Victor Davis Hanson has some insightful thoughts on how the radical left has destroyed the Democrats.
“They don’t have any political power. They’ve lost the House. They’ve lost the Senate. They do not have the White House and they don’t have the Supreme Court. They do have the lower courts, but they can ultimately be overturned by the Supreme Court.”
“And more importantly, they set certain precedents, Obama’s use of executive orders, for example, that are very convenient for a powerful Republican president like Trump.”
“So, they’re frustrated that they can’t affect anything politically. And then they thought they could use extra legal methods.”
“So they raided Mar-a-Largo. They had 93 criminal indictments in, if you count E. Jean Carroll’s crazy suit. Five different courtrooms. 25 states were trying to get him off the ballot. They impeached him twice his first term. They tried him as a private citizen. Two assassination attempts and he’s a Nietzschean character that it just made him stronger. The more they tried to destroy him, the stronger.”
“They tried to destroy him and in the process they destroyed institutions. They were willing to do that by waging lawfare. We’ve never seen any of those things I just mentioned, raiding a president’s house, ex-president’s house, or trying to remove a major candidate of one of the parties from the ballot, but it all failed and now they have no political power.”
“So then the question is why are they why did they get in this position? And I think the answer is that they became the party of the subsidized poor, and the very upper upper middle class professional classes and the billionaire class, 9 trillion market capitalization in Silicon Valley. The Zuckerbergs, Soros, all those people and Bloomberg, all of them. And the reason was, I think, they thought that globalization, that enriched the two coasts, who had global skills, you know they had a market suddenly of 6 billion people, with media, law, investment, hedge funds, universities.”
“And then the people in the middle, who were muscular, and lost out on manufacturing assembly, resource exploitation, oil, gas, those type of workers [were] offshored or outsourced. They they created a kind of a narrative: ‘We’re the smart people. That’s why we’re wealthy. That’s why San Francisco and LA in the ’90s and the early century of the, 21st are so much better than you people.'”
“‘And that’s why the people in the East Coast are so much better. And you people are clinging and deplorables and irredeemables and chumps and drags and most lately garbage, because we’re the winners.'”
“‘And now that we’ve won and we’re affluent, we’re not subject to the consequences of our ideology, we can use you as lab rats. So we’ll try transgender on you. We’ll try the New Green Deal. We’ll have solar, wind mandates. We don’t care what the kilowatt price is. We don’t care what gas prices are because we’re protected by our wealth and our degrees and our zip codes.’ And that changed the Democratic party.”
“If you go back in ’92 and ’96 and look at their convention statements under Clinton, my God, they’re to the right almost of Republicans. ‘We’ve got to close the border. Illegal immigration has to end. We have to deport people. Juveniles who commit crime should be tried as adult. We need more police officers. We need to balance the budget.’ That was the Clinton response to McGovernism and Carterism.”
“What I’m getting at is that this demographic change, or this economic or financial change, made it a party of, ‘Well, we don’t have any popular middle class anymore. We don’t want them. All we need to do is open the borders, subsidize the poor, subsidize the non-white, and concentrate on the power of money to influence the media. And the order of your Google searches will be affected. We have insidious ways of retaining power without popularity.'”
“And somebody came along and beat them at their own game. And that was Trump, who was a master of the media, who was a master of alternate media, popular culture. And that creates a lot of frustration on their part as well. They thought that they were transforming to NetZero world, Green New Deal, DEI. It wasn’t just DEI or affirmative action. There was a new, vitriolic, anti-white [ideology].”
“And all of that was going to be institutionalized, and that was part of the new Democratic Party, and Trump came along and said ‘I don’t think most people like this stuff, and I’m going to find out who they are that don’t like it. I’m going to get him out to vote.’ And it was very hard in 2016 and 2020, but he learned.”
“And final thing is maybe the best thing was that he did lose 2020, because he learned in those wilderness years exactly how the the left got power and how to neutralize it. And then when he came back in, he said, ‘I’m going to appoint people on my ideological turf. It’s not going to be any more of these first term people. And I’m going to actually appoint people who have been victims of the very agency they’re going to run like a Kash Patel or Tulsi Gabbard or Jay Bhattacharya, so I can trust them.'”
“And it’s been a remarkable first 8 months how effective he’s been. And I thought by now he’d be pulling 30%, given the magnitude of the counterrevolution. But it’s just amazing what he’s been doing.”
“It reminds me so much of the Thermidorian Reaction to the Jacobans. You know the Robespierre brothers were put out of business by a counterrevolution, and they were exactly like the left. We have 1619, they had Year Zero. Our people are secularist or atheist or agnostics; Vatio* was going to be their Supreme Deity, Reason.”
Trump is much better prepared for his second term than his first. “They must have studied the left, chapter and verse, because they really know how to push their buttons. And maybe one of the legacies of Donald Trump, besides his positive contributions, will be he had an unique, uncanny ability to make the Democrats expose themselves in a way that they really are. And it’s very repulsive and off-putting to the public.”
As usual, VDH is succinct, insightful and accurate.
*Not sure YouTube’s automatic translation has this one quite right.
Here’s an interesting talk between two Trump-hostile liberals (director of Thiel Capital Eric Weinstein and novelist Bret Easton Ellis) who nonetheless have figured out how badly Trump Derangement Syndrome and Social Justice has screwed their side.
A few interesting points, most from Weinstein:
A mention of Weinstein’s essay on Kayfabe, professional wrestling’s shared fake reality. From that essay:
Because professional wrestling is a simulated sport, all competitors who face each other in the ring are actually close collaborators who must form a closed system (called “a promotion”) sealed against outsiders. With external competitors generally excluded, antagonists are chosen from within the promotion and their ritualized battles are largely negotiated, choreographed, and rehearsed at a significantly decreased risk of injury or death. With outcomes predetermined under Kayfabe, betrayal in wrestling comes not from engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct, but by the surprise appearance of actual sporting behavior. Such unwelcome sportsmanship which “breaks Kayfabe” is called “shooting” to distinguish it from the expected scripted deception called “working”.
Were Kayfabe to become part of our toolkit for the twenty-first century, we would undoubtedly have an easier time understanding a world in which investigative journalism seems to have vanished and bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts. Perhaps confusing battles between “freshwater” Chicago macro economists and Ivy league “Saltwater” theorists could be best understood as happening within a single “orthodox promotion” given that both groups suffered no injury from failing (equally) to predict the recent financial crisis. The decades old battle in theoretical physics over bragging rights between the “string” and “loop” camps would seem to be an even more significant example within the hard sciences of a collaborative intra-promotion rivalry given the apparent failure of both groups to produce a quantum theory of gravity.
What makes Kayfabe remarkable is that it gives us potentially the most complete example of the general process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery.
Mention of preference falsification. “You needed to say how horrible [Trump] was if you were part of the institutional milieu, or if you needed to keep a job or weren’t on the wrong side or your clients.”
Here’s a long money quote:
The dominant idealism of a time is usually a false narrative about how people can make money during that time. ‘We Are The World'” as a portrayal of concern about Africa, the poor in Asia, what can we do to uplift people. But really it was a story about if we don’t break our bonds to our fellow countrymen, if we don’t make sure that we can not have to take care of Appalachia and the poor in the South and the downtrodden in our inner cities, we’re not going to be able to make money. The way to make money is to move operations overseas, to keep [your] headquarters wherever it’s tax advantaged. There was some process by which globalization was the betrayal of your countrymen. And that thing was portrayed as the Davos idealism. And the Davos idealism is cratering. Because it was a wealth transfer program posing as a philanthropic effort. And so the reason that nobody wants the Clintons, nobody wants the Democratic Party. Nobody wants the sanctimonious nonsense about, you know, our thirst for justice in our hatred of oppression is, is that this is a search for a constituency. That’s large enough to get people elected who can continue to keep people making money.
“He knows what the inference patterns of the left are.”
“The institutional left [forcibly] transfuse one group to supply blood to another.”
Reservoir Dogs: “Mr. Blonde is the psychopath who has shot up the jewelry store. They can’t figure out who they can trust. The only person you can trust is the psychopath, because the psychopath isn’t under control. Well, Trump came through as Mr. Blonde. The one person we know isn’t under institutional control is Donald Trump because he would never say those things. So now we’ve got a new paradigm where the only trustworthy person is the least trustworthy person.”
“You can’t wake people up because they’re dying to get back to the process of making money by betraying their fellow countrymen. The globalization thing came to an end. There’s no new idea about how to make money, right. And the pyramid schemes are collapsing.”
Ellis talks about how freedom of speech has become so constrained by leftists shibboleths. “I can’t say this, I can’t express myself…this is maddening. I can’t live!” And how many people confided to him secretly that they were going to vote for Trump, even though they could never say it in public.
“So Trump is going to hit this thing over and over again, the left is programmed to say certain things, to defend certain things. If you have to make the point that there is absolutely zero connection whatsoever between Islam and terror, there is no connection whatsoever, zero, it’s an illusion, somebody can hit that all day long, every day.”
“There is, there was once upon a time, a heuristic that said the best way to have a multicultural society is that you have to have some load bearing fictions. Like all religions are equally problematic in all ways. There’s no way that’s true…As a result, those heuristics hardened into dogmas.”
“‘Why are those everybody complaining about the trade deals we inked since they helped people in Mexico?’ As if American voters are gonna vote to help Mexican peasants. I mean, it’s great if Mexican peasants are helped, but I just don’t see the lowest echelons of American society having as their top priority, helping Mexicans with their vote. I mean, none of this makes any sense.”
Ellis: “Trump presented something extremely new into the conversation and the left couldn’t deal with it. The media couldn’t deal with it. I always felt that they had kind of dealt with them in a neutral way and just reported what he did without all his hyperbole. I don’t know if he would have won necessarily.”
Weinstein (in response): “All just, smart, honest people had to be rejected from the institutional layer. Universal expulsion of people who will not go along with the gated institution. My theory about this [is] that we grew very quickly in a very stable way. That was totally anomalous post world war II to about 1972, and every single institution that you see has an expectation of that kind of growth continuing. And so what happened is, is that all of those institutions, when they went pathological, they became Ponzi schemes and you needed to have a group of people in that institution who would not reveal the Ponzi scheme. And so effectively our expert class has been selected for as the people who will not blow the whistle on the fact that they’re lying.”
“It’s easy to be Trump. It is. But the only problem is is that if you beat Trump in the way that’s easy to beat Trump, you will not service the people with second and third homes in the Hamptons. And so those people are saying, well, I wasn’t thinking of spending that much to beat Trump.”
“Do you, do you really want nine conservative Supreme court justices? If you do, if that’s what excites you, I highly recommend talking about reparations for slavery.”
I have significant ideological disagreements with Weinstein on various issues, but his analysis of how Democratic dogma, institutional hypocrisy and Trump Derangement Syndrome have driven the left insane is insightful.