. Like several of Trump’s nominees, former Democratic congresswoman Gabbard is controversial in D.C.-insider circles, and understandably so; she’s skeptical of the political establishment, often criticizes foreign policy and was apparently subject to surveillance and put on a terrorist watch list because of her dissident ways. In other words, she’s a rather promising nominee for an incoming administration that wants to completely revamp government institutions that desperately need reform.
Asked this week by NBC’s Kristen Welker if he has confidence in Gabbard despite objections raised in certain circles to her past actions and positions, Trump responded, “I do. I mean, she’s a very respected person.”
Trump was specifically asked about two meetings Gabbard had in 2017 with then-Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Now in exile, al-Assad and his relationships with American politicians shouldn’t be much of a worry anymore, but he plays a part in the official panic over Gabbard’s views on foreign policy.
In 2019, former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton famously called Gabbard a “Russian asset“. Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq war, aroused Clinton’s ire with her anti-interventionism in foreign policy matters and criticism of the political establishment and its hawkishness during the course of a short-lived campaign for her party’s presidential nomination.
“There are brutal dictators in the world. Assad of Syria is one of them. That does not mean the U.S. should be waging regime-change wars around the world,” Gabbard told CNN in early 2019. Her long-standing fears of Islamist extremism led her to consider al-Assad a less-bad alternative to a potential fundamentalist regime.
Gabbard returned Clinton’s slight by calling her “the queen of warmongers” and the “embodiment of corruption”. It’s unsurprising that the two no longer share a political party.
Gabbard’s dissent from establishment orthodoxy doesn’t stop at military matters. In 2020, she joined with libertarian-leaning Republican Thomas Massie, from Kentucky, to call on the U.S. government to cease its persecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Assange ran afoul of the U.S. government when he published leaked documents revealing embarrassing details about official misconduct in Iraq and elsewhere.
November 24, 2024
Trump breaks the electoral pattern that had persisted for decades
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.
October 30, 2024
Less than a week of increasingly desperate measures left to go …
I’m referring to the antics of the major US political parties as the formal date of the US election heaves into sight. On the one hand, Theophilus Chilton characterizes the Democrats as “cornered animals”:
“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 
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With just about a week left before Election Day, things have definitely been heating up. At this point, it’s pretty apparent that all of the indicators are in Trump’s favour — and this is driving the Democrats absolutely nuts (even more than they usually are). A month ago, one could have definitely made the case that Kamala Harris had a good chance of winning. Now, that seems pretty far-fetched outside of the Democrats figuring out a way to fraud the vote so hard that they can overcome their ever-worsening situation in basically every swing state. As we enter this final week, Trump definitely has the momentum and is conducting an upbeat, optimistic campaign. Meanwhile, Kamala and her surrogates seem palpably despondent, screaming at their microphones and rolling out one ill-conceived “October surprise” after another at an increasingly frenetic pace.
That this is the case seems to find a lot of varying data points to support it. Public-facing polling is always subject to a healthy dose of skepticism (“… gonna need to see some internals there, bub”), but even that seems to have moved in the direction of a possible outright Trumpian popular vote victory. It’s obvious where both campaigns’ internal polling is trending, as Trump heads to states like New Mexico and Virginia to expand the slate of contested states while Kamala does damage control in bright Blue urban centres where her party’s early voting numbers have collapsed. Republicans have been overperforming bigly in every swing state’s early voting. Newspapers like the Washington Post and techbros like Jeff Bezos (with access to tons of relevant Big Data) are starting to make nice with Trump because their information is pointing them in that direction. At a demotic level, Trump supporters appear loud and energised in all sorts of places where Trump support has not been traditionally robust, while Kamala’s supporters seem dejected and subdued — when they’re not angrily screaming at small children. On and on, the “non-traditional” indicators keep pointing in the same direction.
At this point, it’s pretty obvious that there is a preference cascade that is moving in Trump’s direction.
Now, if we were dealing with normal people, getting the kind of feedback that an electoral loss like this represents would cause the Left to step back and reassess what they’re doing. They’d take a moment to “look in the mirror”, so to speak. But understand that we are not dealing with normal people. Losing elections (or at least losing the actual voting, the “election” is a different matter altogether) does not send them the same message it sends to everyone else. Instead of introspection, it merely generates anger. It tells them that they need to screech harder, steal harder, and smash harder. After all, these people are on the Right Side of History and anyone who opposes them is a “fascist” and a Nazi (their actual closing argument this week, by the way). And as we all know, heroes like Indiana Jones punch Nazis. If the election is lost, it’s not because the Democrats ran an absolutely clueless, tone-deaf campaign that basically only appealed to wine aunts, gay men, and twenty-something sluts. It’s because Trump is a Russian asset and his supporters accessed a secret reservoir of racism, sexism, and transphobia like it was some kind of evil superpower that allowed them to scurrilously subvert the Good People in America. In other words, the Left will only double down on their own intrinsic madness.
I mean, this isn’t just a theory — we’re already starting to see this pattern of behaviour take place even though Harris hasn’t even lost yet. Celebrities are already starting up with their bidecadal threats to leave the country if their candidate loses. Keith Olbermann wants Elon Musk to be arrested and lose all of his government contracts for the crime of not suppressing oppositional speech on X like it used to be censored back in the old days. The ever-amusing Will Stancil is gloompilling and appears to be on the verge of either suicide or a murder spree. These people are not well. Not at all.
On the other hand, Trump is not only Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin re-incarnated with his red-hatted brownshirts terrorizing the land … he’s literally the Devil:
My current prediction — based on the average of the Trump v Harris opinion polls at Real Clear Politics — is that President Trump will win both the popular vote and the Electoral College in the 2024 election. This prediction is not only based on President Trump now effectively tying with Vice-President Harris in the average of polls, but even more on that VP Harris has never polled as well as Secretary Clinton did at the relevant points in the 2016 campaign.
What reading this Substack Note brought out very clearly was how very different this US Presidential election seems to folk on the two sides of a deeply politically polarised polity.
On the VP Harris side, the salient view is some version of “how can you even consider voting for That Man!?” This is usually attached to a whole list of sins and other claims, of varying accuracy. This is the Trump-The-Devil view. The election is all about Trump and how appalling he is, both as a person and as a political figure. Sure there are other issues (e.g. climate change, abortion) but the lead and focus is how awful Trump is.
To deal with the reality that President Trump has already been President, there is regularly extra focus on his personal Devilness plus various claims about how a second Trump Presidency would be so much worse, for whatever reasons.
Back in the 2016 campaign, it was noted that Trump’s supporters treated what he said seriously but not literally, while his opponents treated his words literally but not seriously. That is, his opponents focused on Trump’s erratic connection to accuracy in his statements but did not take the political pressure points he mobilised anywhere near as seriously. Those were simply ignored and/or dropped into “the bigotry, so ignore” box. Conversely, his supporters were being mobilised by precisely those political pressure points.
The focus on President Trump’s willingness to say things for their rhetorical effect rather than their accuracy loses some of its moral high ground, given how willing President Trump’s opponents have been willing to make statements about him for rhetorical effect, rather than accuracy.
October 25, 2024
The “party of youth” is led by decrepit, doddering wrecks and time-serving political hacks
You can tell a lot about a political party by looking not at its current leadership but at its “bench” … the next couple of generations of potential leaders. In the United States, the Republicans actually don’t look too bad for future leaders, but the Democrats are facing a bench of already-too-old and never-will-be-ready-for-primetime hacks, as the “groovy fossils” have been clinging on to power right to the bitter end and drive away competent potential successors:
Thirty years ago, Democratic politicians were people you disagreed with, but they were from and of the body of the people. They were us, our brothers and sisters who saw things differently. I lived in California when Jerry Brown was the governor, twice, and I liked him. He was a brilliant crank, colorful and interesting. Whatever else he was, he was never dumb. If you remember the 1992 Democratic primaries — yes, this is a deep reach — the campaign season was full of distinctly likeable people, with the exception of the one who prevailed. Paul Tsongas used to say, often, that he was socially liberal but absolutely certain that federal transfer payments were on an unsustainable trajectory. His best line in the primaries was, “I’m not Santa Claus.” He was an unorthodox Democrat, when it was still possible to be one of those.
The current cultural model of the Democratic Party has produced a generation of politicians who are nakedly stupid and empty.
I’ve compared the Biden years to the Brezhnev years, with the army of handlers covering up the decline of the old party hack who’s been elevated beyond his ability. What we’re seeing now is the generation of dismal, time-serving party hacks that comes after the old decaying party hack. Democrats have credentialed their leaders on their ability to fit themselves tightly to the ritual grooves carved into the discourse. When asked about transgender issues, they say, “Trans women are women”. They have the whole list of correct slogans available for the moments when the machine is expected to push those slogans through the slot. Hate has no home here! (applause) They above all do not say things that are not the slogans. It’s time for the billionaires to pay their fair share!
And so we get Kamala Harris, and holy cow please help me. This may be the first person in the history of the world who has never answered a question. She seems programmed in her core functions to turn away from the actual substance of anything that anyone might ever ask, like she was brainwashed after that one combat patrol that ended vaguely.
[…]
This isn’t an accident. A generation of Democratic politicians have been culturally trained into a deflective and hollow discourse. It’s fascinating to watch them sort JD Vance, who talks like a person, into the category of “weird”.
September 13, 2024
“The problem [with America] is and has always been the people and their beliefs”
Chris Bray puts on the old biohazard suit and goes wading into the political book section, this time looking at two recent tomes by NeverTrumpers Robert Kagan and Tom Nichols:
Robert Kagan speaking in Warsaw, 2008-04-17.
Photo by Mariusz Kubik via Wikimedia Commons.
If you want to know where we are as a country, get your hands on a copy of Robert Kagan’s new book, Rebellion. Don’t worry, you won’t even need to crack the spine and open it. Kagan, who married the Queen of Eternal War Victoria Nuland and helped found the now defunct neoconservative Project for a New American Century, has written a warning about the dangerous renascence of antiliberalism in American political life: intolerance, a rejection of minority rights, hatred of progress. America is in deep trouble, Kagan warns. We’re close to losing our democracy! You can already see the freshness and originality of his thought.
Flip it. Take the book, turn it around, and look at that back cover, which carries an excerpt from inside, getting right to the meat of the thing. The problem isn’t the media, Kagan concludes. And it isn’t government. It isn’t a problem with institutions at all: “The problem is and has always been the people and their beliefs”. The thing that’s wrong with America is Americans, full stop. The country works brilliantly, except for the existence of the population. Imagine how healthy we would become if we could just get rid of them.
Should you make the mistake of opening the book, your experience will get worse in a hurry. The intellectual muddle is fatal. Here’s Kagan’s summary of the one big problem that runs through all of American history: “A straight line runs from the slaveholding South in the early to mid-nineteenth century to the post-Reconstruction South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, to the Dixiecrats of the 1940s and 1950s, to Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society of the 1950s and 60s, to the burgeoning Christian nationalist movement of recent decades, to the New Right of the Reagan Era, to the Republican Party of today.”
All of those movements are precisely the same, you see. Ronald Reagan was a latter-day Ben Tillman, the Birchers merely a rebrand for the 1940s Southern Democrats, and Barry Goldwater was a fitting heir to Nathan Bedford Forrest. A shrewd mind is at work here. All, Kagan concludes, were figures representing “antiliberal groups”: “All have sought to ‘make America great again,’ by defending and restoring the old hierarchies and traditions that predated the Revolution.” The American Revolution, he means. The Dixiecrats and the Birchers and Reagan and Trump all want to restore Parliamentary supremacy and the landed aristocracy, or … something.
But pretend, for a moment, that Kagan has made some form of coherent statement about American history. He is arguing for the protection of the liberal order, the dignity of the common man and the premise that we’re all created equal. At the same time, he says, the biggest problem with America is … the American people themselves. How do those two claims fit together? What kind of politics can we frame around the dignity and inherent worth of the common man, who is stupid and worthless?
See also, on this theme, anything the former U.S. Naval War College professor Tom Nichols has written in the last decade, such as his warning in Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy that “our fellow citizens are an intolerable threat to our own safety” — a claim that closely mirrors Kagan’s warning about America being plagued by Americans. Consider this framing very carefully: if a threat is intolerable, what do you have to do about it?
Kagan’s base argument sounded better in the original German.
July 19, 2024
The rise of the reactionaries – Gen X poised to pounce and seize
Andrew Potter tries to explain why Gen X are much more likely to support conservative policies than the groovy fossil Boomers and the painfully Socialized Millennials and GenZ’ers:
Generation X Word Cloud Concept collage background
Best Motivation Blog: What Generation Is X
As North American politics continues its rightward lurch, it is becoming increasingly commonplace to note the outsized role of Gen Xers in pushing this trend. In 2022, a Politico essay tried to explain “How Gen X became the Trumpiest generation“. That same year, an essay in Salon lamented how “of course Gen X was always going to sell out and vote Republican”. Writing in The Line last year, Rahim Mohamed wondered “how Generation MTV became Generation GOP?” These aren’t outliers – there is a whole sub genre of cultural commentary devoted to trying to explain just why Gen Xers are so right wing, compared to both their Boomer predecessors and the Millennials and Zs who followed.
This raises a couple of questions, the first of which is: is it even true? And if so, why?
On the facts of the matter, it appears that members of Generation X are, on the whole, more conservative than other generations, and this is especially true in the United States. For the past three or four years, polls have consistently shown that Gen Xers are more likely to see the country as going in the wrong direction, more likely to disapprove of Joe Biden, and more likely to support Donald Trump and vote Republican, than any other generational cohort. And while every generation tends to become more conservative as it ages, it is a tendency that accelerated under Gen X.
Pollsters have found similar support for these trends in Canada. An Abacus survey conducted last August found Gen Xers had the highest level of support for the Conservatives, with 41 per cent of those surveyed intending to vote CPC. And just this past June, the pollster Frank Graves released a series of charts tracking sentiment in Canada on a number of issues, including national attachment, social cohesion, and voter intention. He found significant intergenerational discord, with members of Gen X showing the highest level of support for smaller government, and Gen X males having the highest level of support for the CPC.
So why is this the case? How did the generation that fought (and won) the first culture war against conservatives, that launched the antiglobalization movement, that made heroes out of left wing icons like Kurt Cobain and Naomi Klein, become the most right wing cohort of all? Did we follow our Boomer parents’ hippies-to-yuppies trajectory in selling out? Or is there something else at work, beyond crass financial self-interest?
There’s probably at least something to be said for the “crass self-interest” angle. Despite the long-standing claim to being the first generation to do worse than their parents, the truth is, Gen X is raking it in. Starting right around the pandemic, Canadian Gen Xers quietly overtook Boomers as the generation with the highest average household net worth. It may also explain why alone amongst the generations, members of Gen X list “cost of living” as their most salient political issue, in contrast with both the older and younger cohorts who identify things like climate change, health care, and the environment as the most important issues facing Canada.
