Author: photog

The Fisking of Kagan 123

photog Current Events , , ,

My favorite author of Trump-happily-ever-after election propaganda is now Robert Kagan of the Washington Post.  You may ask yourself, “Has photog gone mad?  Isn’t Robert Kagan part of the neo-con Kagan family that runs the Biden State Department?”  Why yes, he is.  But he’s just written a column that would bring tears of joy to the eyes of any Trump voter who reads it.  I’ll demonstrate.

“Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day.”

How’s that for a start?

 

“In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. In the RealClearPolitics poll average (for the period from Nov. 9 to 20), Trump leads his nearest competitor by 47 points and leads the rest of the field combined by 27 points. The idea that he is unelectable in the general election is nonsense — he is tied or ahead of President Biden in all the latest polls — stripping other Republican challengers of their own stated reasons for existence. The fact that many Americans might prefer other candidates, much ballyhooed by such political sages as Karl Rove, will soon become irrelevant when millions of Republican voters turn out to choose the person whom no one allegedly wants.”

Pretty good right?

 

“The magical-thinking phase is ending. Barring some miracle, Trump will soon be the presumptive Republican nominee for president. When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, in his favor.”

Nice.

 

“Biden, as some have pointed out, does not enjoy the usual advantages of incumbency. Trump is effectively also an incumbent, after all. That means Biden is unable to make the usual incumbent’s claim that electing his opponent is a leap into the unknown. …

Trump, meanwhile, enjoys the usual advantage of non-incumbency, namely: the lack of any responsibility. Biden must carry the world’s problems like an albatross around his neck, like any incumbent, but most incumbents can at least claim that their opponent is too inexperienced to be entrusted with these crises. Biden cannot. On Trump’s watch, there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It is hard to make the case for Trump’s unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it.”

That is true.

 

“Trump also enjoys another advantage. The national mood less than a year before the election is one of bipartisan disgust with the political system in general. Rarely in American history has democracy’s inherent messiness been more striking. In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile and fractious coalitions. German voters increasingly yearned for someone to cut through it all and get something — anything — done. It didn’t matter who was behind the political paralysis, either, whether the intransigence came from the right or the left.”

You went with the Hitler gambit?  I knew you would.

 

“I mention all this only to answer one simple question: Can Trump win the election? The answer, unless something radical and unforeseen happens, is: Of course he can. If that weren’t so, the Democratic Party would not be in a mounting panic about its prospects.”

Finally!

 

“If Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office. Not only will he wield the awesome powers of the American executive — powers that, as conservatives used to complain, have grown over the decades — but he will do so with the fewest constraints of any president, fewer even than in his own first term.”

Ooh!  Tell me more!

 

…

Note: Long exposition about how Trump will not be constrained by Congress, the Judiciary or even by Heaven itself.  Blah, blah, blah.  Suffice it say Caesar at the Rubicon.

…

 

“Having answered the question of whether Trump can win, we can now turn to the most urgent question: Will his presidency turn into a dictatorship? The odds are, again, pretty good.”

Alright, the good stuff.

 

“It is worth getting inside Trump’s head a bit and imagining his mood following an election victory. He will have spent the previous year, and more, fighting to stay out of jail, plagued by myriad persecutors and helpless to do what he likes to do best: exact revenge. Think of the fury that will have built up inside him, a fury that, from his point of view, he has worked hard to contain. As he once put it, “I think I’ve been toned down, if you want to know the truth. I could really tone it up.” Indeed he could — and will. We caught a glimpse of his deep thirst for vengeance in his Veterans Day promise to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.” Note the equation of himself with “America and the American Dream.” It is he they are trying to destroy, he believes, and as president, he will return the favor.”

Ooh.  That’s pretty exciting.  What else you got?

 

“The Trump dictatorship will not be a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it. In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not. The fact that this tyranny will depend entirely on the whims of one man will mean that Americans’ rights will be conditional rather than guaranteed. But if most Americans can go about their daily business, they might not care, just as many Russians and Hungarians do not care.”

Gosh, it sounds so good.  Can it be true?

 

“Should Trump be successful in launching a campaign of persecution and the opposition prove powerless to stop it, then the nation will have begun an irreversible descent into dictatorship. With each passing day, it will become harder and more dangerous to stop it by any means, legal or illegal. Try to imagine what it will be like running for office on an opposition ticket in such an environment. In theory, the midterm elections in 2026 might hold hope for a Democratic comeback, but won’t Trump use his considerable powers, both legal and illegal, to prevent that? Trump insists and no doubt believes that the current administration corruptly used the justice system to try to prevent his reelection. Will he not consider himself justified in doing the same once he has all the power? He has, of course, already promised to do exactly that: to use the powers of his office to persecute anyone who dares challenge him.”

Yes! Yes!  He must!

 

“This is the trajectory we are on now. Is descent into dictatorship inevitable? No. Nothing in history is inevitable. Unforeseen events change trajectories. Readers of this essay will no doubt list all the ways in which it is arguably too pessimistic and doesn’t take sufficient account of this or that alternative possibility. Maybe, despite everything, Trump won’t win. Maybe the coin flip will come up heads and we’ll all be safe. And maybe even if he does win, he won’t do any of the things he says he’s going to do. You may be comforted by this if you choose.”

No! No! Dictatorship, we must have dictatorship!

 

“Are we going to do anything about it? To shift metaphors, if we thought there was a 50 percent chance of an asteroid crashing into North America a year from now, would we be content to hope that it wouldn’t? Or would we be taking every conceivable measure to try to stop it, including many things that might not work but that, given the magnitude of the crisis, must be tried anyway?”

No! No!  We want the Asteroid!

 

“We are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy. As the man said, we are going out not with a bang but a whimper.”

Yes! Yes! Whimper!

 

And there’s a whole lot more of this.  Thousands and thousands of words.  And all of it unintentionally hilarious.  Oh, if only life could imitate this Kagan art.  What a wonderful world it would be.  Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi wearing those old timey striped prison outfits and General Milley in front of firing squad for his treasonous words to the Chinese military.  But alas, the fevered imaginings of Kagan are just that.  There will be no pogroms.  No elected or career government officials will go to the wall.  In fact, we’ll be hard-pressed to get anything done in the unlikely case that Donald Trump returns to the White House in 2025.

But I still want to thank Mr. Kagan for this wonderful bit of fantasy.  I needed a good laugh.  Reading his overheated imaginings was a hoot.  Donald Trump as a combination of Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler and Joseph Stalin was wonderful.  He even managed to get the asteroid from the movie Armageddon into the act.  And poor Bruce Willis can’t help us now.

But all good things must come to an end.  We can’t forget that in the real-world people are still in prison awaiting trial for something that happened three years ago when they trespassed in a government building like every other Lefty has done for decades.  We still have Dementia Joe crushing our lives under a blizzard of stupid directives that make everything from food to rent too expensive to afford.

And we still live in a country where fake news and fake elections mean fake democracy is the reality we live under.  So, all of this sound and fury about a man who basically is just a middle of the road New York Republican who is trying to keep our globalist elite from dispossessing the middle class and replacing them with tens of millions of third world refugees is a little bit ridiculous.  All it shows is that actual democracy cannot be allowed to happen in Barack Obama’s America.

But it’s good to see that Democrats can somehow manage to pretend that somehow, they are the ones being persecuted.  Well done, Bob, you creep.

Guest Contributor – Glenn W – 02DEC2023 – Dissident Monarchists

photog Glenn W, Guest Contributors , ,

Hi photog,

I’m a reviled civic nationalist just like you but you shouldn’t put more weight on successful predictions by the dissident right than they deserve. I realized in 2004-2006, when Republicans had the presidency and both houses of congress, that we were in deep do-do. With Republican control nothing changed. Literally, nothing changed. While I like to think I’m smarter than the average bear it doesn’t mean that I have a solution for all that ails the U.S. any more than the dissident right does.

Before I stopped following the Zman (please don’t think I have a grudge against him, I just know him better than most) he was reading a lot about Karl Marx and the early Russian communists. Zman was impressed by their sharp social criticisms; they did an excellent job of diagnosing the problems 19th century Europe was facing. The elephant in the room with the Marxists was their solution to these problems was horrific. Seeing a problem doesn’t mean you can solve it.

I hate to say it but a lot of what is happening in the U.S. right now reminds me of problems I used to associate with South America; a loss of the middle class and large slums. When I was younger I would wonder why the ruling classes in these countries didn’t do more to encourage the development of a middle class. As time passed I realized that the ruling classes in those countries liked things that way, they liked being an aristocracy that lorded it over the peasants. They had a class identity and not a national identity. I think that’s where the U.S. is now but the dissident right solution of moving toward monarchy is not a solution. All it will do is formalize the class distinctions we’re already seeing.

At least that’s how I see it.

 

Comment from TomD

I’m not certain I see that it is the far right moving to a monarchy. It seem that the current trend of the concentration of all power into the executive branch and the underlying administrative state would come closest to a de facto monarchy. And that looks to be a feature of a significant portion of the entire ruling class, regardless of party affiliation.

Please expand on the equation of far right to monarchy.

Reply by Glenn W

Hi Tom,
 
When I wrote the comment about monarchy I had in mind an argument that Zman has made on many occasions where he compares our modern democracy with a monarchy. Zman argues that being in the white hot spotlight of an election discourages any self respecting person from running in the first place. Over time the sane people are boiled off and only the most superficial people would consider running for election to any public office. This how we get congress critters like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes in office. He then compares the democratic clown show to a monarchy where the king has to keep the people happy or risk being toppled from power. That is an over simplification but not by much.
 
To be fair, Zman probably isn’t advocating for monarchy but he does consider it to be superior to any democratic system. What I think he actually advocates, without saying it in the open, is some form of commmunitarianism (for an introduction to what that is please read “The Communitarian Option”).
 
The common thread that runs throughout the dissident right, to use Zman’s term, is its antagonism to individualism. Zman constantly hits on the theme that the voting public is a bunch of morons who cannot be trusted to vote for enlightened self interest. Of course that is the principle that our founding is based on and why he disdains civic nationalists. The details of what exactly the dissident right would like to replace our system with are always vague but it won’t be a system where the hoi polloi are allowed to mess things up.

If Trump Wins in November, Then What?

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Let’s suppose that the economy continues to unravel and the misery index spikes.  Now maybe the masterminds, among the powers that be, decide that letting Trump clean up the mess would actually be smarter than owning it.  So, they unfortify democracy temporarily in Philadelphia and Detroit and, miracle of miracles, Trump wins.

Then what?

Of course, for a few months the dirt people will be dancing in the streets.  The mockery of Biden and all of the Democrats will be unrelenting.  And all kinds of brave talk will be heard about “draining the swamp” and “cleaning out the FBI.”

And then what?

Truth be told, maybe a whole lot of nothing.  Trump has said he intends to fire all of the disloyal FBI and Justice Department officials who wrecked his presidency.  In order to do any of that he will need a filibuster-proof senate majority.  And even then, the lower courts will fight him tooth and nail and we would probably see nefarious action by the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department to attack Trump’s lieutenants and even himself.

And even if he has the Congress to pass these measures, he will be juggling restoring the country to solvency along with this delousing program.  And because fixing the economy is a very difficult job, he has to get all this done in two years.  If he doesn’t, he’ll surely lose the Congress in the mid-terms.  And nothing of note will happen after that.  So, if Trump is elected, he must hit the ground running and do all of his hatchet work right from day one.

As daunting as that sounds it’s also kind of bracing.  To me it sounds like he has no choice but to go to the nuclear option from the git go.  It would be like a right-wing New Deal or Great Society sized effort.  And since this is a one-shot deal, they could do things that haven’t been contemplated in decades.  They could cancel all kinds of defense appropriations for useless weapons systems and literally and not figuratively close down whole agencies.  How many times have we heard about closing down the Education Department or the FBI and absolutely nothing has come of it.  But if the will were there then it could be done for a short window of time.  And for Trump eliminating the FBI and firing most of the Justice Department is almost a case of self-defense.  Because if they’re still in charge when he finishes his term, they will imprison him for the rest of his life and go after everyone in his sphere of friends.

You notice that all of this is built on a pile of ifs.  The biggest one is that the people running the country decide that it’s time for the Republicans to clean up the Democrats’ mess.  And it also assumes a Republican Congress wouldn’t just stab Trump in the back again as soon as he was in the White House.  Based on past performance that is the likeliest case.  But who knows?  Mitch McConnell might drop dead and if the economy continues to go south there might come a point where even the degenerates who inhabit congress might be willing to play ball with Trump just to save their own hides from the mob.  After all, we’re getting closer and closer to French Revolution territory every single day that Joe Biden drives this country off a cliff.  If the timing is just right, we might see something real happen in November.

Or maybe we’ll see nothing at all.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 01DEC2023 – Biden’s Voters

photog Chemist, Current Events, Guest Contributors , , ,

 

Here is the person who will vote for Biden:
This is an old friend. A person who has worked union jobs their entire life.
They asked if I planned to retire anytime soon.
I replied that, had they asked me that in 2019 I would have told them I’d be retired now.
But since the last presidential election, my 401K is in the shitter and everything is a hell of a lot more expensive so retirement is not an option.
(I phrased it this way because I knew they were liberal.)
“Well, the market goes up and the market goes down.” was the reply.
I pointed out that this was the first time the market was down while inflation was skyrocketing.
They gave the standard talking point that inflation was down now.
I explained that the rate of inflation was down, but the prices had not come down and were substantially higher than they were 4 years ago.

They will still pull the lever for straight democrat, even though they live in a crime ridden shithole city that has been run by the democrats for over 50 years.
There are many of them.