A comment on the upcoming election by Tony Donadio (9-5-2020), posted on The John Galt Line Facebook groop.
Those treating it that way are making a serious mistake.
Understanding what’s truly on the line in November requires taking a broader cultural and political perspective than a focus on personalities. Particularly troubling are the very real threats to freedom of speech today, which is under direct assault by the political left.
I think it’s clear that America is now effectively facing civil war at the hands of a neo-Marxist insurgency. And I have to say that not appreciating that reality — especially on the part of some people who I think ought to know better — comes across to me as naive, tone-deaf, and lacking in awareness of what is actually happening in the nation’s culture and politics.
I want to make a “statement for the record” on what I think and where I stand on this. I wish I had more time to discuss it in detail, but I have projects due soon and will be too busy for the next few weeks to engage in much debate. So for now I’ll settle for simply listing a few examples of what I think we’re facing. There are a LOT more.
First, the democrats will pass a national version of AB5 (the PRO Act). Biden’s already endorsed it, and it will effectively make it illegal, everywhere, to work for yourself as an independent contractor. Instead your livelihood will be tied to a unionized “employer,” which will have the power to hold that “job” over your head if you don’t toe the line, and behave and speak as expected. In addition to being an attack on the right to earn your own living, this will be a direct assault on the freedom of speech.
The left has weaponized the intel and law enforcement agencies. This is not conjecture or a “right-wing conspiracy theory.” It’s a scandal that makes Watergate look like jay-walking, and the fact that the MSM has erected a wall of silence around it only makes it all the more damning. If they can use that power against a sitting president, they won’t hesitate to use it against anyone — including you and me. This is a profound and direct threat to freedom and the freedom of speech, and it dwarfs anything Trump has done or that we’ve seen from the right.
The left’s calls to “defund the police†will lead directly to de-facto censorship. That’s what happens when you neuter the social institution tasked with protecting citizens from violence and intimidation, and with maintaining law and order. When the anarchy of local gangs moves in to take its place, and people can be threatened, attacked, killed, or have their property taken or destroyed with impunity and without accountability for displeasing those gangs, then freedom of speech is dead and it’s time to go on strike.
And, of course, the left will, if given power again, pass single-payer, finally destroying the nation’s last vestige of freedom and self-determination in health care.
None of this is about treating Trump or the GOP as paragons of capitalism. I am not so much voting for them, but against the Democrats. But I do want to emphatically reject any attempt at equivocation or moral equivalence between the Republicans on the one hand, and a left that has embraced actual wage-slavery, violence in the streets, and the fascist weaponization of federal law enforcement. Yes, today’s right deserves criticism. It is not even in the same galaxy of bad as the Democratic party of 2020.
EDIT and Postscript: Here are some comments I’ve written elsewhere about this. I thought this would be a good place to collect them as well.
“The problem is that the Democrats have become a historically unique threat to the future of the republic. They weren’t even close to this bad at the time of the last presidential election. As I look at their actual policy platforms, and understand that they will put these into practice if they are given the power, I don’t see how I can do anything other than oppose them. However bad I may think Trump is, what the Democrats are proposing now is an open declaration of war on the rest of my life.â€
“Calling for a fight to defeat ‘Trumpism’ is waging a battle that is already long lost. That was my clear takeaway from what happened four years ago, and its scope is wider than just Trump and his supporters. As a result, I’ve come to regard the mission of ‘saving the right and the Republicans’ as a fool’s errand that is frankly divorced from a real-world appreciation of where they are as a political and intellectual movement. It’s earlier than you think.
“With respect, many people seem to be treating a presidential election as a method of culture-change intellectual activism. That is not only wrong, but I think it’s a hierarchy inversion. And because ‘Trumpism’ is a symptom of wider trends in our current culture, ‘defeating’ it will NOT save the right or bring it around to anything better. I think the Democrats, who are subject to the same cultural forces, have already demonstrated that. They responded to political loss by quadrupling down on precisely the worst elements of their platform, ideology, and naked power-lust.
“What I think all of this indicates is a need to start treating politics, at least for the time being and until we can make more pre-political headway in changing the culture, as a holding action designed to protect ourselves from the worst of the existential threats that we now face in the political landscape. And today, those are overwhelmingly coming from the Democrats and the left. That’s why I will be voting this November with the explicit goal of stopping them.”
As American cities burn again and a bitterly-divided country prepares to battle to the death over the upcoming presidential election, Titus Techera finds all of it reminding him only too well of Sidney Lumet’s black comedy “Network” (1976) and some other Seventies cinematic visions of Apocalyptic despair and heroic struggle.
Network is so far-sighted because it takes seriously the shift in post-war liberalism, from the halcyon days of Edward R. Murrow to the transformation of the news into theater. We see the collapse and abandonment of the high hopes of transforming America through technocratic reason. As the administrative state replaces ignorant politicians with ‘experts’ on issues of burning national importance, so the national media emphasizes its objectivity and tells everyone the same stories with the same authoritative confidence.
But the Great Society failed catastrophically as race riots, urban bombing campaigns unprecedented in American history, and Vietnam protests tore the country apart and set students against the Democrats who depended on their votes. Liberalism’s authoritative media speakers lost their authority and became as questionable as liberalism’s authoritative champions in politics. When the political elites fail to act for the common good, how can the journalistic elites do their job? By damning their own ideology or lying. Beautiful fantasies or ugly truths: this is how liberalism comes crashing down.
In a just world, Peggy Noonan would have repented publicly for turning her coat and endorsing Barack Obama in 2008 and then retired to a nunnery to spend her remaining years making grape jelly. But, no, alas! she is still holding forth regularly as a “conservative” commentator at the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Just last week, Peggy horrified some of us afresh with a gushing puff-piece praising Joe Biden’s running-mate to the stars.
She is an excellent performer of politics. Like Bill Clinton she enjoys and has a talent for the necessary artifice. She takes obvious pleasure in campaigning—making speeches, waving, laughing, pressing the flesh. In committee hearings she cocks her brow in the closeup to show skepticism. Her glamour, and her consciousness of it, were vivid enough to be spoofed by Maya Rudolph on “Saturday Night Live.â€
Reading her 2019 autobiography, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,†it occurs to you that what she’s really bringing Joe Biden is the things she doesn’t say and the stories she doesn’t tell on the trail.
She was born and raised in a climate of liberal activism in Oakland and Berkeley, Calif., in the 1960s and ’70s. Her father, Donald Harris, born in Jamaica in 1938, was a student there and went on to be an economics professor at Stanford. Her mother, Shyamala, was born in southern India, graduated from the University of Delhi at 19, and earned a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. Shyamala, who died in 2009, was expected to return home for an arranged marriage; instead she met Donald. They married, had two children and divorced.
When Kamala Harris was a toddler, her parents brought her to civil-rights marches. “I have young memories of a sea of legs moving about,†she writes. Her mother liked to tell a story. Once Kamala was fussing in her stroller, and Mrs. Harris leaned down and asked, “What do you want?†“ ‘Fweedom!’ I yelled back.â€
The general atmosphere was ’60s Berkeley—diverse, full of passion, consumed by identity politics and debates about liberation.
They took periodic trips to India. “My mother, grandparents, aunts, and uncle instilled us with pride in our South Asian roots. . . . We were raised with a strong awareness of and appreciation for Indian culture.†(India looks to be an increasingly important ally as America’s relationship with China deteriorates. If Biden-Harris wins and her background is helpful, good.)
She went to ballet class, sang in the choir in the 23rd Avenue Church of God, went to a black cultural center called Rainbow Sign on Thursdays. She saw Rep. Shirley Chisholm speak and was electrified.
By the time Ms. Harris graduated high school she wanted to become a lawyer like her heroes Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley. Also like her Uncle Sherman and a family friend named Henry. “Any time someone had a problem . . . the first thing you’d hear was, ‘Call Henry, call Sherman. They’ll know what to do.’ . . . I wanted to be the one people called.†…
[W]e get a sense of gusto. She admires toughness. She is a natural pol. She was bred to achieve in an aspirational immigrant environment. She loves to compete.
She is warm, humorous. Like most of the men around her in politics, she enjoys being important. She isn’t embarrassed by attention.
Peggy omits mentioning the unpleasant reality of exactly how a graduate of a third-rate law school, who flunked the bar exam, rose so rapidly to the upper levels of California democrat party machine politics.
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This week, Peggy delivered a tepid critique of the democrat convention: boring, artificial, and way too full of grievance-mongering. But, she also endorsed, and enthusiastically echoes, all the scurrilous crap they flung at Donald Trump.
All summer I’ve been running into two kinds of people. One kind says, “That man is a living shame on our country and must be removed.†The other kind says very little. They don’t defend him. They say, “I can’t believe I may vote for him, but . . .†And always they explain it this way: “What the other guys are gonna do on taxes,†“What the other guys will do to my industry,†“What the Democrats will do to the economy.â€
I’m getting the impression that for a lot of people, the ballot this fall won’t read “Trump vs. Biden†but “Trump vs. What the Other Guys Will Do.†…
Barack Obama’s speech will stick in history; it won’t just slide away. No former president has ever publicly leveled anything like this criticism at a sitting successor: “I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously, that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care. But he never did. For close to four years now, he has shown no interest in putting in the work.â€
This is a former president calling the current one shallow and lazy. He also suggested he’s greedy and intellectually incapable. Unprecedented? Yes. Unjustified? No, alas. And I’m not seeing Trump supporters rise up in indignant defense. They know it’s true, too.
Reading this, my blood boiled and I marveled at the extent to which long residence in the elite community of fashion bubble has distorted and impaired her perception of reality.
OK, it is true that Donald Trump talks differently from the typical representative of the national upper middle class elite. He boasts and brags. He constantly indulges in exaggeration and he interrupts his own sentences, inserting annoying little modifiers like “the most beautiful.” Trump also dresses and grooms himself peculiarly. His suits are always identical and blue and look like they came from Robert Hall. He wears (almost always) monochrome neckties, usually red, and always tied too long. And he dyes his hair and wears it peculiarly long and combed over elaborately in a very strange fashion obviously contrived to cover at any cost his baldness.
Trump offends the delicate sensibilities of people like Peggy Noonan, too, by his conspicuous lack of inhibition and propriety. Trump gets online and tweets what he thinks and feels, insulting and attacking his opponents in government and the media with no consideration to his own dignity or that of his position. Trump obviously is not lazy. His problem is hyperactivity.
I think “shallow” is also not the mot juste. Trump is not so much shallow as undomesticated and unrefined. Donald Trump offends the dickens out of our national elite, because he is clearly “not one of us.” Trump is an outsider, a parvenu from the Outer Boroughs, who dresses, walks, talks, and behaves like –oh, dear! oh, dear!– one of the common people.
Donald Trump is not glib and smooth-talking. He cannot produce the same kind of ever-so-nice sounding gaseous rhetoric as Obama. He does not understand how he’s supposed to behave. He breaks all the rules and knocks over the tea set every time.
Why all this rankles, why this stings so sharply, lies precisely in the fact that the people’s elevation of Donald Trump constitutes a distinct rejection, an undeniable slap in the face to the entire America establishment elite. The people rejected the democrat elite’s left-wing insanity, and they also rejected the Republican elite for having failed for so long to defeat Leftism absolutely and decisively. And, there is an especially sharp, added level of pain for establishmentarians looking on: Trump is winning, Trump is faithfully, unprecedentedly fulfilling campaign promises. The horrible, uncouth and unworthy Trump shrugs off easily the worst the democrat opposition can do, and marches on, trampling taboos underfoot, from victory to victory.
I didn’t support Trump in 2016. I had all the same stylistic reservations as Peggy and George Will and all the other Never Trumpers. However, I gradually observed that Trump really is patriotic and sincere. I liked many of his appointments and I really like the majority of his policies. Sure, I recognize that Trump is eccentric and flawed, but I also recognize how much he has accomplished and how willing he is to fight. You can’t come to me and tell me that Donald Trump is too dumb and too shallow to be president, we have to have Joe Biden instead! If Donald Trump owned a dog, it would be smarter than Joe Biden. And that dog would be more principled.
Andrea Widburg puts the Kamala Harris choice into its correct perspective.
Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris to be his running mate shows the shallowness of the Democrats’ talent pool. Biden handicapped himself by explicitly pledging to ignore men and then implicitly bowing to the demand that his female choice be black. However, it’s still somewhat shocking that, out of all the black, female, Democrat politicians in America, the best he could do was Kamala.
What’s most striking about Kamala is that, like Barack Obama, she has nothing in common with the American black experience. Despite her slamming the race card on the table, the only thing she shares with the generic “black vote” is skin color.
Kamala did not come from a family that has traveled through generations of the American black experience. There’s no history of Southern slavery, no Reconstruction, and no being part of the endless variety of post-Reconstruction stories. Some blacks struggled through the Jim Crow South, some reveled in the Harlem Renaissance, some roped cows in the Wild West, some were part of the single biggest American migration when they moved to the upper Midwest, some embraced the middle class, and some got sucked into the undertow of the underclass. Each is an American story.
Kamala’s bio, by contrast, brings her closer to me: like me, she’s a first-generation immigrant who is the child of very educated parents (although her upbringing was more affluent than mine). Her mother is a high-caste East Indian breast cancer scientist, while her father is a Jamaican-born economist who is an emeritus professor at Stanford. Like me, Kamala grew up in liberal enclaves that were anything but racist (although Kamala also spent many years growing up outside the U.S. in Montreal).
Other than that, the only differences are that her skin is dark and she’s a leftist, while my skin is light and I’m conservative. And I never slept my way to the middle the way she did. But other than that…
Local organization "Help Asheville Bears" is offering a $5,000 reward for information on whoever put a 'Trump 2020' sticker on this black bear's collar, spotted in North Asheville. Full story: https://t.co/07GuqSveyl (Photos by Sheila Chapman) pic.twitter.com/CqBOm9MRbB
F.H. Buckley contends that Slavery and Black Criminals Shot by the Police are not the real reason for national disorder. All the racial politics is simply a pretext.
Reading today’s national media is like staring down a bottomless pit. Le vertige des grandes profondeurs, the French call is. The vertigo from looking down a deep hole. And just when you thought we had reached bottom, there’s deeper level to the madness. It seems incomprehensible, and yet there’s a simple explanation. America is being held hostage.
We began by re-fighting the Civil War. Until recently we had left that behind us, and non-racist white southerners were permitted to retain some measure of dignity, in the memory of their battlefield heroes. But it was never about the Confederate statues, and the proof is that we quickly moved on to refight the American Revolution. A statue of Thomas Jefferson came down in Portland, Oregon, and Hofstra removed its statue of the author of the Declaration of Independence. We’re waiting to see what will happen to the Jefferson Memorial.
At the New York Times, Charles Blow tells us that George Washington isn’t safe either, and the university named after him prudently declined to express any disappointment when someone vandalized a statue of the first president. Whether or not George Washington University will change its name remains to be seen.
Things we thought were sacrosanct, the icons of our national identity, now are scorned. We can pretend that this doesn’t matter. They’re just statues, after all. But they do matter. Not for the pleasure they give the rioters so much as for the pain they inflict on patriots who love America.
Nor has it stopped with the vandalism. We’ve gone to the next level, with the looting and rioting. In the last month major cities have become unsafe, as rioters work out the logic of what “resistance†means. American stores lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and merchants boarded up their stores for protection. Nothing to see here, folks, said the liberal media, which gaslighted the looting and the boarded-up storefronts, and portrayed the riots as peaceful protests against an illegitimate president.
And that’s how to understand what is happening. We’re not to object to the riots because the bigger issue is defeating Trump. Nothing much else matters, and if an Antifa mob attacks a federal court building in Portland, don’t call this a riot. Say rather that it’s a campaign event, led by the good guys.
We’re in the middle of a chicken game, where the Left tells us they’ll let this go on as long as Trump is president. The liberal media will ignore the riots, the liberal mayors will tell the local police to stand down, the liberal prosecutors will promptly release anyone arrested. Try to defend yourself, and you’ll find yourself prosecuted.
The message is: this is what you’ll get, America, if you reelect Trump. Elect our guy, and the madness will stop, pronto. A Democratic president would forcefully suppress the riots without a peep from the press. But until then we’re held hostage.
They don’t even need a candidate. They can run Biden from his basement.
