Ukraine and Carl Schmitt's Enemy Thing

I was reading a frightening piece today, "The Architects of Our Present Disaster" by Benjamin Braddock, about how we coulda shoulda made peace with Russia after the Cold War. On 9/11, for instance, Condoleezza Rice spoke with Vladimir Putin:

[S]he called President Putin and told him our military would be going on high alert. He told her that he knew and that he had ordered his forces to stand down. Then he asked if there was anything he could do to help. Rice recounted that she had a moment of reflection: “The Cold War really is over.”

Wat! Vlady baby asked if he could do anything to help?

Only Rice and her successors didn't make peace; they didn't write a new Treaty of Westphalia. In fact, it is clear that, all along, Russia has been an opponent. And pretty clearly, Russia right now is an enemy. I've been reading articles in places like Quillette -- "Ukraine and the pro-Putin Right" -- that clearly show that the global ruling class regards conservatives that don't go full-on anti-Putin as traitors. 

Braddock goes on to detail all of the meddling we've been up to in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the post Cold War era. And what good has it done?

I would say the same about the domestic politics in the US since the end of the Cold War: what good has it done?

Let's make the problem bigger. What good has politics ever done?

Because politics is always about an enemy. Says Nazi Carl Schmitt. If there isn't an enemy, there isn't any politics.

So if you are a ruling class, what's the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" if you don't have an enemy?

You can see the enemy thing in the COVID experience. The Dem governors were all in on the war against COVID, ordering people around with mask mandates and vaccination mandates.

(I was to a vegetarian restaurant over the weekend -- after WA Gov. Inslee ended his mask mandate -- and the dears at the restaurant still had a mask mandate and still required proof of vaccination. It's funny, isn't it, how our liberal friends, who believe in Peace and all that, just love to be in charge and issuing orders. And following orders.) 

I don't think that the Dem Governors were consciously wanting to be little Hitlers. It's just that if you are a liberal you think that politics is the royal road to justice. And so you always think, like the generals in World War I, that one more Big Push should do it. Because once you have made an issue political, you have required that you have an enemy to fight. And once you have an enemy you have to continue the fight until the enemy is defeated. If there wasn't an enemy then you wouldn't need government force and a political life-or-death narrative.

That's why liberals are so into the pejorative thing, calling people racists, sexists, homophobes. If you make an issue political it is because you need to fight for it, and that means you need an enemy. And what is the first thing you so with an enemy? You call them a nasty name. By the way, what's with the liberal thing on Trump's Mean Tweets? Isn't that what you liberals are doing every day of the week? Isn't the slogan on every protest sign the peaceful protest equivalent of a Mean Tweet? You tell me.

Back to Ukraine. I don't like Putin. I don't like his invasion of Ukraine. I don't like all the NATO and EU saber rattling. I don't like the proposed NATO summit.

Why not? Because I think that all the players are fools and knaves, and whatever they do, chances are they will Make Things Worse.

Why do I think that? I've come to this notion gradually over the years, as my reading has given me what I consider to be a greater depth of understanding of human affairs than you get by ingesting the usual narrative.

Maybe it's all just a conceit on my part. But one thing that reading books does for you. It gives you a means of judging the world from a different position than the ruling-class narrative. If you only consume regular media then you will be signed onto one or another of the received wisdoms of the day.

And that's not good.

Do the Dems Think Strategically?

Paul Gottfried thinks that the Dems are thinking strategically with their Green Energy and their open borders. Both policies are designed to grow the base of Democratic voters.

[T]he administration is successfully catering to its base. Biden is doing exactly what his voters want, and he and his handlers have no intention of changing course. There is also the possibility of processing the millions of illegal aliens Democrats have shepherded into the country to full citizenship.

Says he:

Biden’s party is always thinking ahead, particularly when it cheats and/or acts destructively. 

But is he right? After all, he writes, "Democrats are not necessarily holding a bad hand if they can pull in more independents to help bring their numbers back up."

Let's start with independents. The point about independents, I think, is that they are not that engaged with politics. So, if the Dems show them helpless immigrants being whipped at the border, they are appalled. If Dems do non-stop propaganda on green energy and how we are going to fry the world unless we act now, they have to agree.

But when independents note that there seem to be a lot of Hispanic roofers taking all the roofing jobs away from good old American workers, then they wonder. If gasoline prices start exploding then they are angry and afraid.

So, the ruling class gets to set the agenda and make its narrative the default narrative. But when things go wrong, it all falls apart.

I've been reading a biography of Andrew Mellon, banker and financier, who was Treasury Secretary in the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. In the 1920s the Republicans were the ruling party. But when the Crash of 1929 hit, and the Republicans didn't manage to right the economy, for three straight years from 1929 to 1932, well then the American people voted for the other guys.

The GOP lost 53 seats in the House in the 1930 midterms and 100 seats in the 1932 presidential election. Thy deserved to lose. Reading about Andrew Mellon in David Cannadine's Mellon: An American Life, it is clear that, for Mellon, the thousands of banks failing every year in 1930, 1931, 1932 were just the way things were. 

He and the GOP hadn't learned the lesson taught by Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street that the central bank is the lender of last resort, and its job is to keep the credit system from crashing on the rocks. If there was one thing that the New Dealers got right it was to stop the bank failures and restore the credit system in 1933.

But the New Dealers screwed up just about everything else.

The GOP lost another 29 seats in the 1934 and 1936 elections. And then gained 81 seats in the 1938 midterms. So, in 1938, the media was still all-in on FDR and the New Deal, but the voters had had enough.

Did the New Dealers have a strategy to rule forever? They thought they had, with all their National Industrial Recovery Acts and Civilian Conservation Corps and so on, but they were wrong. Those glorious policies, that my liberal friends still recall with a warm nostalgic glow, didn't work. Of course, the Dems went on to win the biggest war in human history against the most evil enemy in human history: gold stars for that!

When you start losing, on the battlefield or in the economy, then the soldiers and/or the voters start to desert the colors. It doesn't matter what glorious narrative you have, or how many voters you are bringing over the border, or how much money Mark Zuckerberg is putting into election offices in Democrat districts, when things turn South then people start to pay attention and they start to lose faith in the narrative and in the current leaders.

Now, of course, people react to bad news in different ways. Using my Three Peoples theory, we can say that for Subordinates they start to lose faith when their lord isn't sending the checks regularly. We can say that the Responsibles start to lose faith when they cannot go about their business every day without being harassed by government regulations or crazy price increases. We can say that the Creatives get antsy when the glorious vision of the prophet -- say, to save the world from CO2 pollution -- starts to crumble.

Right now, I'd say that all three of the Three Peoples are experiencing distress. For the Subordinates, their checks aren't covering their bills; for the Responsibles, the crazy mandates and restrictions are screwing up their lives; for the Creatives the glitch in the Matrix on climate change is raising questions -- even though they haven't yet even begun to think of questioning the divine prophecy of the climate gods.

Politics needs an enemy, and I'd say that right now, most Americans think that their rulers are the enemy.

And my feeling is that the Democrats really don't know what to do, except keep on keeping on.

And I say that when people start to cheat, it is a "tell" that they know they are losing.

Inflation is a Government Program

Oh well, another month of 10 percent inflation in the Consumer Price Index. And here's the point. The Fed hasn't started raising interest rates yet. Not until next week. And that means...

We've had a nice liberal guest around here, who keeps mentioning the availability of "affordable housing.," meaning, of course, government financed and assigned housing for approved poor people.

I just haven't had the heart to mention that the reason housing is so expensive -- and that housing prices here in Seattle are going through the roof -- is government.

Back in the day, before the Great Depression, all you could get was a 50 percent mortgage. And you had to refinance it after ten years. Do you see how that might keep house prices down? Because, you see, before you can borrow any money you have to pony up 50 percent of the home's value. In cash, in savings.

The federal government has been subsidizing mortgages since the invention of Fannie Mae in 1938. That set up government-backed 30-year fixed mortgages for homes. But, of course, no private lender can offer 30-year fixed rate loans. Not at 3 percent. Not with 2 percent inflation -- in a good year. So the gubmint does it. In the years since the total of such government-backed mortgages have gone to about 40 percent of GDP. So that's really an additional 40 percent on top of the existing federal government debt of over 100 percent of GDP.

By the way, why in the world does anyone buy 30-year bonds from the US government, knowing that it can inflate the value away any time it likes?

On top of that, government encourages low-down-payment loans, sometimes pretty close to 100 percent of the home's value. Which isn't too smart around 2006 at the peak of the last real-estate bubble. And, of course, the more that people can bid for a house with borrowed money the higher the prices go.

On top of that, ever since the 70s, because feminism, mortgage sellers have to count both man and wife income in evaluating creditworthiness. Since a lot of people believe in borrowing the full amount that the lender will allow, that means that more people are competing for more homes with more borrowed money in their pockets. And that means higher prices, and that means less affordable housing.

Because you see, a healthy credit system relies on two things: faithful payment of loan payments by the borrower; and proper collaterization of loans, so that if the borrower defaults the lender can get his money back. If either or both go south -- as they did in the 2008 credit crisis -- then you got trouble, right here in River City.

That's not the whole of it, of course. There are building codes, which make houses more expensive. There are environmental regulations, that limit the land available for housing. Oh no, we can build any more houses because there might be a landslide. Oh no, we can't build any more houses because there might not be enough water.

All of these wise and educated policies subsidizing mortgages means that more people compete for loans, and the more people that compete, the higher go the prices.

And then nice liberal ladies think the answer is government "affordable housing."

And that's just houses. Then there is everything else that's going up in price because the government is printing money and is stopping the fossil-fuel industry in its tracks and is still not backing modular nuclear plants, and and and.

And the tragedy is that it is all going to cause untold suffering to ordinary people and especially to poor people in the lower classes.

Because the more you muck around with the economy, with wars and lockdowns, and money printing and Fannies and Freddies and subsidies and handouts and regulations and programs, the more you jerk the ordinary person around. And end up Making Things Worse.

Politics and Enemies

I was reading a piece on Britain's far Left when I came to this:

I sensed the anti-democratic tendencies of the far Left when I first met Corbyn’s Labour Party in 2015. It was obvious in the way they spoke about their enemies, which they define as anyone who has ever disagreed with them... The violence of their language offered a creeping kind of dehumanisation of the enemy who is also — crucially — a voter: someone to be seduced by a serious politician is, for them, only someone to be despised.

And so, of course, violence against the enemy is no problem.

Violence was always acceptable if it was against your enemy: the rhetoric itself made it necessary. I heard many far Left cheerleaders call the throwing of milkshakes and eggs acceptable if they landed on the wrong kind of politician, and what comes after that? Quite recently a far Left journalist celebrated a policewoman being knocked off her horse. I saw a journalist attacked at a far Left meeting last autumn; they applauded when the victim left the room. At the last campaign rally in 2019, a Jew was physically attacked for carrying an anti-Corbyn banner.

Did I mention that Nazi Carl Schmitt wrote that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy? And that Curtis Yarvin writes that "there is no politics without an enemy?"

I am also around a liberal for a couple of days listening to ordinary by-the-ways about "affordable housing" and thinking to myself that, yeah, we have an affordable housing problem Because Liberals.

But the funny thing is that such people Have No Idea of the malevolence and the chaos that their Hundred Year reign has caused.

Because all problems are caused by the Other Guy, the racist-sexist-homophobes of which you've heard tell. We are the Good Guys.

Anyway, in the middle of the night I came up with two new maxims:

If you want more politics, you are really saying you want more enemies.

The more politics, the more enemies.

Am I right, or am I right? And that brings me back to Mircea Eliade:

[S]uffering proceeds from the magical action of an enemy, from the breaking a taboo, from entering a baneful zone, from the anger of a god -- and when all other hypotheses have proven insufficient -- from the will or the wroth of the Supreme Being. (p.97) The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

And that is exactly how our lefty friends think of suffering. If the homeless are homeless or there is a shortage of affordable housing, then there must be a fault. And chances are the fault is the malevolence of racist-sexist-homophobes.

UPDATE: Here's some more on the enemies front. Reporting on the Battle of the Bouncy Castle up in Canada, Giles Hoffman notes how the Canadian regime needed enemies.

Every conflict now is largely an information war and a public relations battle. The regime has a well-oiled propaganda machine, and they curated footage with spurious themes. For the regime, it was insufficient to have opponents; they needed enemies, which is why so much effort was expended to portray the demonstrators as dangerous ultra-nationalists and racists. 

Hey, no problem. There is no politics without an enemy. 

A Supreme Court with Three Liberal Women

Today Steve Sailer is analyzing the question of black woman Kentanji Jackson Brown on the Supreme Court. And it's all about whether she is really up to snuff, because Bell Curves by race.

Sailer argues that to be a top-flight lawyer you need to be absolutely out on the edge of the Bell Curve for intelligence.

The race disparity in talent is particularly glaring in the practice of law because much of it is so dependent on raw brainpower... But the meat and potatoes of lawyering—writing contracts—is basically a medieval form of coding. Your job is to anticipate what could go wrong in a deal and write if-then-else statements to protect your client from those eventualities.

So, if Brown isn't up to snuff on the medieval coding, what then?

Well, I think that if Brown gets on the court and joins the other two liberal women, Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, what you get is three rather below-average judges. But not necessarily because Bell Curve.

For sure Justices Breyer and RBG is that they were pretty smart. Wrong on everything? Sure. Crazycakes? Got it. But they were up to the challenge of writing cunning liberal Supreme Court opinions that further the agenda and the hegemony and the domination of the liberal ruling class.

How do you get to do that? Well, I'd say you need quite a bit of appeals-court experience, knowing, from experience, how to push your political agenda.

But what about the three liberal girls? I think that they won't be so smart as their predecessors. But I don't think that their raw intelligence is the big issue. 

I think that the big problem for the three liberal girls is that, having been elevated because racism-sexism-homophobia they don't have the political and collegial smarts to make a difference on the Court. That means they won't be as good at persuading their conservative brethren and sistren into compromise decisions that protect the liberal monuments of civil rights, women's rights and LGBT rights.

Of course, for you and me those liberal monuments are monuments of monstrous injustice, but that is another story.

The point is, to me, that to argue in conference, and gather majorities on the court, and write monumental Supreme Court decisions you need to have a strategic mind, and a collegial personality. Much more than a mind that is good at medieval coding.

I'd say you need that more than pure intellectual horsepower.

So I think that having three liberal girls on the Supreme Court who basically got there because they were the right race and gender is not good strategy.

In my view liberals are going to need the best lawyers and committeemen and persuaders in the world to protect their glorious liberal legal monuments in the Autumn of the Liberal Ages.

Instead they are putting average personalities on the Court that really don't have the chops to defend their achievements and conduct a defense in depth that slows the conservative advance until the glorious new liberal era dawns.

From Changing the Future to Changing Next Week

Last week I wrote generally about "How Do You Change the Future?" 

How? Well, you wait for disaster. You wait for climate change policies to wreck the economy, for the entitlement programs to fail even worse. For the racist-sexist-homophobe pejoratives to make people angry.

But that is all pie in the sky.

Now we are going to see how it works "on the ground."

Because right now we are seeing the collapse of the climate change narrative because the Russian invasion of Ukraine is upending the global energy market and causing gas and oil prices in the US to double. Yes, climatistas, no doubt the world will come to an end with a 1.5 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures in a century or so. Meanwhile, what about the contractor using gasoline for his truck that he uses in his construction business?

Because right now we are seeing general inflation in the economy because of the Federal Reserve's money printing and the government's COVID handouts.

Because right now ordinary Americans get to see how lefty peaceful protesters and lower-class criminals get released on bond -- or even no bond -- prior to trial, but January 6 protesters are held in solitary confinement for months.

And today I was reading that Democratic donors are shifting from contributing to congressional races in 2022 to contributing to Democratic governor races. They figure that Congress in 2022 is a lost cause, but they have to hang onto some governorships.

“My entire donating life has always been centered around Congress, but I really think that if you care about democracy, you need to worry about these governors’ races,” said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic donor and lobbyist. “This is critical for us to win in 2024.”

Oh no! Democracy! I wonder what "democracy" means to a lobbyist.

I was re-reading about how in 1934 -- just in time for the mid-terms -- the FDR administration went after businessmen. They sicced the Justice Department on businessman and electric utility magnate Samuel Insull. And kept going after former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon on federal income tax avoidance charges: again and again, even after he was dead. Gosh, those New Dealers sure were nice guys. And by frightening all the businessmen, I'm sure they really helped get the economy back on its feet.

I wonder if the next GOP president will go after the Dem grifters and cancel culturists and wokeys and teach them a lesson?

Actually, I hope not. Because if the ordinary middle class is going to be setting the political agenda in the future, I hope that the ordinary middle class is not interested in revenge and retribution. The ordinary middle class is not that interested in power. Unlike our liberal friends, for whom politics is life.

But it is interesting to wonder how the leaders of the ordinary middle class will treat the rest of America, if they get the power. I hope that they behave better than our liberal friends have behaved over the last century.

But maybe not. Because there is no politics without an enemy: that's what Nazi Carl Schmitt says, and I believe him. And, really, what do you do to an enemy? At the very least, you teach them a lesson. If you are a Democrat, you sue them and impeach them and harass their aides and supporters. If you are a Commie you send them to the camps.

I hope that we can be better than that.

Best of Times, Worst of Times

 If you are a racist, sexist, homophobe, climate denier like me you realize that nothing can change until it gets worse. "The worse the better," said Lenin.

Because nothing changes until it's broken. And that is as it should be. We may have the stupidest rulers in the world, but as long as things seem copacetic to the average bear, things ain't gonna change.

Obviously, the Biden administration is changing that. And so is Vladimir Putin in Russia and Ukraine.

The Biden administration, in its agenda that presumably was hammered out when Biden was handed the Democratic nomination in March 2020, has pushed major handouts to "oppressed peoples" and pedal to the metal climate change and termination of fossil fuels.

My guess is that this will turn out to be the great political and economic mistake of the ages.

And just to prove that the world is gonna change we have the Ukraine crisis, which has forced Europe to face up to its stupidities on the climate front.

God knows, of course, what stupidities the politicians will commit on the Russia-Ukraine front.

Victor Davis Hanson pulls out the "irredentist" card to explain Russia's adventure in Ukraine. After the end of a glorious empire, politicians are always trying to get back to the glory. Whether Greeks trying to get back the Byzantine Empire, or Mussolini trying to get back the Roman Empire. Or Putin trying to get back the Soviet Empire. Irredentism usually fails, but not before the rest of us pay a pretty big butcher's bill.

The problem is, of course, that just because the hard left of the Democrat party and the climateers get given their walking papers it doesn't mean that we now decide to do the right thing: get the welfare state down to size and frack baby frack and start to build modular nuclear plants.

Oh and rework the debt economy so that people and corporations can't load themselves up with low down payment loans. Because a highly leveraged society is a very fragile society.

In the past few years I have also paid a lot of attention to what women input into the public square. As in going 100 percent for the COVID lockdown and in sending money to Ukraine to help the refugees.

Really, after a century of the educated elite in power it's time for a change. Not because the educated elite is a particularly bad or foolish ruling class, but because any ruling class tends to look after itself and its supporters and not pay too much attention to how the rest of the world is making out.

Hey, why be surprised? The whole point of the rule of the educated elite is over / under politics, where the rulers mobilize the lower class against the middle class. It works politically when the under class is a majority of the voters. But when the ordinary middle class becomes a majority of the voters, maybe not so much.

I was reading Dominic Cummings on his Substack this morning and he is suggesting parallels with 1914. Only, for him, our rulers and leaders are worse than the rulers and leaders of 1914.