* Point one, the election tropes of Reagan in 1980 are as useful to 2016 as those of Wilkie in 1944 were to 1980.
Point two, Reagan’s legacy is distorted through the lense of post-Reagan Bushian-Cuckservatism. Most of what is claimed to be Reagan’s legacy really stems from that time. This includes:
1) endless foreign wars (starting with Panama and Gulf War 1.0, Somalia, using US military and NATO to support Yugoslavia break-up)
2) modern mass immigration (1990 Immigration Bill)
3) free trade agreements (NAFTA signed in 1992, EU forms in 1992)
4) social issues politicization (started in opposition to Clinton changes in early 1990′s – “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, reaction to Casey vs. Planned Parenthood which birthed Lawrence and SSM)
Point three look at Reagan’s actual agenda. Much more like Trump than Cuckservatism:
1) Tax cuts and tax rationalization
2) Strong military to back-up foreign policy seeking world peace, seek confrontation but avoid conflict
3) Implacable opposition to Communism as a source of “evil”, no calling them a “political movement of peace”
4) Push-back on unions and strikes
5) Save Social Security as is, no cuts
6) Federalism
7) Protect American industrial might for vehicles, electronics, steel, textiles, sugar,
8) War on drugs
9) Deregulate energy production
* By far the biggest branch of government is the unelected permanent bureaucracy, which is leftist down to its very core. The judiciary also turns slowly – in 4 years or even 8, Trump will barely be able to change the course of that steamship. Trump will be fighting rear guard actions and sabotage from the day he takes office to his last day. Ultimately, the “Reagan Revolution” was just a blip on the trajectory of the “history is on our side” statists. Government just keeps growing and growing like Topsy. Mussolini’s formula applies now more than ever – everything within the State, nothing without the State.
The Presidency is a bully pulpit but ultimately his power is limited, even more limited than the Founders intended. They did not foresee the giant bureaucracy of the modern state nor that the judiciary would have the means to overrule both the President and Congress and conjure up new “Constitutional” rights out of thin air.
* The Presidency has been accumulating more and more power around it for a long time. One could say it started with Andrew Jackson, but it really kicked into high gear with Lincoln, and other important inflection points were the two Roosevelts, Wilson and LBJ. Obama is not so much of an inflection point of it getting worse, but his big sin was bragging about it, boasting about his pen and phone. What this has done is start to get the right out of a Constitutional mode and into an acquire-power-for-its-own-sake mode, in other words, focus on gaining control of the pen and phone. This somewhat explains why Trump defeated conventional rightist opponents, and also explains the burgeoning popularity of #NRx, Dark Enlightenment, and neo-monarchism. Presidents as near-dictators were doing alright when their power center accumulation was not well understood, when they could couch their power under Constitutional rubric. But, dummy Barry just blew that all to hell.
If you’re going to exercise near absolute power, don’t boast about it, lest you want to create competitors who want what you have.
* No, only a Democrat can be an American Mussolini, because our “sclerotic institutions” are in the D’s pocket and don’t resist at all when the dictator is doing stuff that they (not so) secretly favor.
Obama unilaterally announces that 11 million illegal aliens can stay – all of the “sclerotic institutions” who were supposed to provide “checks and balances” in our Constitutional scheme cheer him on (press, academia) or at most shrug their shoulders (“Republican” Congress, judiciary).
If next year President Trump announced that he is tearing up Obama’s decree (two can play this decree writing game) and declaring immediate expulsion of illegals – all of these “sclerotic institutions” will suddenly come to life and do a furious salsa dance, like those “disabled” workers that they catch water skiing. There will be 99 injunctions against enforcing the decree quicker than you can say “restraining order” and if they are lucky it will take to the end of the Trump Presidency for all of these to make their way up to the Supreme Court (and maybe get shot down there). The “sclerosis” is highly selective in one direction. The Overton Window is mounted on a track with ratchets so it can only slide to the left, which is the “right” side of history according to all of our institutions.
* What’s going to happen without Trump is that the mostly white elites will do fine (in the short term), and the and the high IQ Asians will intermarry to the new Brahman class. We will then have a huge mixed race class, largely non-white, who will continue to do all the labor. Certain classes will be fobbed off with sectors of the economy to destroy, but which will do no permanent damage in the end (e.g., DC Metro.) And there will be large black-gray markets that will feature drugs and violence.
How do I know it will end up this way? Look at any Latin American country. Including the People’s Republic of Cuba.
Electing Trump is not really about xenophobia, racism, or any of that. It’s about whether America will remain even functionally a democracy.
* Fareed Zaharia’s folksy, Will Rogers charm will ensure a large audience in the heartland of America.
* I think you’re onto something, Cagey Beast. You’ve identified the perfect running mate for Hillary. Technically, Zakaria is ineligible to be President, but surely we can overlook that. If there’s anyone even more likable, warm-hearted and funny than Fareed Zakaria, I don’t know who it could be. Between HRC’s already sky-high likability and Zakaria’s let’s-grab-a-beer-mate accessibility, the Dems could not lose.
Seriously, I think Fareed Zakaria on screen is the most dislikable person on cable news. He might be a lovely guy in real life, but on screen he is an utterly humorless, smugly superior, pompous little prig of a man. It doesn’t matter who his guest is; I will not watch him. I all but cringe at the sound of his voice (similar reaction to hearing HRC’s voice – see? match made in heaven!). Ugh.
* C’mon, don’t you remember when Reagan said he wanted Jennifer Rubin and Jonah Goldberg to carry his legacy into the future?
* [John J.] Mearsheimer says the odds against a Trump victory are long, but as pres there is no danger of him as an authoritarian because the system is entrenched in democracy and would prevent any basic change.
He suggests Trump will face a total dearth of qualified appointees in foreign policy positions who think like him. They are all neocons it seems.
Hillary Clinton’s stated policy is extremely hawkish according to Mearsheimer, and likely to involve the US in further open ended adventures like Libya, which she was mainly to blame for (and Obama said the war powers act didn’t apply to).
The article below notes he won his contested primary by sucking up the money of an open borders fast food magnate. Illegals love fast food, they both work and eat there. (You will notice that in otherwise white neighborhoods of California, the fast food American patriots should boycott fast food chains both for their health and for love of country.
The article also notes that as president of a small university in Nebraska, Sasse worked to overturn a local ordinance requiring proof of legal residency in order to rent an apartment.
Beltway Open Borders conservatives plus local Chamber of Commerce illegal-hiring businessmen just adore the guy with his perfect Religious Right background on top of his “complete amnesty” stance. In fact they are now trying to talk Trump into naming him as VP in return for ending the NeverTrump movement. Fortunately Trump will be to smart to fall for this trap. If Trump names an amnesty VP, he will be impeached and removed from office within a year.
Since Nebraska is not a competitive state, I hope patriotic Nebraskans here will consider finding some like minded Trump supporters and protesting Sasse’s local offices. Get 8 to 10 people together, figure out a spokesmen (a vet or a woman ideally, but whoever is most articulate), and call up the local media. Also, keep the message very simple: “We are protesting Ben Sasse’s support for job-destroying trade deals and illegal alien amnesty.” The local news stations in smaller towns in Nebraska are really starved for news, a small house fire is often the top story. It should not be hard to get some great free media for Trump.
* I don’t think Congress can limit the immigration cases the Supreme Court hears. It certainly can do so for Courts of Appeal and District Courts, and already has with other areas. Bankruptcy courts were created by Congress to hear just those cases and sit below regular District Courts. Patent cases are treated normally at the district court level, but are appealed to the Federal Circuit, a specialist appeal court, rather than regional appeals courts.
However, all federal courts in high immigration areas are already basically specialists in immigration issues. Here is the largest circuit court’s list of unpublished decisions:
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/memoranda/
There are about 24k decisions listed online. Running a restricted search shows that of that 24k, a full third or 8k are appeals from the lower Board of Immigration Appeals. More than 95% of the time the immigrant loses the appeal. And mostly when they “win” it isn’t that they get their green card, but a determination the lower court made a mistake and needs to look at the issue again, where it will probably rule the same way against the immigrant. The main point of these thousands of appeals a year is that it keeps the deportation process from happening for an additional one to two years, and top of all the other ways of delaying things. That’s more time to marry a citizen, engage in legal or illegal work, or create an anchor baby (and Obama’s position is parents of anchor babies should never be deported).
And the 1/3 of the work of appeals courts that are BIA appeals understates the immigration related work, as a lot of the criminal cases deal with deportation of illegals and criminal immigration violations. For example, here is a case where an illegal was convicted of a crime and also for illegal reentry into the USA following deportation. He appealed on the grounds that the lower court judge did not fully explain its sentence: http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/memoranda/2016/04/18/14-10502.pdf
And civil cases as well can concern immigration.
* In a way, immigration is about boosting the power of the ‘left’.
But it is also a way of taming and neutralizing it.
There are various kinds of ‘left’.
There is the ‘entitled left’. The more a people remain in a nation, the more they feel ‘entitled’. They feel ‘this is my country’. So, settled working class communities tend to be more demanding. They have Union mentality than Scab mentality.
FDR’s New Deal was about the Settler Left. It was about American Workers demanding more wages, benefits, programs, and protections. It was a real counter-force against the capitalist class, and this kind of settler American patriotic leftism defined the New Deal and much of post-war American Liberalism.
For Jewish elites, the Settler Left was Too White. For the capitalists, it was too troublesome and demanding since the Settler Left Americans had come to feel ‘entitled’. Even the immigrant communities(of late 19th century and early 20th century) had become Settler communities by the 60s.
Also, during the Cold War when the communist side promoted itself as champions of the Worker, the capitalist West had to show that it cared about the Working Class too.
But time passed. Communism lost. And Jews became very rich, and Liberals became better at new fields in Big Business than the Cons did. Look at Silicon Valley and entertainment sectors, and it’s mostly Lib.
As Libs were into arts, culture, and such stuff, they were more into ideas than identity. They preferred to attend film festivals and other cultural events around the world and schmooze with foreign intellectuals and artists than with native dummies and yahoos.
They identified with interest than by ethnicity.
Also, even when Liberal Jewish elites did feel a powerful sense of identity, it only made them feel LESS united with American masses.
When white gentile elites felt a powerful sense of identity, they might identify more with the white masses. But when Jews felt more identity, they felt more Jewish and more at odds with white gentile masses. So, Jews were doubly disassociated from white society. As liberals, they favored globo-cosmopolitanism that allowed them to rub shoulders with cultured and intellectual people all over the world. But even as tribalists, they only felt more disassociated from the white gentile Christian community.
As Jews became more dominant in American Liberalism, they were bound to feel less in common with the mostly white Settler Working Class and Middle Class…. even if both sides were on the political ‘left’. And as Jews and white Libs got richer and richer, they didn’t want to deal with labor issues that could be such a pain in the ass.
And even ‘leftist’ businessmen who offered generous benefits relied on affluent communities that could pay more. Take Starbucks, much lauded for benefits and such. But it’s a business model that will only work in whitopias filled with people with money. I mean people with limited means are not gonna blow $5 on coffee.
Anyway, the Sanders movement shows the fissures on the ‘left’. Even though Sanders and his supporters go along with the Dem Party talking points about ‘diversity’, they represent Settler Left sentiments. They are more ‘entitled’ and demanding because they feel they are Americans.
In contrast, immigrants may join with the Political Left, but they tend to be of the ‘grateful left’ kind. Being newcomers, they feel less entitled and more likely to do as told and work for low wages and even be grateful for it since life was so much worse back home.
The Lib elites prefer the Grateful Immigrant Left to the Demanding Settler Left.
There would be more push against the 1% if the American Left was entirely Settler.
To drown out the Settler Left, the Lib elites have increased immigration. If US is a ‘nation of immigrants’ and if ‘progressivism’ is about ‘privileged whites’ morally deferring to non-white immigrants, then the Settler Left loses confidence and expends much of its energy on serving the newcomers. It has less time and energy to organize against the 1%.
We see this among blacks. Native blacks are more demanding and feel more entitled whereas African immigrants are more grateful and subservient to the Lib elites. (Cosmopolitanism also undermines black power. Valerie Jarret is a ‘citizen of the world’ like Obama, and as such, she feels closer to elite circles than to the Negro kind. Cosmolattos are more likely to collaborate with the GLOB.)
The Lib elites also used the homo/tranny agenda, of course. How can the Settler Left organize against the 1% when they are too busy picketing businesses for not allowing some guy in a dress to wee wee in the women’s restroom?
* It’s hard to really grasp just how much power the President has. For any outrageous-seeming act the president might take, there is an even more dictatorial power that he could employ:
*Anything that has ever been done by executive order can be undone day one.
*Any federal employee can be reassigned to paperclip audit duty, every federal contractor can be barred from performing any action on behalf of the government or using any government information or property.
*Any group from the PTA to the Black Caucus may be declared a terrorist organization and its members imprisoned and its supporters charged with treason.
*Anything that it is legal to do to suspected terrorists can be done to congressmen or judges en masse.
*A simple declaration of emergency gives the President authority to expropriate any defense-related items such as building materials, fuel, food, buildings, medical supplies, and water, and to imprison or conscript anyone he wants for any reason or none.
*A declaration that the US is being invaded allows the president to wage unlimited war in the United States.
