Quotulatiousness

November 14, 2026

“Some ideas are so bad that both major political parties support them”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Most Americans think that more “bipartisanship” would be a good thing, yet every time there actually is an issue that both Democrats and Republicans can support … it seems to be a uniquely terrible idea that sounds good but brings awful unintended consequences tumbling along behind:

“Credit Cards” by Sean MacEntee is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Even in these divided times, some ideas are so bad that both major political parties support them. That’s certainly the case with proposals to let the government put a cap on the interest rates charged by credit card companies. It’s a scheme that seems considerate to those who run up debt but would instead deny riskier borrowers access to legitimate credit, and it could drive many people to lenders — some underground — who charge more. That is, it’s a plan stupid enough to draw backing from Democrats and Republicans alike.

Bipartisan Economic Idiocy

“President Trump himself said that he wants to reduce interest rates on credit cards to 10 percent,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) told CBS’s Margaret Brennan on Sunday. “I got the bill, I’m ready to go.”

Sure enough, back in January, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, “Please be informed that we will no longer let the American Public be ‘ripped off’ by Credit Card Companies that are charging Interest Rates of 20 to 30%, and even more … Effective January 20, 2026, I, as President of the United States, am calling for a one year cap on Credit Card Interest Rates of 10%.”

The two nominally hostile politicians discussed cooperation on the issue earlier this year, though nothing concrete has come of it so far. It’s enough to make you wonder if the issue is enough to bridge political divides for these two as they flirt over their shared interest in idiotic economic populism.

And the idea of capping credit card interest rates really is idiotic, unless you’re trying to deny options to higher-risk borrowers and drive them to more expensive alternatives like payday lenders and loan sharks. We don’t have to speculate on the impact of such caps; there’s plenty of evidence that trying to forcibly lower borrowing costs for consumers cuts them off from legitimate credit.

In 2021, the Federal Reserve Board published a paper by Gregory Elliehausen, Simona M. Hannon, and Thomas W. Miller Jr., examining the impact of a 17 percent interest rate cap in Arkansas. They found that “consumer finance companies, traditionally a source of credit for nonprime consumers, do not have offices in Arkansas because, being subject to the usury ceiling, they cannot profitably lend to risky consumers.” Because of its impact on riskier borrowers, the cap was loosened for banks to “allow consumers to escape restrictive effects of the low Arkansas rate ceiling.” Even so, “results of our analysis suggest that nonprime consumers in Arkansas were rationed” in terms of access to credit.

Notably, the paper described the 17 percent cap as “very restrictive.” The 10 percent cap currently contemplated by politicians of both major parties would be that much tighter and could be anticipated to further restrict access to credit.

November 6, 2026

“[E]lections are the inchoate expression of collective emotional reactions”

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

The Librarian of Celaeno offers an analysis of the midterm results from a monarchist perspective (I didn’t think there were many monarchists left in the US, honestly):

Analysis shows the real reason the Republicans lost so badly in the 2026 midterm elections.

As a reactionary monarchist, my approach to electoral politics is generally hands off. I find individual races and aspects of the system interesting, but only in terms of what they reveal about human psychology. I’ve written about this in the past, explorations of Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy (for some reason, my most popular post ever) with the goal of understanding what they and others mean. And having examined the fortunes of various candidates and factions over the years, as a matter of academic study and personal interest, I continually come to the same conclusion: liberal democracy is insane.

This to me seems the parsimonious conclusion for any theories of this (last) night’s election, with Democrats sweeping into power in former Republican bastions like Texas and Georgia. People online, people I respect, have advanced a number of theories as to why they were able to do so, generally based on something to with President Trump. But while there is something to that line of reasoning, I think the answer is more basic. I believe the evidence shows that “the people” however conceptualized, have no coherent sense of ideology or even self-interest. I wouldn’t even say they’re guided by residual inertia of inherited beliefs. Rather, elections are the inchoate expression of collective emotional reactions to an ever shifting and polarized mediated reality. In other words, madness.

I have heard, for example, that people are angry about high gas prices and so turned on Donald Trump and his Iran War in favor of the Democrats. But does anyone seriously think that the latter even intend to make fuel costs cheaper? Whose gas prices would you rather have- those of California, or Georgia? Well, if you live in Georgia, the answer seems to be California. Democrats are not shy about their aversion to fossil fuels and eagerness to tax their way to a German-style Green regulatory utopia. Voting for Democrats because gas prices are high is like giving yourself malaria in order to sicken the mosquitos who keep biting you. That’ll show ’em.

Then there’s the fact that the youth vote swung heavily to the Democrats. Many are suggesting that this is driven by young white men frustrated at being shut out of the economy, unable to get the jobs they want or afford a house. But again, in what universe is voting for Democrats the viable solution to that problem? These are the people who have flooded the country with foreigners meant to undercut those same native-born white men (and everyone else) and this election enables them to cement control over far more space to do that. The young people of Georgia, to return to my example, just voted for California’s taxes, regulatory environment, housing policies, and most importantly, its demographics. Everyone upset at his current situation pulled the lever to make it worse.

The rejoinder to this is, “well, Trump didn’t reach out enough! The young men were angry!” Of course they were. But then, everyone was angry. The blue hairs were angry. Black people were angry. Boomers were angry. At the heart of the anger is a continuously changing but relentlessly prolific barrage of propaganda, a kind of anti-myth, for while myth is timeless and transcendent and unifying, the words and images that comprise anti-myth are ephemeral and tendentious and discordant — inciteful rather than insightful. This propaganda comes from everywhere and nowhere all at once, subtle and overwhelming, but ever omnipresent. It keeps the masses running through cycles of elation and dooming, smug triumphalism and black rage. It is the context through which the people view politics, whether from the shallows or the depths, they all swim in it

And the whole of the mad masses, broken down into sub-mobs of conflicting interest groups, are all driven to the polls to vote against whatever happens to be there at the moment. They were all mad for different reasons, but the results were all the same, the empowerment of the sort of people who can only be elevated by an irrational horde.

Few seem to grasp that this wipeout is but the latest iteration of a now perfectly normal phenomenon, something that’s been going on since the 1930s. The president’s party nearly always sees losses in the midterms, sometimes enormous. It happened to Bill Clinton; it happened to George W. Bush. Barack Obama referred to his midterm losses as a “shellacking”. Every time it happens it’s declared the end of whoever is in power and birth of a new order for the ages, only for the script to flip some time in the next 2-4 years. Obama was the repudiation of Bush-Era Republicanism. Trump was the end of technocratic liberalism. Biden was the doom of Trump and Trump was the doom of Biden. And at the halfway point of each administration the other party was was given control of Congress in order to thwart the will of the man the electorate had just put in office.

Mark Steyn:

It is two days after the election and they still cannot tell us who won Mississippi.

Mississippi! A state Trump won by twenty-three points just two years ago.

So why can’t they call it for the Republican? Er, because it’s the Democrat who’s ahead, but only by a hundred votes. That’s how thoroughly Mark Levin and Lindsey Graham have bollocksed the Republican Party. If Mississippi is suddenly a purple state, New Hampshire is now bluer than, er, South Carolina: the Granite State legislature flipped from a 43-seat GOP majority to a 200-seat Dem supermajority. On Tuesday, nationwide, men went +11 for Democrats, and so did rural voters. There are no takers for what the Lindsey-Levin crowd are selling. The President displayed appalling judgment in ever listening to them. Me channelling Megyn Kelly back in March:

    The Micropenis That Ate MAGA

And so it has proved — from Maine to Texas.

Nevertheless, those who destroyed the forty-seventh presidency are now doubling down:

Yeah, baby. Nuke the world! That’ll show ’em …

I don’t really know who Laura Loozer is, but evidently she has the President’s personal cell and I don’t. And she is not alone. The slogan du jour is “finish the job”. Former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen:

    We should go back to war and we should finish the job.

My old pal from Fox News, Brian Kilmeade:

Finish the job? It’s not clear that the Pentagon, in a strategic sense, has even started it. Nevertheless, another former comrade, Duane Patterson from The Hugh Hewitt Show, is on board:

    Trump has a window of about three months … He has to finish the job. Topple the regime. Hang a W. Then, after oil comes down, affordability returns as the cost of energy stabilizes, and the rest of the economic engine he jump started revs up, whoever comes next can ride prosperity in 2028.

Good luck with that. For one thing, the corrupt and dysfunctional US military has demonstrated, for three-quarters of a century, no capability whatsoever to “finish” any job. What part of “Dollar for dollar, you’re the most expensively crap warmonger in the history of the world” don’t you understand?

As for “Nothing to lose now”: America is supposed to be a self-governing republic, and its citizens have just told you they don’t want this. Yet you’re still proposing that their chief magistrate should go ahead anyway and MOAB (or worse) those lousy mullahs?

Vice President Vance — who, unlike Pete Hegseth, cannot be fired by Trump — yesterday wrote a very long tweet, including the following:

    The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.

    If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so.

November 5, 2026

Midterm aftermath

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

I didn’t post much about the US midterm elections, partly because I felt there were more than enough non-US sites opinionating wildly but also because the results seemed to be locked in months ago (but the “blue wave” was much bigger than I expected). Now that the votes have been counted, there’s a lot of fault-finding and scapegoat-identifying going on, which is pretty standard for any election. At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter notes that the largest demographic swing seems to have been Gen Z men, who helped Trump get elected two years ago and now have shown just how unhappy they are with the vast chasm between what they hoped for and what Trump gave them:

It usually seems that the GOP are always auditioning for the “runner-up” role.

Let’s not beat around the bush. The US midterms are bad news, and not only for America. What happens in the imperial core has consequences on the periphery, too.

I don’t want to troon out on this. A second-term president losing the midterms is hardly unprecedented. Voters tend to get disillusioned over time. Frustrations mount, and they vote for the other party to punish the incumbent. It’s part of the negative feedback cycle that locks American democracy into its permanent state of hysterical torpor. Every election is the most important election in history, the last election that will ever matter, and then once again nothing ever happens. The new party assumes office, commences gorging on the corruption machine, fritters away its time and political capital on trivial nonsense, and steadfastly refuses to take action on even the most popular 80/20 issues.

The outgoing Republican House and Senate are a case in point. They outright refused to pass the overwhelmingly popular SAVE Act, for instance. I don’t think they passed any meaningful legislation at all over the last two years. They were very enthusiastic about bombing Iran, however.

Odds are the Democrats will prove to be equally disappointing to their base. Judging from their campaign rhetoric, they’re slavering at the opportunity to drag their political enemies into the Congressional torture chamber. Elon Musk has been put on notice to lawyer up, I assume for his role in DOGE, which the Dems are furious about. A lot of Trump’s other appointees and allies are probably going to find themselves subpoenaed. The King in Orange himself may well get to enjoy another round of impeachment theatre. All of this will no doubt be immensely emotionally satisfying for the Democrats. Will it make much difference in the day to day life of the average American? Probably not.

Have Trump or the GOP made much difference in daily life? Trump’s done some good things over the last two years. Gutting USAID, clearing out hundreds of thousands of federal bureaucrats, closing the border, deporting a million or so illegals and motivating the self-deportation of a couple million more. There’s been a chilling effect on DEI, the so-called “vibe shift”, which in practice has mostly meant that large institutions are pretending not to do DEI anymore. All of that’s been great, but it’s been like one percent of what’s actually required.

Deporting a few million people is a drop in the bucket compared to the many tens of millions in the country illegally. Getting woketards to turn down the volume on woke was a nice reprieve, but they remain in control of every institution that isn’t the executive branch of the US government, and they’ve carried right on refusing to hire young white men. “Woke 1 was craaaazy”, as Ocasio-Cortez said. The implication is that there will be a Woke 2. We’re probably about to find out what that looks like. I expect it to be positively psychotic.

There are just so many missed opportunities over the last two years.

When Charlie Kirk was assassinated by a trantifa terrorist, a wave of rage washed through the country, not only at his death but in revulsion at the glee with which the left greeted it. Trump’s administration had every excuse it needed to bring down the hammer. It started well enough, with Antifa being declared an international terrorist group. And then, nothing. Oh, I think they lost a web server recently, they seemed pretty bummed about that. Black-bagging them to Gitmo that was not. Less theatrically, there was every excuse to go after the NGOs and foundations that fund Antifa and Antifa-adjacent groups, bring the hammer down on universities that provide them with a safe place to operate, and put serious pressure on foreign governments (Canada, for instance) which provide funding for Antifa-adjacent left-wing “research organizations”. Instead we got Candace Owens wittering on about how it was really all a Mossad plot or something. The result of all this lack of serious action was that the left felt quite comfortable celebrating the Kirkaversary. One young Brazilian woman went so far as to recite a vicious little death threat in the form of “Night Before Kirksmas” doggerel to a Turning Point USA representative, who for some unfathomable reason was on campus still doing the Debate Me Bro routine a year after the Debate Bro got shot in the neck for debating. There’s some talk that she and her family might get deported, but, call me cynical, I wouldn’t count on that.

Friends have been sounding the alarm for several months now over Trump’s refusal to do anything to ameliorate the plight of young white men in America. They’ve languished under woke for a decade, now. It has absolutely hammered them economically. Six years of that decade have been under Trump, by the way. He didn’t do anything about it during his first term, and during his second what little he did do was mostly performative, things like castigating the universities for not following meritocratic admissions policies and allowing anti-semitism on campus. He tried to freeze research funding to Harvard and a few other universities, sure, but that got blocked in the courts. They got their money and ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action, carrying right on with discriminatory admissions as though nothing had happened. In the private sector the toxic confluence of HR girlbossery and AI filtering at the recruitment level, along with an entrenched preference for H1B over American labour within the tech sector, has made it basically impossible for anyone to get a job, but particularly impossible for young white men. There was a study recently which found that something like 98% of new jobs had gone to women, or maybe women and foreigners; either way, young white men have been left out in the cold.

This matters, because the young white men were Trump’s strongest soldiers. In the last election they swung harder for Trump than any other demographic. Much more importantly, they’re the political radicals who push the envelope, make the memes, record the podcasts, write the blogs, and conspire together in secret group chats. They went to war for him in three elections in a row, two of which he won, and the other of which was stolen. Many of them sacrificed careers to do that. The social and therefore professional consequences of being a MAGAt, a Trumptard, a member of the Trump Jugend, can be crippling. Nevertheless they were the ones pushing the envelope, hammering away at the Overton window to widen the permissible boundaries of discourse. And they succeeded. You can say things in public now that would have been absolutely verboten just a few years ago. Things like “retarded”. Go ahead, say it out loud, it’s okay now. “Retarded.” Shout it. “RETARDED!” Doesn’t that feel great?

What is of course genuinely, deeply, epochally, unfathomably retarded is that the reward bestowed upon young white men for their successful decade of service has been … nothing. Nothing at all. No patronage jobs. No grants. No lawfare against the universities refusing to let them in the door, no sanctions against the corporations using H1Bs to replace American tech workers, no ICE raids against blue collar employers undercutting American citizens with illegals, no serious effort to reduce the cost of housing, no free Zyns, no state-assigned beautiful mid gfs. They’ve been thanked by being told to stop playing video games and to go become a plumber at Panda Express.

So, this election, apparently, the young white men swung by 40 points, from something like +30 for Trump to +10 for the Democrats. I saw another tweet claiming that the swing was even larger, so who knows, but the discontented rumblings have been audible, palpable even, for months now. The young men are embittered and furious. I don’t know how much of that swing is in actual political alignment and how much of it was just the zoomerwaffen saying nah, fuck it, Imma stay home and play Age of Empires tonight, but there’s more than a whiff of what happened with the Bernie Bros in 2016. The Dem establishment shat on them, so they defected to Trump, bringing all of that energy to MAGA. Millennial and zoomer men are not institutionally loyal the way boomers are. If you don’t take care of them, if you shit upon their heads and force them to eat it, they will abandon you. As they should.

October 2, 2026

Those who are attracted to power are the ones least capable of using it wisely

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

Lord Acton, something, something, corrupts absolutely:

Power selects for a specific personality type, and it is not yours.

F.A. Hayek spelled this out in 1944. In a centrally planned system, the people who rise are not the most competent or the most honest. They are the most willing to exercise force against strangers, the most comfortable with contradiction, and the most skilled at coalition-building through favors rather than merit. Government filters for the bad ones from the start.

The mechanism is straightforward. Political power means controlling resources you did not earn. Capturing that control requires outcompeting rivals who have no ethical constraints. A principled candidate refuses to promise contradictory things to different voter blocs. An unprincipled one does it without blinking. The unprincipled one wins. Repeat this selection pressure across hundreds of electoral cycles and you get the U.S. Congress in 2026: a body where the average member has held office for over a decade, raised millions from interested parties, and delivered almost nothing measurable to the people who voted for them.

Bureaucracy compounds the problem. Once entrenched, state agencies attract people who want authority without accountability. You cannot fire most of them. The FDA, the TSA, the Federal Reserve all function this way, staffed by individuals whose career advancement depends on expanding the agency’s reach, never on serving you efficiently.

May 13, 2026

A quick look at the race to be the next governor of California

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Chris Bray somehow seems to find the election coverage by a multi-decade veteran Los Angeles Times political reporter to be, dare I say, lacking just a little objectivity and honest analysis:

Robin Abcarian has been a professional journalist for four decades, mostly at the Los Angeles Times. She’s spent her adult life writing about politics. So go read her column about the last gubernatorial debate in California. Here’s how it opens:

    What am I looking for in a new California governor?

    Like a big chunk of the state’s voters, I’m not exactly sure.

You can already tell you’re in the hands of an experienced professional. There aren’t really any big issues or anything in California right now, so how would you zero in on something you would want from someone who wants to lead the state’s executive branch, right? It’s all just a shrug and a guess.

Then she recites: This candidate said X, and this other candidate said Y. And she tells you which of the recited things she likes: I like X. I do not like Y. She doesn’t analyze or argue or contextualize: she just says I like that one and I do not like that one. The effect is that you’re watching someone wander barefoot through a field of statements and either make “ooooh, pretty” sounds or “ick, yucky” sounds with a kind of vibration from her brain stem. Billy likes blue balloons, they are pretty. Becky loves pink balloons, they are even prettier! She can’t explain any of it, though she attempts some explainy noises, and then it gets worse:

    I know who I don’t like, though.

    Every time I see Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, with his Tom Selleck mustache, I can’t help thinking he should play a lawman on TV.

  1. Should Chad Bianco become the governor of California?
  2. He has a mustache

CHAD BIANCO WISHES TO BE THE GOVERNOR BUT ACTUALLY HE APPEARS TO BE VERY MASCULINE THINK ABOUT IT

Have I mentioned that Robin Abcarian has a graduate degree in journalism? You can see how her education sharpened her mind.

She adds that Bianco has said some deeply disturbing and disqualifying things, and then she gives an example: “A lack of affordable housing has nothing to do with homelessness, Bianco has said repeatedly”. Gasp!

Instead, outrageously, he claims that homelessness has something to do with “drugs and mental illness”.

It is very bad to say this. Why is it very bad to say this? She doesn’t explain, but it’s very bad to say it. Homeless people are all just fine, and they would immediately be okay if you just gave them a house, because the whole crisis is just affordability. Drugs and homelessness!?!? In CALIFORNIA!?!?!? What are you even talking about!?!?

This woman is a journalist in Los Angeles, where you can experience psychotic episodes in the street next to an encampment by driving to lunch.

By the way, this video of homeless people on Skid Row smoking fentanyl right next to the LAPD’s Central Division station? I drove over there this afternoon, and yes. Open drug dealing, drug overdoses, ambulances running day and night, bodies in the street, police station.

Let’s have a look at Abcarian’s analysis of Katie Porter, whose marriage quite notoriously ended with her husband accusing her of once expressing an (apparently frequent) rage by dumping a boiled pot of mashed potatoes on his head, part of a pattern of what he described as an abusive relationship. Abcarian:

“I’ve always liked Porter and her famous white board. I don’t believe snapping at your staff or a reporter is disqualifying, and I’m glad she’s been able to joke about the leaked video that damaged her campaign.”

I like Katie Porter. She is nice. People say she yells a lot, but that is okay. She makes jokes about when she yells at people who work for her. That is funny! She is funny and nice.

Decades on the payroll of a major American newspaper. Will a candidate be an effective governor? “I’ve always liked Porter.” Thanks for your analysis, Robin.

And then finally, big finish, watch how aggressively obtuse this person is. Just watch. It’s a gold medal performance.

First she discusses the attacks on Democratic frontrunner Xavier Becerra. The other candidates are criticizing him because “on his watch at HHS, the Office of Refugee Resettlement lost track of 85,000 migrant children”. Abcarian acknowledges what happened next, when “many of the minors, mostly teenage boys, were exploited by sponsors, who illegally put them to work in various factories, food processing plants and as roofers”. So she has explicitly discussed migration as a source of human trafficking and exploitation.

Then she says that Tom Steyer won her heart by promising to shut down ICE and prosecute ICE agents. Here’s Abcarian’s complete discussion of the way she feels about Steyer promising not to enforce immigration laws: “Could it be I’m falling in love?”

  1. Unmanaged migration across borders is human trafficking and exploitation, often of children
  2. My uterus is a little gushy over this candidate who says he’ll block the enforcement of immigration laws and shut down the agency that enforces immigration laws

Does she notice that she did this? Does she notice the one-two punch of talking about tens of thousands of minors trafficked across the border to be exploited and then the immediate wine aunt pivot to this ooh-he’s-so-cute swooning about Dreamy Tom Steyer promising to not let anyone enforce immigration laws?

My position regarding the high-cultural-status AWFL and biologically male pseudo-AWFL, in media and politics and academia and NGOs, is that none of them notice themselves at all. They have noises that they’re been trained to make, and they make the noises. Warm and wonderful unhoused neighbors. Warm and wonderful trans kids. Warm and wonderful immigrants. They have categories that they purr about, because one purrs about those categories or else one is a Trump person who belongs in a trailer park. It’s been purely automatic for years and years.

April 18, 2026

QotD: Democratic versus Republican Senators

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

A few years ago, Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema provoked the rage of progressive activists by occasionally having an independent thought, voting with her caucus on “party unity votes” only 96% of the time. Senator Joe Manchin caused comparable disgust by joining his party in those votes only 92% of the time. Sinema and Manchin were EVIL MONSTERS, and progressive activists showed up at their public events to scream at them.

Sinema eventually left the Democratic Party, declaring herself an independent, because a disgusting heretic couldn’t remain in a party that she only agreed with 96% of the time. Burn the witch, Democrats explained.

The descent of the Democratic Party into a state of increasingly obvious group psychosis is a product of the absence of internal debate, and of the degree to which Democratic legislators wholeheartedly believe that their job is to hold up their hands in unison whenever their party leaders tell them to. They can’t talk themselves out of their madness — they don’t know how. They don’t have the cultural habit of thought. Watch someone like Chris Murphy speak, and ask yourself if there’s a person inside there. I find myself unable to say yes to that question. He will read anything that is put on that teleprompter, and I mean an-y-th-ing.

By comparison, the Republican legislative habit of wandering around like the residents of a feline daycare center is a strength, and the presence of independent thought in the GOP’s legislative caucuses makes the party relatively sane. The presence of a Rand Paul, refusing to get on board, is more a good thing than a bad thing. The culture of debate is healthier than the behavior of the North Korean legislature or Tina Smith, soulless human robots.

Chris Bray, “The Greatest Republican Strength is the Greatest Republican Weakness, Again”, Tell Me How This Ends, 2026-01-15.

April 6, 2026

Coolidge “does not deserve credit for winning the 1924 election … it just happened to him”

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

While I wouldn’t agree with the statement in the title of this post, it has been a common enough reading of the US 1924 presidential election — that it wasn’t an endorsement of Coolidge and his policies but merely a reflection of voters’ overall satisfaction with the economy. The editors of the Coolidge Review would beg to differ:

From the distance of more than a century, a political scientist has taken a fresh look at the 1924 presidential election.

In an article published last year in Presidential Studies Quarterly, Christopher Devine questions the conventional wisdom about how and why the incumbent, Calvin Coolidge, won that election in a landslide. Coolidge had assumed the presidency little more than a year earlier, after the unexpected death of Warren Harding. In 1924’s three-way race, he received more votes than the other two candidates combined and carried thirty-five of the forty-eight states.

As Devine points out, most historians say that a robust economy was by far the biggest reason Coolidge won. Strong economic conditions did work in the president’s favor. But Devine notes that many historians adopt a form of economic “determinism”. In this very common view, Coolidge “does not deserve credit for winning the 1924 election”. Rather, “thanks mostly to the economy, it just happened to him”.

That argument is too simplistic, Devine suggests. He presents both qualitative and quantitative evidence to challenge the standard narrative of the 1924 campaign.

Old Assumptions, New Data

For his empirical analysis, Devine examines “county-level political, economic, and demographic data” alongside county-by-county voting results. Using these data, he tests three common explanations for the election’s outcome:

Did Coolidge win primarily because of the economy? Scraping the data, Devine concludes that the answer is largely yes. And he shows it’s misleading to claim that — as one history textbook put it — Coolidge merely rode “the crest of a wave of economic prosperity for which he was given undeserved credit”. Devine demonstrates that from behind the scenes, Coolidge “took an active role in coordinating campaign messaging” that showcased the administration’s and Republicans’ achievements. For example, Coolidge worked closely with his running mate, Charles Dawes, to keep the famously free-range vice-presidential candidate focused on the economic message. “In the matter of economy and tax reduction”, Dawes declared, “the Federal Government is headed in the right direction”. Moreover, as Devine reports, Dawes argued that the administration’s work to stabilize Europe via the Dawes Plan spared America from “the depths of an inevitable and great depression” while also ensuring that “the whole world enters upon a period of peace and prosperity”.

Did third-party candidate Robert M. La Follette hurt Democratic nominee John W. Davis more than Coolidge? Devine concludes that this effect appeared only in the Great Plains and the Mountain West. It probably wasn’t large enough to change the election’s outcome.

Did internal divisions cost the Democratic Party votes in 1924? The Democrats were so fractured that they needed 103 ballots to choose a nominee at their convention. Devine says it would be hard to imagine that such disarray did not hurt Democrats in the election. Yet he notes that quantitative evidence on the reasons for Democratic losses in 1924 is hard to find because “scientific polling did not exist in the 1920s”.

Seeking an alternative approach, Devine looks at patterns of defection from the Democratic Party by state. He finds that northern states that voted to defeat the anti-Ku-Klux-Klan plank at that year’s Democratic National Convention — in other words, states whose delegations supported the Klan — saw heavier defections in the general election. From that, Devine extrapolates to suggest that Coolidge “benefited from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan — or, perhaps one might say, Democrats lost ground because of it”.

March 9, 2026

QotD: Why they’re called “The Stupid Party”

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

    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 gals persyns 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.

November 1, 2025

MAGA is not a monolith, thank goodness

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

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

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

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

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

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.

  1. 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

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

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.

  1. http://www.everyjoe.com/2015/01/12/politics/breakup-of-united-states-terrible-idea/#1
  2. 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”

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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