Progressives will continue cramming their grim vision down our throats, and the neo-Trumpists will be utterly ill-equipped to stop them

 Here's what's going to happen, as far as I can tell: "Progressives" are going to complete the dismantling of Western civilization, the neo-Trumpist Right is going to persist in thinking that progressives can be stomped into the dust and that "conservative" values will then prevail, and actual conservatives - sheesh, isn' there a better term for what I mean at this late date? - will have to keeps their heads down and their mouths shut in order to survive.

Progs experienced some setbacks lately, such as Bud Light sales going into and remaining in a slump, and Target making some tweaks to the displays of its sexual-freak merchandise. But they're not down for the count:

Rose Montoya, a transgender content creator who has worked with marketers including Savage X Fenty, said fewer brands are reaching out for Pride partnerships this year. Montoya attributed that drop to fear sparked by the furor surrounding Bud Light and Target, in addition to other factors including greater saturation of the influencer market.

“For us, it’s important for our customers to not only see themselves in our products, but also know that we see and welcome them—many of whom aren’t represented or often overlooked by other brands across a wide range of industries,” said Emma Tully, chief brand officer at Savage X Fenty.

The fashion brand, which recently introduced a new Pride collection, uses its marketing to support the LGBT community, as well as related groups such as the Black Trans Femme Arts Collective, throughout the year, Tully said.

“All of this will hopefully blow over,” Montoya said. “The queer community has huge spending power. Brands can’t afford to not work with us forever.”

Companies at the same time can no longer row back to an era when they were neutral on social and political issues, said Adamson, the Metaforce co-founder. Doing so may run the risk of creating forgettable brands that don’t resonate with anyone, he said.

“No matter what, they have to assume there will be a minority who will strongly object, and they have to be prepared to live with that decision,” Adamson said. “And part of that is moving from marketing to the basics of crisis management.”

A couple of marketing consultants speak plainly about where we are:

“Previously you could send a homogeneous message to the country, but there’s so much divisiveness and polarization on so many issues that that’s become almost impossible,” said Allen Adamson, co-founder of brand and marketing consulting firm Metaforce. 

And

“The marketplace has become saturated with hostility that seems to break out in any number of places at any time,” said Scott Broetzmann, president and chief executive of Customer Care Measurement & Consulting, which conducts the study with the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.

Well, isn't combativeness of the type displayed by the neo-Trumpists  just what's needed to champion what's been traditionally considered normal, objectively true and worthy of upholding?

Um, no. For one thing, the movement's namesake has the depth and the understanding of history of a paramecium. The only reason he rants about "leftist radicals" is because someone told him that such a stance would ensure that his drool-besotted leg humpers would glorify him. And he's not going away. Even as the GOP slate of presidential candidates continues to grow, he blows the doors off all of them, and they're too cowardly to do what they'd need to do to rectify that. And the next-most-viable candidate campaigned for Kari Lake last year, characterized Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a territorial dispute, and said he'd consider pardons for some January 6 convicts. And all other neo-Trumpists are performative, cartoonish yay-hoos. 

And the closest thing to an institutional effort to assert the presence of the remaining non-neo-Trumpist right has shifted from seeking to ground itself in the principles developed by Montesquieu, Locke, Adam Smith, Burke et al to a position that Democrats may have some good points. The Bulwark and Principles First have narrowed, for the purpose of trying to project a modicum of conservatism, their defenses of anything traditional to a kind of shallow Disney's-just-trying-to-operate-within-the-free-market libertarianism.

So we get Pride garbage crammed down our throats, and the Progs also continue apace in their crusade to abolish material forms of human advancement such as gas water heaters and any kind of dishwashers. 

Quite honestly, I don't see any alternative to the scenario I lay out in the first paragraph. As I said over at Precipice the other day, we're knuckleheads who have squandered our birthright.

 

 

 

How vulgar and falsehood-laden was Biden's Howard University commencement address?

 Joe Biden has long had a penchant for taking the low road. For instance, think about the 2012 speech in which he, by way of attempting to demonize Paul Ryan's budget proposal and Mitt Romney's support of it,  took a protectionist stance ("We're going to give a tax break to any company that unbolts their factory stuff and brings it back to Danville") that, ironically, later became a core element of Trump's economic "policy" and further gave it a Trumpist flavor by demonizing Wall Street and then letting loose with the big line clearly aimed at those in the audience who happened to be black that has followed him through the years:

Romney wants to let the  — he said in the first 100 days, he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. They’re going to put y’all back in chains.

 He's still at it.

In his recent commencement address to Howard University graduates, he claimed, with a straight face, that white supremacy was the country's most dangerous domestic terrorist threat. 

Wilfred Reilly, writing at National Review, makes clear that this is a lot of disingenuous divisiveness uttered solely to burnish his identity-politics boon fides:

. . . according to the centrist and well-respected Center for Strategic and International Studies, the average number of annual deaths caused by all American-based terrorists between 2014 and 2021 was 31.

 Even this represents a jump from the period between 1995’s Oklahoma City bombing and 2013, during which the domestic terror toll topped eight only twice. Saying that white supremacists are the biggest “home front” threat means in practice that all of them combined kill perhaps 20 American citizens annually, versus a toll of maybe ten for antifa/black bloc, the “Not F***ing Around Coalition,” and the like. CSIS records 38 white-supremacist and “like-minded” terror attacks in the fairly typical year of 2021, versus 31 for “anarchists” and so-called anti-fascists.

Let’s put this in more context. Obviously, almost all serious terrorist groups are international in range, and very many are specifically Islamic — the stereotype of the Arab terrorist has been around for decades and didn’t come from nowhere. At present, al-Qaeda, the group responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths from the 9/11 attacks, has cells worldwide and controls a considerable amount of territory in Mali, Somalia, and Yemen. ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) is based in those troubled nations where once Eden lay. New player Boko Haram is Nigerian and in practice controls much of the northeast of that rising Motherland power.

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Obviously, none of these truly major terror organizations — some of which, in practice, come frighteningly close to being unrecognized nations — qualifies as a U.S. domestic actor. And, speaking frankly, terrorism overall is probably no longer a top-five security threat to the United States — when compared with the rapid rise of China, the opiate and fentanyl epidemic (which killed 110,000 Americans last year), surging crime(murders hit 20,000 annually back in 2020), and so forth.

So, why the national-level focus on the rather niche problem of white supremacy — on 20 deaths per year as vs. 20,000? I sincerely think it’s because what some see as white conservative perfidy can safely be targeted in modern America, with little fear of “cancellation” or political backlash, at least from the Left. Since the civil-rights era of the 1960s, working-poor white Yanks have been very much cemented into liberal mythos as an enemy group: the whey-faced, dirty-handed rioters screaming abuse at sainted MLK. And, unlike other groups that may sometimes be unpopular — “hood” black dudes, “slut-walking” feminists, Muslim Islamists, the over-the-top Pride partiers we’ll all see in a month — they form a population that can generally be attacked without significant social risk. They are the Default Villains of the Prevailing Narrative.

This reality helps explain a phenomenon that is facially baffling to my Asian and West African friends: the constant near-beatification of unsympathetic black criminals killed during violent conflicts with whites or the police. My recent column on this topic discusses this phenomenon in the context of the death of Jordan Neely, a vagrant with 42 previous criminal arrests who was tragically killed during an incident on a New York City subway train. However, the trend dates back more than a decade, encompassing the cases of Jacob Blake, Alton Sterling, Michael Brown, and dozens more.

On the surface, objectively, this pattern is genuinely hard for many citizens to understand. Any death or serious injury is unfortunate, to be sure. But most or all of the deaths just listed seem legally justified. Jacob Blake, for example, had been accused of sexual assault and returned to the home of his purported victim despite her protests (the charge was later dropped). He was non-fatally shot by police after he fought them for several minutes. For his part, Officer Darren Wilson, who shot Michael Brown, was cleared of any wrongdoing on self-defense grounds by multiple agencies — including the Obama Justice Department.

Even if you disagree with applying the word “justified” on some case-by-case basis, it remains fair to ask why such a hysterical level of mourning invariably erupts around what empirically are unremarkable local crime stories. Frenetic national media coverage of the Blake shooting, recall, helped kick off the Kenosha riots, which made Kyle Rittenhouse a household name. Objectively speaking, why should George Floyd — and not, say, hero cop David Dorn — be buried in a golden casket after four televised funerals? Why are there statues of Floyd in several cities?

The answer is that certain deaths and harms feed into a preexisting narrative: that the United States of 2023 is a white-supremacist country, where the political Left continues to struggle alone against this entrenched evil, and where those killed by the “white power structure” should be presumed to be heroes or at least martyrs. Biden, by searching out some technical category within which he could call white supremacy our greatest national foe, served this self-same narrative during his Howard speech.

The big problem here, bluntly, is that the story line Mr. Biden just promoted on the national stage has been false for decades. Per the proud HBCU faculty of Tuskegee Institute, the last recorded U.S. lynchings took place in 1964. Violent crime involving both blacks and whites is today just 3 percent of all serious “Index” crime . . . and it slants 80–90 percent black on white. What of the police “genocide” we keep hearing about, from presumably serious people? Well, in the most recent year on record, the total number of unarmed black men killed by on-duty U.S. law-enforcement officers was twelve.

The country would be better off if the president spent the rest of his term just being a doddering empty suit and lay off the activist schtick. We'd be less inclined to base policy on lies. 

 

 

Several things can be true at once - today's edition

To wit:

The Durham report shows confirmation bias in US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies during the 2016 - 2020 period, but delivers no bombshells.

Per New York Times analysis:

Mr. Durham delivered a report that scolded the F.B.I. but failed to live up to the expectations of supporters of Donald J. Trump that he would uncover a politically motivated “deep state” conspiracy. He charged no high-level F.B.I. or intelligence official with a crime and acknowledged in a footnote that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign did nothing prosecutable, either.

It's basically an unexciting rehash, replete with mentions of figures we're familiar with: John Brennan, Carter Page, Peter Strzok, John Podesta, Jake Sullivan, etc. 

The basic story remains the same. Two things came to the FBI's attention around the same time: the matter of Hillary Clinton's email server, and the Steele Dossier. The FBI's investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails was considered preliminary, but the one into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign was full throttle from the get-go. There was a lot of poor judgement all around, but very little that constituted prosecutable offense.

Trump and the Trumpists are already nonetheless howling that this is the "crime of the century" and that some kind of "long knives of the deep state" is the country's most pressing problem. 

Of course, the Very Stable Genius is trying to tie to, or at least draw parallels to, the whole matter with which the Durham investigation dealt, the supposedly rigged 2020 election, which was not rigged.

The post-American press also has confirmation bias and is using the report's prevalence in the current news cycle to deflect from very real questions about the Biden family.

Per Holman Jenkins's column today in the Wall Street Journal:

Even so, the news blackout can’t conceal the suspicious details unearthed by congressional investigators about Biden family bank accounts, shell companies and transfers from shady foreign actors. It can’t conceal that Mr. Biden may owe his presidency to a de facto U.S. intelligence agency operation to bamboozle voters about his son’s laptop.

That said, Trump's call to Ukrainian president Zelensky was clearly extortion - a conveyance of the message that already-Congressionally-approved military aid to Ukraine was contingent upon Zelensky helping to dig up Biden dirt - and it was right for Congress to impeach Trump over it.

The proliferation of special counsels and Congressional investigations over the past few years does not speak well for how we value integrity as a country.

Most Republicans either still drool over Donald Trump, are afraid of him, or are going to be willing to vote for him for president again because they can't see beyond the binary-choice framework.

Democrats show no sign of even easing up on their priorities: climate alarmism, identity politics militancy and wealth redistribution.

Partisans of both the Left and the Trumpist right will get all wonky about particulars of the Durham report's conclusions in order to play gotcha and keep us from seeing the spiritual-level root of our unhealthiness as a nation.

The reason our country keeps bumping up against a government shutdown and now faces default is because we abandoned James Madison's vision of government's scope

 I'll try to keep this sufficiently sexy to keep your attention.

After all, our default setting this time is "whatever":

The attention paid to the debt ceiling crisis in the Obama era may have been a product of a simpler political time, when a near-existential threat to the nation was an anomaly, not another Thursday. Donald Trump was a reality TV show host, social media was still a novelty and a congressman yelling “you lie” at the president seemed like a really big deal. 

“We all have shorter attention spans and crisis fatigue,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who was a top communications official in the Obama White House during those earlier fights.

Like Marvel Studios struggling to keep audiences engaged after they’ve seen the universe saved from the brink of destruction 32 times, a partisan congressional fight just doesn’t have the same draw, however grave the stakes.

“Because default was avoided the last two times, there seems to be an assumption from a lot of people and the markets that it will be avoided again,” Pfeiffer said. “That is a deeply naive view in my opinion.”

Michael R. Strain of the American Enterprise Institute implores us to look at the world-stage implications of our current juncture:

The corrosion of norms and the lack of seriousness in Washington could unleash an economic disaster. This would follow on the heels of the January 6, 2021, insurrection and all that surrounded it – the first time in American history that a president tried to use his office to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after losing an election.

Foreign leaders and global investors would look at the US and see a damning portrait. In this broken system, many elected officials do not respect the results of a presidential election and permit policy and ideological differences to stand in the way of honoring the government’s financial obligations. Investors would think harder about allocating capital to US entities, and America’s role as a beacon of liberal values – including free markets – would be severely undermined.

To whom would the world then turn? There is no obvious candidate. But the absence of a better alternative is a thin reed for national greatness and global economic and political leadership. Sooner or later, it will be gone.

The cyclical nature of these looming debt crises stems from the early twentieth century collective consensus that we needed to reconsider the nature and scope of the American federal government. The wave of fin de siecle progressive thinkers - Richard T. Ely, Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson - posited that, with the onset of urbanization, industrialization, and an even population spread across the continent, American life had become too complex for the Constitution to adequately address it. 

Closely following on their heels was the wave of muckraking journalists and socially focused novelists who pointed up the upheaval wrought  by these changes.

And then came FDR's brain trust, particularly Rexford Tugwell and Frances Perkins. 

But few were the voices that cautioned hesitation about using government, the entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, as the means by which we'd adjust.  So once the leviathan began to grow, there was no stopping it.:

I think the story of President Madison's last veto is instructive on several levels, including moral. Hang in there with this account. It looks like it's headed for a dismaying ending, but all turns out well:

In 1796, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to James Madison, in part questioning whether Congress’s enumerated constitutional authority to “establish Post Offices and post Roads” empowered the legislature to “make the roads, or only select from those already made, those on which there shall be a post” (emphasis in original). Weighing the constitutionality, efficiency, and economic wisdom of the two options, Jefferson chose the latter, preferring to keep Congress out of the business of “cutting down mountains & bridging . . . rivers.” Madison, however, would apparently struggle with the question of the federal government’s authority to build roads, culminating in one of the most dramatic (and inspiring) final acts in presidential history.

Almost twenty years after receiving Jefferson’s letter, President Madison had his eye on “internal improvements,” or infrastructure. In the aftermath of the War of 1812 and in the last years of his presidency, Madison felt compelled to introduce a more efficient system of roads for trade, transport, and communication, and he believed the federal government was suited for the task.

In his 1815 State of the Union address, Madison highlighted “the great importance of establishing throughout our country the roads and canals which can best be executed under the national authority.” Madison touted the many advantages he perceived in such a system—economic, utilitarian, patriotic, and artistic—before reiterating that while states had their own local roads and quaint canals, the federal government was the best choice for “systematically completing so inestimable a work” on a national scale. But did Congress have the authority to establish such a system? Somehow, the father of the Constitution seemed unconcerned, as “any defect of constitutional authority which may be encountered can be supplied in a mode which the Constitution itself has providently pointed out.” In other words, if it’s illegal, we’ll make it legal.

In his final State of the Union address, Madison doubled down on his desires for a national infrastructure package, calling on Congress “to effectuate a comprehensive system of roads and canals.” As to the constitutionality of his plan, Madison again charged Congress to get the job done by hook or by crook, emphasizing “the expediency of exercising their existing powers, and, where necessary, of resorting to the prescribed mode of enlarging them.”

Inspired by Madison’s remarks, young Congressman John C. Calhoun introduced the Bonus Bill of 1817, a provision designed to earmark certain revenue for “a permanent fund for internal improvement” in order to “bind the Republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals.” Such a bill seemed a perfect fit for what the president had requested only a few weeks earlier, and Speaker of the House Henry Clay joined Calhoun to push the legislation forward in the waning days of Madison’s term. Amid concerns of federalism, Congress even shored up the Bonus Bill with two amendments designed to place more power in the hands of the states than previously intended. The bill passed by the narrowest of margins in the House and fared only slightly better in the Senate, but it landed on James Madison’s desk in the final week of his administration, seemingly in the nick of time.

When Representative Calhoun and other Republican congressmen visited President Madison on his penultimate day in office to say goodbye, however, Madison privately told Calhoun that he had had a change of heart and would be vetoing the Bonus Bill. A dumbstruck Calhoun informed Speaker Clay, who wrote Madison and begged him to at least leave the bill for his successor, James Monroe. But Madison would not.

In his veto message to the House of Representatives, penned on his final day in office as his last official act as president, James Madison returned to familiar form:

“The legislative powers vested in Congress are specified and enumerated in the eighth section of the first article of the Constitution, and it does not appear that the power proposed to be exercised by the bill is among the enumerated powers, or that it falls by any just interpretation within the power to make laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution those or other powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States.”

Vetoing the exact measures he had called for, Madison explained that he could not find “a power to construct roads and canals, and to improve the navigation of water courses” in the Commerce Clause, and he especially rejected appeals to the Preamble’s mission “to provide for the common defense and general welfare” as justification for such congressional power, as this interpretation would give Congress “a general power of legislation” and render “the special and careful enumeration of powers” in the Constitution “nugatory and improper.”

As he concluded, Madison echoed the policy views he had expressed in his 1815 pronouncement by first noting that he was “not unaware of the great importance of roads and canals and the improved navigation of water courses.”  But Madison was able to separate that enduring political view from his legal view that “such a power is not expressly given by the Constitution, and . . . no adequate landmarks would be left by the constructive extension of the powers of Congress as proposed in the bill,” so he had “no option but to withhold [his] signature from it.”

He remembered what he was really about as a statesman. Just in time to stave off the leviathan for a century.

We've been asking things of government way beyond what Madison envisioned its function to be.

That's led to a collective cognitive dissonance that increasingly affects all areas of our lives.

Is it too late to shake the assumptions we've been amassing for decades?

I'm gonna leave this with that question, which ought to be the primary conversation among us as engaged citizens. 

Oh, wait. Are we still engaged citizens?

Another conversation we ought to be having! 

 

The Environmental Protection Agency is an instrument of tyranny

 As if this agency comprised entirely of unelected pointy-headed collectivists hasn't done enough damage since its 1971 inception, it just issued a new proposal:

The technology-based standards EPA is proposing include: 

• Strengthening the current New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for newly built fossil fuel-fired stationary combustion turbines (generally natural gas-fired)
• Establishing emission guidelines for states to follow in limiting carbon pollution from existing fossil fuel-fired steam generating EGUs (including coal, oil and natural gas-fired units)
• Establishing emission guidelines for large, frequently used existing fossil fuel-fired stationary combustion turbines (generally natural gas-fired)

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who may be the last Democrat alive with his head on straight,  is not on board:

“This Administration is determined to advance its radical climate agenda and has made it clear they are hellbent on doing everything in their power to regulate coal and gas-fueled power plants out of existence, no matter the cost to energy security and reliability,” Manchin said in a statement. “I fear that this Administration’s commitment to their extreme ideology overshadows their responsibility to ensure long-lasting energy and economic security and I will oppose all EPA nominees until they halt their government overreach.”

This development comes about as this administration is attacking human advancement from this angle as well:

There’s no serious dispute that one of the most significant obstacles to the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is the lack of suitable charging infrastructure to back them up, something of particular importance given the anxiety that many consumers feel about the range an EV can go without a charge and, for that matter, the amount of time that it takes to charge an EV.

Henry Grabar looks at this issue in the Atlantic:

Recently, I was chatting with a friend who drives an electric vehicle in New York City—and parks it at the curb. There are no curbside chargers in his neighborhood, so powering up requires dipping into a nearby garage for a few hours, or driving to a curb in a different neighborhood entirely. Full battery? Move that car or keep paying the charging company. Studying the charging landscape to save time, money, and energy has become “his whole personality,” he told me. As he sent me image after image of prices, charging maps, and street-parking setups, I could see he wasn’t totally kidding.

The reality, of course, is that (in the end) quite a few of the central planners “managing” the transition to EVs do not believe that cars of any type belong in cities, at least in large numbers. Urban residents, they believe, should be happy with public transport and their supposedly delightful “15-minute cities” (a topic for another time). For such planners, the difficulty faced in finding a charger is a feature not a bug, if not one they can admit to. Yet. Frogs in a pot and all that.

Factors such as cost and convenience are the most immediately effective way to present the argument that all this is wrong to the American public.

But I would posit that they are secondary to the central issue: freedom.

Look, I get that there were growing pains attendant to the industrial revolution, from the pollution so prevalent in its early days to the historically unprecedented phenomenon of summoning men (at first; later, women, too) out of their homes in which work and family life had previously seamlessly blended and into aesthetically stultifying behemoth buildings to perform tasks of mind-numbing repetition. But human ingenuity set about addressing these matters. The fields of manufacturing and resource extraction are quite clean today, and the fact that they continuously employ technological advancements has made the work much more engaging.

And, of course, the central question continues to loom: Would you rather forego heart transplants, emergency-rescue helicopters, smart phones and air conditioning?

The collectivists would respond that in our bright future, we'll have all these things; they'll just be powered by clean energy. We'll make private-sector makers of these things cover as much of the costs as they can, and we'll subsidize the rest.

But isn't that for each consumer, and, for the matter, producer, to decide? If I want a petroleum-powered car the next time I go shopping for a vehicle, shouldn't I have access to the full panoply of options that makers might want to offer me?

Damn it, let's review a fundamental and morally irrefutable law of economics:

A good or service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth. Period. No other entity, most certainly not government, has any business being part of that agreement.

Always been true, always gonna be true.

Don' stand for what the EPA is trying to cram down your throat.

The Republican Party is still the bitch of the most vile person to ever enter American politics

 A civil-case jury found the Very Stable Genius liable for sexually assaulting a woman. 

A man who wished to project even a modicum of honor, who had any desire to appeal to the sense of decency of the citizens whose votes he wanted, a man who had one subatomic particle of character, would have shown up in the courtroom to state what he knew in his heart to be the truth. Except that Trump's heart, to the extent he has one, knew that Carroll had the truth on her side.

No, he sat for a taped deposition. The one in which he was shown a photograph in which Carroll and his second wife, Marla Maples, both appear, and got them confused. The one in which he had these disgusting responses to his interrogator:

“She’s not my type… it’s not politically correct to say it. I know that, but I’ll say it anyway,” Trump said.

He later turned to Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan.

“You wouldn’t be a choice of mine either,” Trump said to her face.

In the video, which was shown to the nine-panel jury, Trump was forced to rewatch the infamous leaked 2005 Access Hollywood tape in which he boasted about abusing his celebrity status to sexually assault women because you can “grab ‘em by the pussy.”

Kaplan, who kept her cool and didn’t respond to Trump’s repeated personal attacks against her, asked him if he felt that stars could actually grab women “by the pussy.”

“Historically that’s true with stars. If you look over the last million years, that’s largely true, unfortunately—or fortunately,” he said.

Kaplan followed up by asking if Trump considers himself a star.

“Yeah,” he acknowledged.

Still - and yes, you've seen this point made before at LITD, but the spread keeps increasing - he is overwhelmingly the Republican favorite among 2024 presidential possibilities:

The gap between former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in polling on the 2024 GOP presidential nomination has widened as both men noticeably step up their campaign efforts – both official and unofficial.

Trump surged to a 41-point lead over the governor in a poll of a hypothetical Republican field released Tuesday from Morning Consult. The lead is the largest ever seen in the survey, which has been regularly tracking potential GOP primary voters’ preferences since late last year.

Trump netted 60% of support in the poll, while DeSantis earned 19% – both Trump’s highest level of support and DeSantis’ lowest in any Morning Consult survey so far.

DeSantis has not yet officially announced his 2024 bid but is expected to do so in the coming months.

Other official candidates – including South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and entrepreneur Vivek Ramasway – and those said to be weighing bids, like former Vice President Mike Pence, have been vying in the last several months for the very modest slice of support not lended to either Trump or DeSantis, with some fluctuations.

Trump’s lead in the Morning Consult tally is one of the largest seen so far in the still-early contest, eclipsed only perhaps by an April poll from Emerson that saw Trump up 61% to DeSantis’ 16% – a 46-point gap.

The polls are aligned with a general and persistent trend across reputable polls that has seen the gap between the two men continue to grow.

Unless you're up to your eyeballs in Kool-Aid, you have no doubt that

• He embarked on affairs with both Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal at a golf tournament in Tahoe while his third wife was home with their three-month-old son.
• He appeared in a Playboy Video Centerfold. 
• In various interviews with Howard Stern said his daughter Ivanka was a "piece of ass," said about sleeping with contestants in pageants he owned that "it could be a conflict of interest, but [is] the kind of thing you worry about later," and responded to Stern's assertion that he was faithful to his wife by asking him, "So you don't get it on with anybody?"

More generally, this is the guy who

• walked into a room at the Pentagon and told an assemblage of generals that they were "a bunch of dopes and babies" who "don't know how to win anymore."
• Dealt in a much more friendly manner with authoritarians and dictators on the world stage than he did with leaders of key Western allies.
• wiped out the beneficial effects of the tax cuts Congress passed during his presidency with his protectionist tariffs

There is no defense of this man. None, on any level.

The ate-up cult followers who show up at his rallies, put Trump bumper stickers on their cars and run Trump flags on their flagpoles are beyond hope. It's fool's errand to try to reach them.

The elected legislators who lionize him and have similarly dissolute personal lives are now a Republican feature, not a bug.

Other Republican elected legislators and prominent politicians - think Mitch McConnell, who, after having place responsibility for January 6 on Trump, responded to the question of whether he'd support him in 2024, said that if he was the GOP nominee, yes, or Kevin McCarthy, who is, rightly, receiving kudos for standing firm on wanting to negotiate with Biden about the debt ceiling, but who made the Mar-a-Lago pilgrimage mere weeks after January 6 - have shown that when push comes to shove, they are nothing but cowards and sycophants, are of no use.

The public intellectuals who unequivocally got on his bandwagon - Roger Kimball, Victor Davis Hanson, Bill Bennett, Charles Kesler, etc. - have completely delegitimized their previous contributions to our societal discourse.

Townhall, RedState, The Federalist and American Greatness have ruined the whole idea of fusionist conservatism, perhaps irreparably. 

The Bulwark, Principles First and the this-means-we-have-to-vote-Democrat crowd generally have drifted from any kind of original mission that remembered what conservatism was prior to 2015.

Which brings me to the matter that will surely be my principal point of engagement with my fellow citizens on a political level going forward. Good-intentioned people - those who I know personally and those with whom I find myself engaging with online - will respond, as they have since 2015, with the question, "What is the country to do, then? We're only going to have two choices in the next election."

 There is a third choice. Stay home on election day. It's a choice I've made a couple of times now. 

Your soul is involved here. There are no stakes for the country high enough to compel one to vote for either of two parties that are equally rotten.

Yes, I am aware of how poisonous ESG and DEI are. I'm aware that Biden is administering an opiate to the country by not having a word to say about the relationship between the looming debt/deficit crisis and the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare. I'm aware that the Democrat push to have all petroleum-powered vehicles off the road in less than a decade is not only tyranny but economic madness. I'm aware that our cities are being consumed by murder and addiction.

But the Republican Party is of no use as a countervailing force. 

It doesn't give a flying f--- about character, the essential element for any restoration of a truly conservative proposal for reviving post-America. 

To those who would say, "There are a lot of local-level Republicans with good hearts who are trying hard to improve their communities," I would say, "Look each one of them in the eye and ask them the question that Mitch McConnell answered so abysmally: If Trump's the nominee, are you going to vote for him?"

I'm thinking about character a lot these days. I'd like to learn more about how to cultivate it in myself. This is a subject I intend to explore in my next Precipice post.

But I had to get this reaction to the present political moment off my chest, and I thought LITD was the appropriate venue for that.

Nothing about our political life is any better than it was eight years ago.

It keeps getting worse.

 

 

 

Political polarization and cratering marriage rates are interrelated issues

 At his Substack, Notes From the Middle Ground, Damon Linker examines some key takeaways from a new book by San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge, which he culled by way of a Twitter thread by an account called True Discipline. 

Linker provides a list of data points that will be fairly familiar to readers of LITD or my Substack, Precipice. Wet blanket that I am, I've enumerate stats like these on a few occasions:

• The frequency of individualistic phrases in American books has surged since the early 1990s.

• The percentage of people getting married is cratering.

• The percentage of both men and women who have had same-sex experiences is surging from one generation to the next.

• Around 2015, people between the ages of 26 and 34 began to experience a surge in major depression.

• The amount of time people spend socializing has been trending downward since around 2010, and sharply downward since around 2015.

• The share of Gen Zers who consider themselves either transgender or nonbinary is far higher than the share of previous generations.  

• This trend is taking place pretty equally in both red and blue states.

• The share of high-school-aged people who feel lonely or left out has surged since around 2011.

• Nearly one third of teenage girls are clinically depressed.

• Emergency-room admissions for self-harm are rising.

• The share of 12^th graders who are pessimistic about the future is also rising.

• Each successive generation (from the Silent Generation on through to Gen Z) is more inclined than the last to view the American Founders as “villains,” the country as fundamentally unfair, and to think significant changes are needed to address our problems.

But those are really just table-setters. What he wants us to contemplate is this set of trends:

First, and most obviously, there’s been a substantial rise in the share of 12^th-grade boys self-identifying as conservative over the past two decades (from around 43 percent in the late 1990s to 65 percent in 2021).

Second, 10 percentage points out of this total 22-point increase took place quite recently, between 2016 and 2021—during a period when what it meant to be conservative was largely defined by Donald Trump.

Third, though 12^th-grade girls have always been less likely than boys to self-identify as conservative, the two groups began to diverge sharply around 2012. Since then, the share of girls who self-identify as conservative has dropped by about 9 points (from 40 to 31 percent), but the surge for boys has been bigger (up by about 13 points).

Finally, the gender gap in 2021 was larger than ever at 34 percentage points.

What are the implications?

A country in which young men and women are increasingly polarized along ideological lines is one in which it will be increasingly difficult for them to find mates with whom to build romantic relationships that culminate in marriage and children. Instead, they will be likely to seek sexual satisfaction in individual acts of self-gratification—or perhaps in relationships with politically compatible members of their own sex.

This could certainly be one factor behind a number of the trends captured in the series of graphs in the tweet thread and in complementary studies: sharply declining marriage rates; an epidemic of loneliness and the mental-health problems that follow from it, including depression and self-harm; experimentation with same-sex relationships; pessimism about the future; and so forth.

Then there are the political implications. According to the most recent data summarized in the graph, around 31 percent of 12th-grade girls describe themselves as conservative while 65 percent of 12th-grade boys do the same. That isn’t a perfect equal-but-opposite balance, but it’s pretty close. If this proves to be enduring as these respondents move into adulthood, it would imply that young men and women over coming election cycles will be close to balancing each other out when it comes to voting patterns, with men strongly favoring the right and women much more likely to support the left.

This runs contrary to a narrative one often hears from Democrats, who often pin a decent share of their political hopes on support from young people. The challenge is to get them to show up to vote on Election Day, with the assumption being that if they do show up, they will strongly favor left-leaning candidates. But with Gen Z men breaking sharply for the right, the net result of the youth vote could soon end up being a wash.  

This isn't likely to change, given that our educational system doesn't present young students - male or female - with the tools - that is, great literary and philosophical works recognized until last week as indispensable to the Western canon - for determining the validity of ideological perspectives, tools that are applicable regardless of sex, ethnicity or race.

It's true that at present most Americans still don't want kids getting puberty blockers or irreversible sexual surgeries, but how static is that finding likely to be, given the pretty much mainstreamed status of terms like "non-binary" and "two-spirit?" 

It seems we're going to increasingly wear our worldviews like uniforms, and regard them as brands that validate us, much like we're increasingly doing with our sexual identities, which were, until fairly recently, regarded as givens bestowed on us by nature. 

Nothing us immutable to the post-Westerner. Nothing about our universe was designed before we existed as individuals, according to the New Person. 

We'll see no need to depend on each other for anything, and that slack will be taken up by a state that has no idea what it's based on, beyond ever-moving goalposts for "rights."

We might want to fully take in the profundity of the changes we're living through.