* The internationalist left and right want to make people who are equally concerned about everyone, whether citizen or not. Someone who sees every human on this earth as equally worthy of concern. This is a noble vision. Someone who is like this might claim to be morally superior to most of us who comment here at the Unz review (at least in Sailer, Derbyshire and Buchanan columns). But the law of unintended consequences means that their policies favour those who are completely amoral and are equally callous to everyone, regardless of where they are from. They aim very high but hit very low.
A citizen who loves his country and fellow citizens and cares for their honour may be appealed to on the strength of national honour. Not as beautiful as what the internationalists want, but a limited and durable quality. We can respect other countries while being loyal to our own.
* Good politicians seldom have the intellectual or policy chops to further their inchoate ideas. This is a really good start to putting some flesh on the bones of the make America great again slogan. It’d be great if the writer latched on to some of people in the Trump campaign. IF they win, they will have to govern, and having some worked out philosophy will help them pick people and priorities. I am worried that Trump will completely screw the pooch once he is in office and discredit Trumpism.
As an economist, we don’t have a lot to guide the middle way between free trade and protection. Our models aren’t really good enough to say where to go. He’ll have to reach outside the economics profession to set his trade policy but somebody who is still aware enough of economics to avoid some big pitfalls.
* “The ceaseless importation of people unaccustomed to liberty, coupled with the continued hollowing out of the American middle class, makes the American people less fit for liberty every day.”
To any reader disinclined to credit this statement I relate the following anecdote. About a year ago we learned that my 18-year-old niece had become pregnant. In an earlier time, someone in my circumstances might have reacted different than I did, but I suspect many would do precisely what I did.
I texted one of my social worker friends to make sure my niece got in contact with the appropriate government agencies that provide publicly funded benefits to a such a person. And so it goes as the middle class find themselves not quite able (or sometimes not willing) to address their own dilemmas.
* This article is flawed since it assumes that intuition needs an intellectual framework.
In fact intuition precedes thought, and not as commonly believed the other way round. Thought is only a formalization of intuitive concepts.
Trump is smart because he trusts his intuition, which is always superior to intellectual rigor.
These policy frameworks are in any case a joke, because politicians routinely ignore them. They end up following their intuition, mostly special interests, and then try and cover it up on the outside by finding some obtuse reference to the framework. The press then tries to sell us these lies as the politician being “principled”.
Trump is in touch with his intuition, and his value system is solid. As a Christian I can find lots of problems with him, but he is not my pastor, he is supposed to lead the country which is a secular institution anyway.
* Eisenhower defended the borders, mostly kept us out of stupid wars while still keeping the nation strong, we had trade but didn’t give away our entire manufacturing base, taxes on the rich where high and he defended social security etc. but he didn’t cripple the economy with rules. He moved to support civil rights for blacks – slowly but he did – but he was no social justice warrior.
Historians call his administration ‘boring’. Which is surely the highest accolade that any nation’s leader can ever attain.
If only Eisenhower had a last name that could be more easily turned into a noun. Ikeism? Ikistry? Help me out here, people.
His philosophy was so pragmatic, so colorless, that it almost defies catchy description. And perhaps that is the point…
* What’s unformed or instinctual about the key points of Trump’s platform:
A. End the uncontrolled flood of Third-World immigration to the US and Europe.
B. End the tax and trade agreement regime that favors unrestricted global wage arbitrage and pursuit of absolute advantage in international trade, to the detriment of American and European workers.
C. End the drive for global hegemony and seek, not to destroy great power rivals, but to negotiate durable agreements with them.
Trump’s platform is nationalist, in defense of the sovereign, democratic nation state, and opposed to the 100-plus-year-old Anglo-American project for the New World Order, i.e., global governance.
More concisely, Trump is opposed to the genocide of the European peoples, by the globalist Money Power.
* The economist Hernando deSoto has already formulated an ‘upscale’, part scientific and part spiritual, version of Trumpism. Though it comes from an odd perspective, it strikes me as deeply true.
* If we want an intellectual backing for Trumpism, we need look no farther than what George F. Kennan wrote in 1948:
“”…we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”
Maintaining the “position of disparity” the United States enjoys with respect to the rest of the world is the job of every American politician. To the extent that such persons subvert that objective rather than supporting it, they are not only failing in their responsibilities, but also betraying the public trust. For too long, the powers-that-be have engaged in “the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction” at the expense of their fellow citizens. They have acted toward them as Mrs. Jellyby towards her own children, to their great shame.
* More important than Social Security is Racial Security. Indeed, without Racial Security, there is no Social Security as things will fall apart.
We are seeing this in Sweden and Minnesota. As Africans soak up more and more of social welfare, there is less for the whites who are growing demoralized.
Proggy moral masturbation leads to dissipation and demoralization.
* There is nothing noble about balkanizing America. These people are destroying the engine that has created one of the wealthiest societies in the history of mankind, not just for the super wealthy, but for all of its citizens. Even the so-called “poor” in the USA on average own their own home, have 2 cars, two TVs, a computer, two cell phones, cable TV and internet. Poverty is relative. No one here is walking around with the distended bellies of starvation.
By importing people en masse from third world cultures who have no history of Westernization and its ensuing socialization, they come here and want to remake the USA into the same kind of hellhole they left. It will end badly as it always ends badly everywhere it has been tried.
* Agree that Trump is quite excellent at stepping through the minefields by keeping things slightly vague.
He seems to have a great intuition for dealing with the media, probably a result of his many years in the spotlight.
However, I think there is more to his success than just showmanship. He is one of us (contemporary Americans) . We’ve all grown up along side him and watching his somewhat wacky antics for decades. He was always a little on the entertainment side, but he also had the serious/hard working/down to business thing going for him.
These other candidates came out of (relatively) no where. Having been burned on Obama, a huge important factor is someone that we know.
Just how much we know Trump, of course, will unfold, but decades of familiarity are not without meaning.
* Trump believes lots of things, most importantly making America good for its founding stock again. Hence immigration restriction, trade protectionism, throwing out stupid lefty useful idiots from rallies etc. These are clear and meaningful positions. (Hence the lefties’ hatred of him: they hate America’s founding stock.)
* Denmark has a system that is more national socialist than probably any country in the world. A kinder, gentler third Reich.
* Here is some of our current Emperor’s ideological clothing:
The science is settled: catastrophic global warming is on its way if we don’t act now to stop it.
Economists have shown that free trade is always and everywhere a good thing. The American people have nothing to fear.
Diversity is strength.
Islam is a religion of peace.
Everyone can and should go to college.
Racial and gender discrimination are pervasive throughout American society. It is the principle reason gender and racial inequalities continue exist in various fields of endeavor.
Evolution is a fact, not a theory, but it doesn’t mean that genetic differences are important when it comes to understanding and solving important problems in human societies.
* It occurs to me that re: Trump’s “imperviousness” to attacks, there’s another way of looking at it– the specific flavor of the attacks launched from his detractors’ arsenal is remarkably stale and vitiated from overuse. The image of “Trump” itself is a media creation or rather the entropy of cliched media outrage-gaffe-exposé propaganda, thus he is not constrained by the known laws of media physics…
To quote from Best Of The Web Today: “When decent men like Reagan and the Bushes ran the Republican Party, you could liken them to Hitler and be taken seriously. What has the world come to?”
* When Trump says that George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a disaster, he is just saying what everyone outside the political class has always thought and maintained, but the political class has kept up the lie.
Remember that Hillary Clinton probably lost the democratic nomination before by voting to support the Iraq War, whereas Obama demonstrated that he knew exactly what was going on. It seems to have been a real blind spot of the political class, because Jeb Bush was totally thrown by a question about it, even though the question was inevitable and he had years to prepare for it.
However one must distinguish between false beliefs and deliberate lies. George W Bush told deliberate lies about Iraq when he had access to all the intelligence and available information, and so did Colin Powell and above all Dick Cheney. Hillary was just a dupe who was not smart enough to figure it out for herself. As for Jeb? Well, he is just a low energy guy whose heart was never in the job.
* Our company’s PAC sent us a please-don’t-vote-for-Trump email today.
They didn’t mention him by name, but they said Super Tuesday was an embarrassing spectacle and that Europe is laughing at us. Then they said the main thing bothering voters is the sluggish economy and if we would just realize that free trade is always good for everyone then we would vote for establishment candidates like good little peons.
They wound up with what can only be described as a classic invade-the-world/invite-the-world flourish. They said that all Americans could/should agree that we must protect “the most vulnerable and marginalized among us” and that “America has been and should continue to be a force for good in the world.” This they presented as universally accepted principles that the country should rally around.
I doubt the email had much effect because it was flaccid and long-winded. But it was interesting to see how the big players think, or what they want us to think. One thing that bothered me is that our CEO, usually a no-nonsense guy whose calls Obama takes, actually said that the government hates exporters. I don’t know where he came up with that one.
* Ron Brownstein of Los Angeles who according to Google Cache will come speak at your gig for $17,000:
https://speakerpedia.com/speakers/ronald-brownstein
And whose ex has entirely excised him from her Wikipedia entry, which is…interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Easton
Thing is, Randal–it’s an error to try to apply reason to arguments based on emotion. This is true no less in politics than in a marriage.
At this point in our republic, a lot of what passes for social commentary or policy wonkery is based on emotionalism, histrionics, and outright manipulation through hysteria (and recall the root of that word).
There is no rational reason for mass immigration. It is based on the desire to undercut white males’ wages, position, and genetics, and to make this republic a global, rather than national, entity.
It is, and has been for a century, ethno-genetic war–conducted in the realm of politics and economic policy…by the Ron Brownsteins of the world, and people who pay him big bucks to come and chatter in their echo chambers.
