Tag: politics

Catalonia: the litmus test

Is the globalist’s neo-liberal world order actually rooted in democracy or not? What happens in Catalonia over the next three months has the potential to completely unmask the neo-liberals’ dubious claims to democratic legitimacy:

One of those crises that no one saw coming is about to rear its head in a very unlikely locale: Catalonia, Spain’s richest province, where the local government has scheduled an independence referendum on October 1.  Of course, some observers – e,g, Julian Assange – did see it coming, but the current trend to find “fascists” under every bed in America may have obscured our ability to detect them where they really live – in Madrid, where the federal authorities are threatening to arrest Catalonian politicians who advocate independence.

Madrid has mobilized 4,000 police to stop the referendum. They are seizing election materials, shutting down web sites, and invading the offices of newspapers: they have threatened 700 pro-independence mayors with arrest and prosecution.

The Spanish position – upheld by the country’s Constitutional Court – is that only the federal authorities can call a referendum, and that in any case all Spanish voters, not just those resident in Catalonia, must be allowed to vote on the question of Catalonian independence. So much for the right of self-determination…. Catalonia’s bid for self-determination is an ideological litmus test, one that tells us everything we need to know about the main forces contending for power in the world. The reason is because the crisis is taking place on the terrain of Europe, in the very midst of the “free” West. Since forever and a day we have been told that the “democratic” West doesn’t commit acts of mass repression against their own people: that the right of “self-determination” is universal, and that that liberal democracy is not about to mimic the methods of, say, Slobodan Milosevic, and put down a popular uprising by force. These methods – they claim — are the exclusive province of “illiberal” regimes, like those in Russia, Belarus, and now Hungary, which has been moved into the “illiberal” camp by its refusal to allow an invasion by Middle Eastern migrants.

Except that the threats and repressive measures of “democratic” Spain have exposed this conceit as nonsense. As October 1 approaches, and Madrid prepares to crush the Catalonian revolution with brute force, the myth of the “democratic” West is being shaken to its foundations – with the growing prospect that violent repression will bring the whole dilapidated edifice down on the heads of the people, both Spaniards and Catalonians alike.

There are no shortage of good reasons to question the sensibilities and the wisdom of the Catalonian secessionists. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical that Catalonians will be better off under self-rule than Spanish rule. But all of that is irrelevant with regards to the question of whether the neo-liberal world order stands, as it claims, on a foundation of democratic legitimacy, or if that is merely a false mask for the Divine Right of Moneylenders.

The black art of the deal

As always, I caution restraint before leaping to any conclusions. But I will readily admit, these initial reports of a deal on DACA look almost spectacularly stupid on the part of the President:

The top House and Senate Democrats said Wednesday they had reached agreement with President Donald Trump to protect thousands of younger immigrants from deportation and fund some border security enhancements — not including Trump’s long-sought border wall.

The agreement, the latest instance of Trump ditching his own party to make common cause with the opposition, was announced by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi following a White House dinner that Republican lawmakers weren’t invited to attend. It would enshrine protections for the nearly 800,000 immigrants brought illegally to this country as kids who had benefited from former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, which provided temporary work permits and shielded recipients from deportation.

Trump ended the program earlier this month and gave Congress six months to come up with a legislative fix before the statuses of the so-called “Dreamers” begin to expire.

“We agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both sides,” Pelosi and Schumer said in a joint statement.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders partially disputed their characterization, saying over Twitter that “excluding the wall was certainly not agreed to.”

Either way, it was the second time in two weeks that Trump cut out Republicans to reach a deal with Pelosi and Schumer. A person briefed on the meeting, who demanded anonymity to discuss it, said the deal specifies bipartisan legislation called the DREAM Act that provides eventual citizenship for the young immigrants.

House Republicans would normally rebel over such an approach, which many view as amnesty for law-breakers. It remains to be seen how conservatives’ loyalty to Trump will affect their response to a policy they would have opposed under other circumstances.

The House’s foremost immigration hardliner, GOP Rep. Steve King of Iowa, made clear that he, for one, was not happy. Addressing Trump over Twitter, King wrote that if the reports were true, “Trump base is blown up, destroyed, irreparable, and disillusioned beyond repair. No promise is credible.”

Remember, the usual Trump method is one step back, two steps forward. If this pattern prevails, the next two steps forward should be magnificent. Don’t count the man out until he is actually out. That’s not mindless optimism talking, but rather, the voice of an experience recalling how this game has played out before.

Trump can probably survive caving on DACA if he actually gets the Big Beautiful Wall built. But if he thinks he can play the conventional Republican game of “hey, we got a bipartisan deal” in lieu of delivering on his primary campaign promises, he is going to be surprised at how fast his support melts away.

UPDATE: Then again, this does not bode well, and tends to suggest that the God-Emperor simply does not grasp the thinness of the ice on which he is skating. Of course, he may only be chumming the social media waters. It’s impossible to say at this point.

Donald J. Trump‏Verified@realDonaldTrump
Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military? Really!…..

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Yes. Yes, we do. Now throw them out and BUILD THE WALL!

Build the Wall already

Steve Bannon addresses Trump’s low approval ratings. The president’s former chief strategist says once Trump builds the wall, his approval ratings will go up, and he’ll go on to a 2020 landslide.

Bannon is correct, but he is only stating the obvious. I have been saying this since before the Inauguration. To ensure reelection, Donald Trump needs to do one thing, and one thing only: BUILD THE WALL.

Everything else is irrelevant in comparison. Build the Wall and win handsomely, fail to build it and risk losing.

When success becomes self-sabotage

A liberal professor writes about the structural damage to the Left that the left-wing success in academia has wrought:

Liberal political education, such as it is, now takes place on campuses that are far removed, socially and geographically, from the rest of the country—and particularly from the sorts of people who once were the foundation of the Democratic Party. And the political catechism that is taught is a historical artifact, reflecting more the idiosyncratic experience of the ’60s generation than the realities of power politics today.

The experience of that era taught the New Left two lessons. The first was that movement politics was the only mode of engagement that actually changes things; the second was that political activity must have some authentic meaning for the self, making compromise seem like a self-betrayal.

These lessons, though, have little bearing on liberalism’s present crisis, which is that of being defeated time and again by a well-organized Republican Party that keeps tightening its grip on our institutions. Where those lessons do resonate is with young people in our highly individualistic bourgeois society—a society that keeps them focused on themselves and teaches them that personal choice, individual rights and self-definition are all that is sacred.

It is little wonder that students of the Facebook age are drawn to courses focused on their identities and movements related to them. Nor is it surprising that many join campus groups that engage in identity movement work. But the costs need to be tallied.

For those students who will soon become liberal and progressive elites, the line between self-discovery and political action has become blurred. Their political commitments are genuine but are circumscribed by the confines of their self-definitions. Issues that penetrate those confines take on looming importance, and since politics for them is personal, their positions tend to be absolutist and nonnegotiable. Those issues that don’t touch on their identities or affect people like themselves are hardly perceived. And classic liberal ideas like citizenship, solidarity and the common good have little meaning for them.

As a teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my conservative and progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype, the conservatives are far more likely to connect their engagements to a set of political ideas and principles. Young people on the left are much more inclined to say that they are engaged in politics as an X, concerned about other Xs and those issues touching on X-ness. And they are less and less comfortable with debate.

Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X…This is not an anodyne phrase. It sets up a wall against any questions that come from a non-X perspective. Classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. What replaces argument, then, are taboos against unfamiliar ideas and contrary opinions.

Conservatives complain loudest about today’s campus follies, but it is really liberals who should be angry. The big story is not that leftist professors successfully turn millions of young people into dangerous political radicals every year. It is that they have gotten students so obsessed with their personal identities that, by the time they graduate, they have much less interest in, and even less engagement with, the wider political world outside their heads.

Unfortunately, if we look at the complete failure of the Bush-era Right, and the current fecklessness of the Republican House and Senate, we can’t really say this tendency is limited to the Left.

7 reasons for Zuckenberg 2020

We can only hope the Democrats are dumb enough to nominate the would-be Augustus 2.0:

Here are seven reasons why Democrats should clear the decks for Mark Zuckerberg as their 2020 nominee:

1) He’ll be able to play the political outsider card harder and heavier than Trump.

2) Zuckerberg doesn’t need a dime of anyone else’s money.

3) Zuckerberg is the most effective tech CEO in America.

4) He understands the media ecosystem. Hell, at this point, he basically owns the media ecosystem.

5) Zuckerberg’s a family man—with a family that is the Modern Family to his opponent’s Real Housewives.

6) He will reject all the tropes, traps, and talking points that have led Democrats into trouble. (In other words, adios Nancy Pelosi!)

7) Kamala who?

Can you even imagine how the Democrats of 1960 would react to the idea that only 60 years later, their standard-bearer would be a godless, race-mixing Jew who is one of the wealthiest monopolists in the world?

For all the Alternate History novels about the Nazis that have been written, no one has yet landed on the most obvious one. Hitler builds a time machine, travels to 2017, buys a video camera, films a few hours, then returns and broadcasts it to the people of England, France, and the USA.

The Allied governments would have been overthrown and replaced with pro-German governments in an afternoon.

Too late to worry about it now

Now that whites are learning to play the game properly, the Fake American Left is suddenly wants to change the rules again and give up on identity politics.

Identity politics was conceived and executed from the beginning as a movement of depoliticization. Feminism has become severed from class considerations, so that for the most part it has become a reflection of what liberal identitarians themselves like to call “white privilege.” Feminism, like the other identity politics of the moment, is cut off from solidarity with the rest of the world, or if it deals with the rest of the world can only do so on terms that must not invalidate the American version of identity politics.

For example, because all identities are equally sacrosanct, we must not critique other cultures from an Enlightenment perspective; to each his own, and race is destiny, etc. (Which certainly validates the “alt-right,” doesn’t it?) This failure was noted by neoconservatives some decades ago, a breach into which they stepped with a vigorous assertion of nationalism that should have had no place in our polity after the reconsiderations brought about by Vietnam and Watergate. But it happened, just as a perverted form of white patriotism arose to fulfill the vacuum left by liberal rationality because of the constraints of identity politics.

To conclude, identity politics — in all the forms it has shown up, from various localized nationalisms to more ambitious fascism — desires its adherents to present themselves in the most regressive, atavistic, primitive form possible. The kind of political communication identity politics thrives on is based on maximizing emotionalism and minimizing rationality. Therefore, the idea of law that arises when identity politics engenders a reaction is one that severs the natural bonds of community across differences (which is the most ironic yet predictable result of identity politics) and makes of the law an inhuman abstraction.

This depoliticization has gone on so long now, about 30 years, that breaking out of it is inconceivable, since the discourse to do so is no longer accessible. For anyone trained to think outside the confines of identity politics, those who operate within its principles — which manifests, for example, in call-out culture (or at least it did before Trump) — seem incomprehensible, and vice versa. We are different generations divided by unfathomable gaps, and there is no way to bridge them. The situation is like the indoctrination in Soviet Russia in the 1930s, so that only an economic catastrophe that lays waste to everything, resulting from imperial misadventures, can possibly break the logjam. Short of that, we are committed to the dire nihilism of identity politics for the duration of the imperial game.

The irony of someone called “Anis Shivani” worrying about identity politics in America is downright amusing. Identity politics are the rules of the game in all sufficiently multiracial and multireligious societies. Sort out your identity, build your alliances, pass laws that favor your identity, and screw everyone else.

Shivani uses the word “depoliticization” improperly. What he really means is “deideologicization”.

In any event, identity politics have been baked in the cake since 1965. And it is why the #AltRight is inevitable, regardless of whatever name of the identity is eventually established for white American nationalists.

Go f— yourselves, Fake News

They are REALLY not going to like Senator Rock:

Kid Rock’s response to a watchdog group accusing him of violating a federal election law was classic Kid Rock — ” … go f— yourselves.”

The group Common Cause says the Detroit musician violated the law by declaring himself a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan but not registering his candidacy or reporting campaign contributions. They filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission and also asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate whether the musician —whose real name is Robert Ritchie — has violated election law.

Ritchie dismissed the allegations, issuing the following statement, “I am starting to see reports from the misinformed press and the fake news on how I am in violation of breaking campaign law. #1: I have still not officially announced my candidacy. #2: See #1 and go f— yourselves.”

I’d say he’s off to an EXCELLENT start.

Sebastian Gorka resigns

Another MAGA figure leaves the Trump administration:

Sebastian Gorka, the brusque national security aide to President Donald Trump, reportedly resigned his post as deputy assistant to the president late Friday.
The Federalist reports Gorka wrote a scathing resignation letter that sharply criticized the president’s newly unveiled strategy for the war in Afghanistan, and savaging White House rivals who he claims oppose the Trump agenda.
“[G]iven recent events, it is clear to me that forces that do not support the MAGA promise are – for now – ascendant within the White House,” Gorka wrote. “As a result, the best and most effective way I can support you, Mr. President, is from outside the People’s House.”
“Regrettably, outside of yourself, the individuals who most embodied and represented the policies that will ‘Make America Great Again,’ have been internally countered, systematically removed, or undermined in recent months.”

It’s disappointing to see Trump surrounded by the same sort of anti-American politicos that made up the bulk of the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama administrations. But – and I cannot stress this enough – do not make the mistake of counting the God-Emperor out. Things are not always as they seem, and like Chesty Puller, Trump is at his best when he is surrounded by his enemies.
They can’t get away from him now.

A presidential pardon

President Trump Pardons Sheriff Joe Arpaio
Today, President Donald J. Trump granted a Presidential pardon to Joe Arpaio, former Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. Arpaio’s life and career, which began at the age of 18 when he enlisted in the military after the outbreak of the Korean War, exemplify selfless public service. After serving in the Army, Arpaio became a police officer in Washington, D.C. and Las Vegas NV and later served as a Special Agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), formerly the Bureau of Narcotics. After 25 years of admirable service, Arpaio went on to lead the DEA’s branch in Arizona.
In 1992, the problems facing his community pulled Arpaio out of retirement to return to law enforcement. He ran and won a campaign to become Sheriff of Maricopa County. Throughout his time as Sheriff, Arpaio confirmed his life’s work of protecting the public from the scourges of crime and illegal immigration. Sheriff Joe Arpaio is now eighty-five years old, and after more than fifty years of admirable service to our Nation, he is worthy candidate for a Presidential pardon.

Good on the God-Emperor. This sends an important signal to the pro-American movement.