Tag: Political Reform

Fingers Crossed Again

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Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Bernie Sanders, even Donald Trump.  Look at all these old decrepit people who supposedly run our country.  Shouldn’t we institute some age limits?  And we can grandfather anyone who was already in government before the law passed.  But come on!  This is ridiculous.  I mean, even if Mitch McConnell is technically alive, he’s as pathetic as Feinstein when her “handlers” had to push the voting button for her on the floor of the Senate.  Everyone has seen the video clips of when he “froze up” during an impromptu interview inside the Capitol.  He looked like an animatronic figure in Disneyland glitching on its program.  It was absurd.

Now I know it’s hard to get good people to run for Congress.  Competent people would rather work for a living but something has to be done to raise the level of these people.  Even a lot of the young ones are morons.  I mean, I know I’m just venting here.  To fix all of this will take the concerted effort of a lot of smart people who prefer to work in the private sector because it pays better and is much more interesting but if our republic is going to survive as something more than just the plaything of oligarchs and demagogues something will have to be done to bring competence and accountability to Washington.

I think the first thing that we’ll have to demand is that anyone who serves in Congress will have to forego trading in the stocks of companies whose business is affected by government policy.  That’s a minimum.  Pelosi has already made a mockery out of legal insider trading to such a degree that the law forbidding it should have her name attached to it.

But I will confess I have no idea how we’re going to fix all this.  The lobbyists run Washington and trying to remove their influence would probably get a bunch of people killed trying to do it.  But it has to be done if things are ever going to improve.  The last time large scale reform was tried was during FDR’s administration.  Now a lot of what he did was awful.  He was practically a communist himself.  But he was trying to help poor people during a terrible business collapse.  So, we don’t need a communist.  We need someone with a mandate and a supermajority in Congress to start fixing a lot of dysfunctional policies.

Unfortunately, there is just as much chance that the next populist president will be more in the shape of a Mamdani as a Trump.  So, things may get a lot worse instead of better.  But even though I’m starting to get ancient, somehow, I have the feeling that within my lifetime things may come to a head.  We’ve been vacillating back and forth between Left and Right.  For better or worse I think something happens and the country will break one way or the other.  Fingers crossed it breaks our way.

Where Will We Be in 2,500 AD

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The last twenty-five hundred years of Western History seem to be divided roughly into five-hundred-year chunks.  500 BC to the beginning of the Christian Era was dominated by the Greeks and their successors the Macedonians and the successor kingdoms of Alexander the Great’s conquests (remember I said roughly, the Romans finished off the last of the Hellenistic kingdoms in 30 BC).

Then the Roman Empire dominated the Mediterranean and the rest of Europe for the first five centuries of the Christian era.  When Rome fell, we had five hundred years of interregnum.  From 500 AD to about a 1,000 AD the petty kings fought each other over the carcass of the Roman Empire and the Church attempted to keep the peasants alive and give them hope.  By 1000 AD some stability had been restored and the “Dark Ages” were replaced by the High Middle Ages and civilization began to coalesce and Europe was no longer just a maelstrom of savagery.  And just exactly around 1500 AD Europe exploded into the Age of Reason and the Age of Discovery.  Science, technology, commerce and learning were everywhere and the Renaissance Civilization of Europe conquered the world.

And now here we are at 2,000 AD and European civilization is collapsing into some kind of squalid self-hating cult.  All of the remarkable triumphs of science and technology are despised and feared by the technophobic ignoramuses that crowd around the campuses of the universities where pseudo-intellectuals pose as philosophers and preach a false gospel of defeatism and anti-European hatred.

So, are we doomed to repeat the five hundred years of dark ages that swallowed up Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire?  I guess it’s possible.  It certainly looks that way.  But history doesn’t repeat itself.  We live in a very different world.  Even the powerful Islamic caliphate wasn’t able to roll any farther than Iberia and Asia Minor so Europe had a chance to reassert its independence.  But the world is a very different place today.  China and other non-European powers are emerging.  If Europe and the United States were to decay into weak entities their independence and survival would be far from a guaranteed result.  It truly behooves the leaders in the West to address the loss of morale and direction that is currently ubiquitous in Western countries.  It is basically an existential necessity at this point.  And there is very little time left to reverse the situation before it becomes impossible to solve.

What is needed is a cultural revival.  And a revival requires a leader.  Someone has to focus the resources of the state to purge the negative aspects of the present culture and replace them with institutions and goals that will strengthen society.  And the institution that must be restored and strengthened the most is the family.  All the reforms should work to restore the nuclear family to vigorous health.  Laws that encourage women to stay home and care for children while their husbands work are the most important aspects of a revival.  All elements of society that are detrimental to the family should be weakened and discouraged.  No one should be telling children that they can decide what sex they are or any other madness like that.  Traditional sex roles and other stabilizing patterns should be showcased and encouraged in entertainment and educational media.  Society as a whole should be focused on restoring healthy lifestyles and activities for everyone.

If a program of renewal is pursued strenuously, I think it’s not impossible for us to stave off the destruction of Renaissance civilization.  But where do we find the leader to initiate it?

What Do the Poll Numbers Tell Me?

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For decades I’ve noticed that political polls in the United States had a very noticeable bias.  Depending on whether they were ridiculously partisan polls or just slightly biased they would skew more or less to the Left.  They were able to produce this bias by overestimating the percentage of the population that is Democrat and underestimating the Republican share.  And it was just assumed by me that we had to throw our own fudge factor in when trying to make sense of the actual political situation from these flawed measures.

But look at Joe Biden’s approval ratings on RCP now.

Polling Data

Poll Date Sample Approve Disapprove Spread
RCP Average 1/10 – 2/13 — 40.6 53.8 -13.2
Rasmussen 2/9 – 2/13 1500 LV 42 57 -15
Reuters 2/7 – 2/8 1005 A 43 51 -8
YouGov 2/5 – 2/8 1255 RV 41 51 -10
Susquehanna 2/3 – 2/9 800 LV 42 52 -10
Politico 2/5 – 2/6 2005 RV 41 55 -14
IBD/TIPP 2/2 – 2/4 1355 A 38 48 -10
CNN 1/10 – 2/6 1257 RV 42 57 -15
Monmouth 1/20 – 1/24 735 RV 38 55 -17
Insider Advantage 1/21 – 1/23 850 LV 40 59 -19
Harris 1/19 – 1/20 1815 RV 39 53 -14

 

These are horrible numbers.  And they’re close to accurate.  Rasmussen is one of the few pollsters that doesn’t favor Democrats.  He’s got Dementia Joe at 42 – 57.  CNN which is perpetually in the tank for the Dems has 42 – 57.  That’s not an accident.  Those are real numbers.  And why are they doing this?  Because Biden’s numbers with Democrats are terrible too.  Or in another way to look at it, a lot of the people who voted for Biden have switched parties.  The proportion of voters who claim to be Democrats has shrunk.  They’ve shifted to the Republicans or at least to Independents.  And they mean that they’ll be voting for Republicans even though they don’t want to be called Republicans because they’re women and they don’t want their friends to judge them harshly.

All this tells me that the midterms are going to be very bad for the Dems.  They will lose the House and the Senate.  I think that’s a given.  Does it mean anything more?  Only maybe.  It’s completely within the control of the Republicans to do what they typically do and blow this golden opportunity.  They can use their control of the Congress to collect fees from the donors and lobbyists, as usual.  They can ignore their duty and not thoroughly investigate and document for the American people the blatant and systematic voter fraud that happened in 2020.  Or they can for once act like the leaders of a free people.

Normally I’d say the chance of them doing the right thing was zero.  But things are significantly different this time.  Donald Trump refuses to let sleeping dogs lie.  He continues to rally the people to support efforts to investigate the 2020 election.  He continues to call out the RINO’s like Liz Cheney who support Democrat lies like the “Insurrection.”  And some of the state leaders are making the right noises too.  They are attempting to safeguard their election processes.

Putting all this together I’d say we’re at about a fifty percent chance of something good coming out of the present situation.  Admittedly that’s not a glowing prospect but compared to how things have gone for most of my life, it’s a reason to hope.

The polls actually give us good information for the first time in decades.  The people are pissed off.  Now it will take the politicians to get their act together.  Let’s pray that some actual leaders will emerge and use the opportunity.