19 Sep 2016

Mousey Speaks Again

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togaidiot

Publius Decius Mus (aka Mousey) is back, lying on his klinÄ“ and being interviewed by one of those self-important Alt-Right blogs, which recently sprang into existence to repair the “exhausted soil” of the Conservative Movement with “fertilizing, re-sowing, and diligent cultivation.” Well, I am skeptical of their diligence, and I think the Alt-Right is bent on sowing only the most noxious and pestilential political weeds, but I will grant that they have plenty of male cattle manure to offer to fertilize the soil.

Mousey Maximus starts off defending the Trump base:

Of course there is ugliness in the hearts of some Trump supporters. Is it any uglier than the ugliness of fringe Democrats and leftists? We just lived through a summer in which police were targeted simply for being police officers—risking death to protect low income, primarily non-white lives. It wasn’t Trump supporters who were doing that or egging it on. But the Left and its propaganda arm instantaneously disavow any connection between that kind of fringe violence and official leftism or Democratic politics and that norm is enforced. Whereas our side is always Hitler and David Duke no matter what.

He’s right that there has (not altogether surprisingly) been more bad, even violent, behavior by radical left-wing Trump opponents than by Trump supporters, but he’s also right that there really is an uncharacteristic-of-conservatives-and-Republicans ugliness in the heart of the Trump Movement. All the frothing at the mouth over Hispanic workers, all the hostility toward foreign economic competition and even toward American allies, all the whining and self-pity is ugly. Beyond that, though we haven’t had Trumpshirt mobs fighting communists in the streets, so far, Donald Trump really has repeatedly dropped little comments in favor of violence. Trump has threatened to use the DOJ against political opponents. And Trump has threatened to suppress criticism by making it easier to sue newspapers.

———————-

Mousey moves on to level the usual nonsensical Alt-Right charges against real conservatives. We are all “cucks.”

The “conservatives” have at least two motives for band-wagoning with this nonsense. One is that they simply don’t understand higher principle anymore, because their whole mindset is unconsciously leftist, so they believe that everything the Left calls “racist” is in fact racist. Oppose more immigration? Racist! Don’t believe the police systematically try to kill blacks? Racist!

The other is simple cowardice. Conservatives are terrified of being called racist. I don’t know if this is bad conscience or what—maybe at heart they really believe it? Maybe living in all-white neighborhoods perhaps makes them feel guilty. But being called out for it scares them above all so they are always desperate to make public declarations of their purity as non-racists. They think they will get credit from the Left, which of course they never do, but that never stops them from trying.

Actually, lots of conservatives, including yours truly, criticize and make fun of Political Correctness all the time. I’m certainly not afraid of being called “racist.” I get called that all the time.

I know of a few liberaltarians who are on board with the police-shoot-too-many-poor-innocent-blacks nonsense, but I’m not and conservatives in general are typically not “friends of Trayvon.”

The number of conservatives defending immigration is pretty small. I happen to be one of them, though my own position is slightly nuanced: I’m in favor of curtailing Muslim and other hostile and non-assimilable immigration. On the other hand, I’m the grandson and great-grandson of Lithuanian immigrants, and I sympathize with Hispanic immigrants coming here, just like my own ancestors, to take the worst jobs at the lowest pay that native-born Americans won’t do, in order to make a better life for their posterity. I think that very old story is what America is all about, and I do not subscribe to the “I’m on board, Captain. Pull the ladder up!” school of thought.

——————–

Where Mousey gets interesting, though, is where he starts identifying the Constitutionalist Trump:

It is not that Trump really understands or has thought deeply about the Constitution, but he is trying to do something fundamentally constitutional in my opinion. He wants to assert the right of the sovereign American people to control their government, which is the core constitutional principle.

So, the Constitutional thing, we are given implicitly to understand is to be a great big Know-Nothing, and build a giant wall to keep those beaners out. When these kinds of people start talking about the “sovereign American people,” they are not talking about people’s individual rights. They are referring to an alleged right of some collective group of white lower-middle-class people unhappy with cultural and economic trends to deport Mexicans for cluttering up the landscape and spoiling their views and for speaking Spanish.

That’s really about it for Mousey’s desired exercise of sovereignty.

He goes on to hint that that sovereignty ought to include some kind of reversal or restraint of the administrative state, but he rapidly concedes that Trump isn’t really going to do much about that.

The real issue here is that the mainstream has accepted that the only legitimate rule is rule by the administrative state. Therefore anyone who challenges that, however inchoately, must be a tyrant or proto-tyrant, is by that challenge alone illegitimate. Thou shall not challenge the administrative state.

Obviously, conservatives oppose and challenge the growth of the administrative state all the time. Though, admittedly, when we do, we are fighting against powerful vested interests, the tides of fashion, the defects of Human Nature, and Entropy itself, so we often lose.

Personally, I love the Constitution. I find it to be one of the greatest marvels of human history and perhaps the greatest political achievement of all time. But John Adams was right when he said it was designed for a moral and religious people. It requires a certain virtue or character in the people to maintain the Constitution and unfortunately we’ve let that decline. The biggest question of our time is whether we can get it back.

One attack that people have made against me is “this idiot thinks Trump is a savior!” Of course I haven’t said that and don’t believe it. He is like a burly blocker who’s opening a path for us to run through. It’s still up to us to run through the gap. He won’t—and can’t—do that for us. We have to do it ourselves.

And, here you are, Trump isn’t really going to turn back the administrative state. Instead, we ought simply to interpret all cases of Trump’s vulgarity, rudeness, insolence, bad manners, ignorance, crudity, and flambotant mendaciousness as symbolic assaults on the administrative state. There goes Donald! speaking ungrammatically again and striking another blow for freedom!

I love the “Cato the Elder weeping over the declined morals of the Republic” folderol. Woe to us! We are no longer a moral and religious nation. We’re doomed! So, the answer is to go and support a crude, shameless, unprincipled, materialist millionaire whose moral perspective is essentially identical to that of Hugh Hefner! That’ll keep the young ones on the straight and narrow path for sure.

——————–

Mousey argues that Trump is really a great leader.

Trump did something no one else has done in a long time. He broke through the taboo on talking about immigration, trade and economic policy in ways not reflective of Davos-class, administrative state ideology. And he won on those issues.

All the other “conservatives” who’ve run in the past 20 years either opposed Trump’s take on those questions or ran from them or ignored them. But Trump comes along and succeeds and we’re supposed to reject him because he doesn’t have a sufficient command of political theory? Come on.

I’d say that a defective primary system failed catastrophically, because cross-over democrat voters in open primaries and unprincipled shit-for-brains yobbo voters gave a plurality to a noisy celebrity candidate because watching him was fun and entertaining and it would have strained their brains to think seriously. Those pluralities got him all the votes in winner-take-all primaries and then momentum and all the free television publicity accorded a man-bites-dog style candidacy led to victory.

My own take is that the process failed disastrously and needs to be complete reconsidered and restructured. I do not concede that Trump’s nomination was legitimate or proved something other than that bad things happen and people are stupid.

——————–

And here is where Mousey really get hubristic and above himself.

Conservatism has not adapted in half a century or more. It “adapts” in that it takes up new policy prescriptions, on broadband and the like, but otherwise it still thinks that the fundamental challenges are always the same. Now, the great issue of 1860 was the possible expansion of slavery into the territories. Is that an issue now? There is an underlying matter of high principle, to be sure, but is that issue the issue? Any fool can see that answer is “no.” Why would the great issues of 2016 be the same as those of 1955? Or even 1980?

“Fusionism” is a case in point. This is the so-called three-legged stool: economic freedom, strong defense, “moral values.” These are great things, so it seems. Are they always the priority? For instance, in Puritan times, what’s more needful? A greater emphasis on moral purity? Or maybe a little recognition of human weakness? In dissolute times, of course the former is more needful.

Economic freedom is a human right. But with finance having seized the economy by the … whatevers … and income inequality skyrocketing, should lower taxes really be top priority? Carried interest, 2 and 20? Or is fostering economic solidarity more important? Conservatives have conniptions at the very question. But Aristotle says that the greatest wealth gap in a good regime should be 5 to 1. I’m not saying we want that, but in what way does making hedge fund managers the ultimate winners in our society make any sense? It made sense to challenge the Soviet Union, as it still makes sense to maintain a strong defense. But “strong defense” has morphed into endless, pointless, winless war.

In 1980, we had to unshackle the economy, rebuild the military and alliance structure, and recover from the ’60s-’70s orgy. Today our priorities are different—or should be. But conservatives only know the formula they learned from the crib sheet.

Which load of malarkey proves both that Mousey is no historian and no conservative.

These kinds of vacuous and irrational criticisms of the Conservative Movement only come from much younger Alt-Right dimbulbs who have trouble remembering Ronald Reagan and who do not remember the takeover of the Republican Party and the nomination of Barry Goldwater at all.

Mousey has no principles himself, it’s clear, other than hating immigrants and resenting the misrule of the establishment liberal elite. In the length of a single sentence, Mousey moves from recognizing economic freedom as a human right to revealing that he believes that it’s the government’s job to pick winners and losers and to determine the distribution of share of the economic pie.

He is exactly like a liberal, perfectly prepared to sit down and decide that Jones has been too successful, and that means he must have cheated, so we’ve got to take away some of what Jones has got and give it to Smith and Brown, according to a formula we’ve devised sitting here which prescribes exactly what is fair. That is what I call leftism.

——————–

And if there was any doubt whatever that Mousey is one of those disgusting Alt-Right nihilists, here you go, his conclusion, which quotes Hillary!

AG: Finally, what do you say to people who claim that Trump is just a false prophet, whipping up the masses with promises of things he cannot deliver?

What difference, at this point, does it make? What have you got to lose? Can’t you see that Hillary is certain death for constitutionalism and conservatism?

In the first place, the country survived two terms of Hillary’s much more personable, much more competent husband and –shudder– two terms of Caliban. Hillary is not certain death for either constitutionalism or conservatism.

In fact, Trump is really much more of a threat. Donald Trump is unqualified, unintelligent, willful and self-entitled, narcissistic, unethical, unprincipled, uninterested in theory or ideas, and wildly egotistical. A Trump Administration is practically certain to be filled with scandals, in-house resignations, and economic and foreign policy fiascos. Donald Trump’s electoral success would change the Republican Party into the party of Nativism, Protectionism, and Isolationism. The bad ideas he is associated with would contaminate our politics and his failures and shortcomings would taint the Republican brand. His failures as a president would very likely deliver the executive branch to democrats for some period of time too frightening to contemplate.

It is depressing to contemplate either Hillary or Trump becoming president, but one of them will. We are probably actually better off living through four more years of bad things under a valetudinarian Hillary, for which democrats will be blamed. This was our election to win, but the Alt-Right and low information voters gave it away to a con man.

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Shelby

I believe he is throwing pearls to swine.



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