Non-Contradictory Angst

 

There are people I respect who believe that Trump is dangerously unfit to be president, that he probably would like to become our Duce, and that too many Republicans have wrongly abandoned their former beliefs in limited government, free trade, and America’s essential role in the world, making them unfit to govern. There are people I respect who believe that for all Trump’s personal failings, ignorance, and incompetence, he and the Republicans have done some needed and sometimes necessary things that have benefited the country.

There are people I respect who believe that too many Democrats’ embrace leftist dogmas, and favor radical identity politics and a general dangerously expansive statism, making them unfit to govern. There are people I respect who believe the Democrats are doing the necessary work of upholding norms, defending settled, law abiding illegal immigrants from mass deportations, and opposing Trump’s authoritarian tendencies.

These opinions are conflicting by not contradictory. All them can be true, and the saddening fact is that they are. Neither party is fit to govern or deserves the political allegiance of the citizens. People should accept political homelessness, favoring one party or the other on particular issues but not fully throwing in with either, and certainly not expecting too much from either. One would not want to encourage either bunch.

A New Villain

 

As recently as a couple of months ago the party line from Democrats and their public relations people in the traditional media was that Trump was a dangerous, out of control, megalomaniacal would be Duce who would try to lord it over us as a dictator.

That did not work out for them. Trump won, and according to polls is popular with the public. It became time to try something else. So the story this week is that Elon Musk is is the villain and real president calling all the shots and leading poor, hapless, helpless weenie boy Trump around by the nose. In its characterization of Trump, the whole thing is a fast one eighty suggesting 1984.

My guess is that the Rasputin story won’t work, and pretty soon we will be told that Musk is just another sycophant with no real authority, that the real danger is someone else (probably Trump again but maybe RFK), and that no one in the know ever thought otherwise. It is galling to be lied to so amateurishly and unconvincingly by people who think you are so stupid they do not have to keep their stories even semi-straight over short intervals. It can insult people’s intelligence and make them angry.

Harris, Shapiro, and Walz

 

Mr. Taggart: I got it! I know how we can run everyone out of Rock Ridge.

Hedley Lamarr: How?

Mr. Taggart: We’ll kill the firstborn male child in every household.

Hedley Lamarr: Too Jewish.

-Blazing Saddles

So apparently was Josh Shapiro. On the evidence Kamala Harris and the Democrats were set before the weekend to select Governor Shapiro of Pennsylvania as their candidate for vice president. They announced that there would be a big kickoff event for their ticket Tuesday in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania is a state that a Democrat pretty much has to win to become president. Shapiro is very popular there, and people thought that having him on the ticket might swing the state away from Trump. He is also what passes for a moderate among Democrats these days and might have helped with some voters who would be wary of a hard leftist such as Harris. The selection seemed obvious to lots of people, an easy slam dunk of a decision.

It probably would have been except for one thing. Shapiro is a Jew, and not only a Jew but a Jew who supports Israel in its war against Hamas. The best guess is that that outraged the party’s pro-Hamas leftists enough that Harris found it necessary to drop him and choose instead a leftist governor who seems to add nothing to her chances of winning.

If so, the antisemitism it shows is not even the worst thing about it. The war in Gaza is not only a conflict between Israel and Hamas’s savages. It also is part of a world wide struggle between liberal civilization and its illiberal and barbarous enemies in China, Russia, Iran, and elsewhere. If Harris and her party are too afraid of, or worse sympathetic to, those who side with the savage and the barbarous to do not only the right but even the apparently politically expedient thing, it says a lot about her and the entire party.

The Enemy of Your Enemy

 I never thought much of Donald Trump as a human being, but his behavior since election day has been far worse than I would have guessed. It has been so bad, dishonest, arrogant, un-presidential, and harmful that people need to be reminded to be careful not to make the naïve mistake of assuming that because one  person is very bad, his enemies must be good or at least acceptable.  For  Democrat politicians are neither.

Their wrongheaded and often dangerous plans, agendas and prejudices are well known. Besides that, many of them are  repulsive, hypocritical phonies and con artists. They condemn the rioting  by Trumpist goons Wednesday but  were unbothered and  sometimes  supportive when leftist thugs rioted and looted in cities around the country during  summer.   (The  mess in Washington Wednesday was as much “mainly peaceful” as the events they defended all summer.) They criticize Trump’s stirring up his mob with false stories about a stolen election but were happy to stir up mobs they liked with  false claims that George Floyd’s death was  due not a handful of bad cops but to an imagined systematic racism pervading the country. They claim concern over  Trump’s  threat to their beloved American democracy after embracing  the Marxist Black Lives Matter organization in apparent unconcern for the fact that dictatorships of the proletariat  are not big on democratic elections.  They correctly worry about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies but are unbothered  by the way that their mayors and governors often arbitrarily, sometimes  needlessly, and occasionally  simply meanly  ordered people around and disrupted  their lives during the epidemic.  Pelosi casually calls Trump’s riot a manifestation of “whiteness”  but would demand the resignation of a Republican politician who called the trouble this summer an example of blackness.

Trump will be gone in a few days.  The Dems will still be around – more powerful and with some unpleasant  things on their minds.  People need to be alert and see them for what they are. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend. Sometimes he is just another flavor of enemy.

Different Approaches

Republican politicians can be exasperating. Too many are  crude, illiberal on social matters, unserious about liberty, pragmatic in the bad sense of that term, unscientific in outlook, poor at making their case, and generally lacking cohesive, thought out principles. Some  people favoring liberty and individual rights still  support Republicans in elections against Democrats as the lesser evil.  Others say the two parties are more or less equivalently bad and reject both.  Since state and local governments are being left  to make many of the decisions about handling the present epidemic, people have a chance to look at the behavior of politicians from both parties and see if it indicates any meaningful overall differences between the parties.

Republican officials usually have ordered shut downs reluctantly, enforced them fairly politely, relied as much as possible on people going along voluntarily, and begun – usually eagerly – to start getting things back to normal as soon as conditions allowed. From their behavior it seems that they have not liked the things they have done and will be glad to stop doing them.

On the other hand many Democratic officials give the impression of really enjoying having and using this new power over other people. The pettiness, malice, arbitrariness, dogmatic vigor, and simple mean relish with which they have made and enforced  their dictates surely make it seem that  they are having a good time. They certainly are reluctant to let  go. Some even speak seemingly longingly of a “new normal” in which they will keep the new powers indefinitely.  Some of that reluctance to open things up may be a political ploy to hurt Trump in the next election, but that does not explain all of it. (Trump probably  is not going to carry New York in November regardless of how long Cuomo and Wilhelm  keep the state and city shut down.)

Many of us who are fond of neither party believe Democrats on average are more likely than Republicans to want to control more of other people’s lives by force,  and therefore are a worse  threat.  The Dems recently have given that hypothesis a whole lot of support.

Posture Contest

Years ago a cartoonist at our local newspaper likened some failure in sports – football I think – to losing a good posture contest to Quasimodo.  That is exactly what the Democrats in Washington and their public relations agents in the traditional media have done in the last couple of days.  Last week Trump called Republicans who oppose him politically human scum.  He was properly criticized for it by people who saw it as illustrating his  immaturity, tendency to bullying, lack of respect for the office he holds, immense arrogance, bad manners, and simple lack of good sense vividly.   

Now though the Democrats and their assistants in the media have come up with one that so far out does Trump’s outburst as to make it seem unremarkable. Over the weekend US Army Delta Force soldiers  attacked an ISIS compound in Syria and killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS while suffering no human casualties and only one slightly wounded dog.  This was unconditionally good news in both moral  and geopolitical terms. The man needed killing, and his death damages the vile organization he headed.  It was a fine day for the world, the United States, and the US Army, and for justice and decency.

However one would not know it from the reactions of Democrats and people in the media. Pelosi and Schiff sniffed about not having been informed about the raid beforehand.  I do not know about Pelosi, but, based on his behavior over the last months, it would have been completely in character for Schiff to have leaked information about the attack in hopes of preventing something that people would see as a victory for Trump.  Others on the left, while perhaps allowing that getting rid of al-Baghdadi might have been something of a good thing, announced the real news story was Trump’s speaking too rudely of al-Baghdadi, his treatment of Schiff and Pelosi, or some other supposed breach of etiquette. Some including the Washington Post, which labelled al-Baghdadi an “austere religious leader” went so far as to whitewash the target of the attack. (The Post’s story led to some interesting imagined Post obituary notes on the internet. My favorite was “Adolph Hitler, Austrian vegan activist and landscape painter, dies at  56.”) . 

So the winner of the latest good posture contest is Donald Trump. Go figure.

Unpopular Maybe, But Lucky

One of the things about Trump that many people in the traditional media do not understand is that he probably  does not have to score very well in “approval rating” polls to be reelected.  The reason for this is simple. He likely will benefit more than is usual by being seen as the less bad of two poor choices.

There are many people who do not approve of  the man as a person because of his arrogant, blustering, rude, dishonest, demagogic, and grossly un-presidential behavior, but  will vote for him in a race against a leftist Democrat.  (A poll taken after the election in 2016 attributed Trump’s victory to his doing better than Hillary Clinton among voters who disliked both of them.) I did not vote for Trump in 2016, but I would have if Texas had been in play. Since it wasn’t, I cast a protest vote for Gary Johnson.   If Texas is in play  2020, I will vote for Trump  against any of the candidates now running as Democrats. Their policies, plans, and “aspirations” are so bad and dangerous as to make such a decision easy. However I don’t like it, and I do not think I am alone.

 If the Dems could come up with a Jack Kennedy or even a Jim Webb as a nominee,  I  think many people who usually vote for the Republicans would be ready to vote for him against  Trump.  However that is so unlikely as to be nearly impossible.  Trump was lucky in his opponent in 2016 and seems on track to be even luckier in 2020. Considering both his base of those who are his fans and  the many others who are not but will vote for him as the lesser evil, he looks pretty salty.

A Big Parade

Conservatives are wrong to be focusing on Ocasio-Cortez. She is not what is worrisome.  To paraphrase an old columnist, she is only the majorette twirling a baton as she struts  in front of the marching band while the parade was planned and the music selected by someone else.  The thing to worry about is that  some people who make the decisions for the American left and  the traditional media now want this particular parade.

It does not matter that the Democrats’ next nominee for president probably will not campaign on killing all beef cattle and dairy cows in the country, banning air travel, and partially or completely demolishing all buildings in the country (though several supposed serious candidates of theirs have endorsed a plan demanding these thing among others).  Neither does it matter that a Soviet-style direct expropriation of people’s property via a so-called wealth tax is not likely  either.  What does matter is that many of the American leftists who count now feel safe to drop pretense and  demand that level of power openly. 

They’ve wanted it all along, but with a few infrequent  exceptions such as the McGovern campaign most of them kept it mainly to themselves because they knew Americans would not go for it.  For many of them that fear is now gone, and that is something for the rest of us to take seriously and deal with instead of fretting distractedly over the twirlers.