Populism: France vs. US

 So, in France the populist-nationalist candidate Le Pen goes down 59-41, while in the US Donald Trump in 2020 went down 52-48. (Yes, I know. And Biden got 81 million votes. Really.) What gives?

I'm reading a piece from Richard Hanania, where he's podcasting with a Frenchie, and the Frenchie says that the difference is that Le Pen is radioactive. If you talk to an anti-immigrant Frenchwoman and tell that, presumably she's voting for Le Pen, she replies:

Me? Voting for Le Pen? I will never do that. I’m not an extremist, only fascists vote for Le Pen. This is somebody who just explained to you that if she had her way, she’d send back all the immigrants and their descendants, if it doesn’t work we’ll have to kill some.

It makes you realize the practical usefulness of the whole racist-sexist-homophobe thing. Oh no! I would never vote for an extremist!

Whereas in France Macron is just the status quo. You may not like him, but you don't fear him.

Hanania's Frenchie pollster also says that older people are afraid of Le Pen because they fear that her policies -- such as leaving the EU -- will cause inflation and hurt their pensions and retirement income.

Whereas here in the good old US and A, I'd say that the Democrats are the party of inflation, and also the party of woke extremists.

Or at least, you could cause the voters to be really confused about whether white nationalist J6 armed insurrectionists are really an order of magnitude worse that BLM and AntiFa protesters burning down commercial districts.

I suppose that's the point of the J6 committee: making the right radioactive. OK. It's not rocket science. For any politics there must be an enemy. So, who's going to be the enemy? That is the only question.

Hey! I know! Let's make pointy-headed wokey intellectuals with nice comfortable gubmint jobs and pensions into the enemy! Why didn't anyone think of that before?

You can see the genius of a chap like Gov. DeSantis in making the blue-hairs at Dis-e-ney into the extremists. It's the way to get to the moms. They'll believe anything they see on TV, except when it comes to their kids.

Really, the job of the populist nationalists is simple. Just make sure that the voters get the idea that the populist nationalists are the safe choice and the wokey, bird-chomping, LGBT activists are the extremists.

How hard could it be?

Russia: Is it all Dugin's Fault?

The chap who is really Putin's brain, according to Tim Black on Spiked, is Alexander Dugin. He's the guy that's inspiring Putin to go back to the future with Traditionalism and Orthodoxy.

[In his] Foundation of Geopolitics in 1997... he argued that the geopolitical forces shaping the world derived from a foundational conflict between... four civilisational zones: the American zone, the Afro-European zone, the Asian-Pacific zone, and the Eurasian zone. It was ethnic Russians’ destiny – ‘as the bearers of a unique civilisation’, as Dugin put it – to play the leading role in bringing together and constituting Eurasia as a regional hegemon in the coming ‘multipolar world’.

Calling on Heidegger he proposes that Russians inhabit a particular Russian form of Dasein, being-in-the-world: "spiritual rather than rational, collectivist rather than individualist, strictly hierarchical rather than democratic," Otherwise we are all stuck with liberalism.

Honestly, I don't think that is going to work. I'd say Russia made sense back in the day when it was part of the grassy steppe providing grass for the horses of warrior Huns and Mongols. I'd say Russia made sense as a feudal land in the agricultural era, back in the day. I'd say that Russia and Ukraine today make sense for about five people growing the grain to feed the Middle East.Otherwise it makes sense as a park in which to hunt mastodons and other extinct megafauna reconstituted from fossilized DNA. Jolly good fun too.

That is why Russia of late has been hag-ridden by ideologists trying to come up with a good narrative. It just doesn't make sense as a geopolitical power center.

Mind you, I don't make any excuses for our own narrative ideologists, still making like it's World War II and that but for glorious NATO the whole world would collapse into murderous nationalisms. Or a Holocaust of transgenders. Or something. Maybe murderous racisms.

Now, I'm all in favor of a Multi-Oceanic Piracy Patrol, MOPP, that would be charged with chasing pirates away from good honest tankers and container ships and marooning the Captain Flints and Mate Billy Boneses and Quartermaster Long John Silvers on out-of-the-way islands without benefit of womankind. Maybe we could get Elon Musk to set up a rocket system to project anti-piracy patrols anywhere in the world in one hour. And we might even protect billionaires' mega-yachts as part of the deal.

Other than that, I'd say, the Russian ruling class is no different than our ruling class. It's obsessed with the need for a vitally important ruling class, right here in River City. Only we don't need no stinkin' ruling class. Did you read about the vigilantes in South Africa that set up a vigilante system in 24 hours to take care of an outburst of looting. All I can say that if South Africans can do it in 24 hour, we red-blooded Americans can do it in 12 hours.

Yeah, go ahead and defund the police, liberals. We deplorables can handle it.

The Why of Biden's La La Land

If you are a racist-sexist-homophobe like me, it is hard to get your brain around the policy bonfire that we call the Biden administration. Victor Davis Hanson calls it La La Land.

Open the borders. More mask mandates. Redo the 1970s inflation. Stop oil and gas production. Cancel pipelines. Asks Hanson:

What explains an America that suddenly no longer works? 

Maybe, he writes,

The administration fears the anger of the hard Left more than the furor of the American people.

I don't think that's the reason. I just think that Biden does unlimited immigration, COVID craziness, green energy, defund the police, unlimited bail, because for every one of these issues there are half-a-dozen activist groups creating an issue that you don't want to oppose. Not if you are a Democrat.

I just saw a piece today reporting that Charlie Crist in Florida wouldn't say nuttin' about teachers grooming kids. Because no Democrat can go against the LGBT agenda.

You would think that the Biden administration would have the chops to navigate a middle road between the world of left-wing activist groups and the ordinary middle class. And I think that, if 2020 had been an ordinary campaign year, then the candidate that would have emerged as Democratic nominee would have squared the circle between the crazies and the moderates. 

But because Democrats came together in a smoke-filled room to give the nomination to Biden rather than to a surging Bernie Sanders they had to agree to go with the full menu of crazy leftiness as the price of Sanders going along with Da Fix Is In.

Anyway, it is clear to me that Biden doesn't have the chops, or the authority, or the charisma to push back against the far-left agenda, from immigration to green energy to LGBT to wild-and-crazy handouts.

I think that in a way this is all providential. Maybe it's a good thing that the Dems, with an ageing president and a 50-50 Congress, are pushing wild-and-crazy extreme lefty La La issues. Because the utter failure of all these issues, all at once, is what it takes for ordinary people to get the message and go to the voting booth and say Go Away.

It takes mob scenes at the border to discredit the immigration activist groups.

It takes soaring gasoline prices to discredit the green energy scam.

It takes soaring grocery prices to force the Fed to stop printing money.

It takes Libs of Tik Tok videos of crazy lefty teachers boasting of teaching LGBT to pre-pubescent school-kids to prompt legislators and moms to cry Stop.

Otherwise the public square and the narrative is completely sucked up by the liberal activist groups and their well-connected activists and their inside track in the media and their defacto control of social media.

The Disaster of Eddication

My Girl Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) who, you will be delighted to know is

Congressmember for WA-07 and lifelong organizer for immigrant, civil, and human rights. Progressive Caucus Chair. Bold, unafraid, and a proud mom. She/her.

recently sent out the following tweet: 

Student debt cancellation is racial justice.

Student debt cancellation is gender justice.

Student debt cancellation is economic justice.

— Pramila Jayapal (@PramilaJayapal) April 16, 2022

Isn't she special!

I suppose that in progressive LaLa-Land, this pathetic effusion is considered part of the Fight for Justice. Naturally, I have already sent her -- my congress-critter -- a slashing email, reminding her aides and staffers that they -- as Ben Rhodes well said -- "literally know nothing."

But let us work backward from the student debt cancellation demand. As in,

• Why should college be so expensive that students need to borrow money? Can you spell Injustice?
• Why does the government encourage students to borrow money against their education -- that connot be discharged in bankruptcy -- when borrowing has traditionally been collateralized, and a student, with no work experience, has no collateral? Can you spell Injustice?
• What exactly are students getting from a college degree that they couldn't get with an internship or an apprenticeship? Can you spell Injustice?
• What exactly are most youngsters getting from high school? Can you spell Injustice?
• What exactly is so vital about elementary school that the educators have time for LGBT grooming? Can you spell Injustice?
• What exactly is the whole point of our education system, besides keeping youngsters from competing in the labor market with adult workers? Can you spell Injustice?

It happens that I've been reading -- accidentally -- a lot about how education used to be in the olden time.

First of all, the education of David Copperfield. First they sent him to a school owned by a Mr. Creakle, a failed hop-dealer. Then he was sent to work in a warehouse by the River Thames in London, Then he got to go to Mr. Strong's school in Canterbury. Then he was apprenticed to a lawyer at Doctor's Commons. Presumably this education has some echoes of writer Charles Dickens' own experience.

Then the education of Tom Tulliver in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. Tom is the son of the miller Mr Tulliver, and Tulliver thinks it would be a grand thing for his son to get a real education. So he talks to a business friend, who recommends sending him to board with a curate in the country. Where he unwillingly learns Latin and Geometry.

Then the education of Benjamin Franklin. His dad sent him to grammar school (where you learn the Latin that you need for Harvard). Then changed his mind and sent him to an ordinary school for a couple of years to learn reading, writing and arithmetic. Then he apprenticed him to Ben's brother the printer for nine years. Then Benjy escaped to Philadelphia and worked for various printers before setting himself up as a printer.

Do you mind if I suggest that the brilliance of Dickens, of George Eliot, of Benjamin Franklin had nothing to do with their education?

And I wonder what education means in the lives of everyone else?

Really, what are we trying to do with schools and education? Bueller? Anyone?

Why exactly do we make such a big deal over a college education? Bueller? Anyone?

Suppose we say that the most important thing in education is to bring up the children of the poor. So why are the schools that the poor attend almost always the worst?

Why do teachers have almost lifetime employment? Shouldn't the people teaching our children be evaluated every ten minutes and fired if they don't measure up?

Why do we have government running education when government is all about fighting the enemy? What enemy?

Let us return to the empty slogans put out by the "bold, unafraid" Pramila Jayapal.

I get the vital importance of trolling indebted Twentysomethings by handing out Get Out Of Debtors Jail Free cards. But just where is your Five Point program to reform the disaster of our education system, noble Congressmember?

Starting with the question: why in the world do we prompt college students to get into debt?

Chasing "The Latest Thing"

The Zman notes today that the COVID Thing is over, what with the Trump judge invalidating it and the TSA immediately removing the mask mandate from the air travel system. "The CDC appears to have conceded the point and will not appeal."

[T]hese mass hoaxes that have become a feature of life. People wake up and see that everyone is now into the latest thing. Maybe that thing is outrage over a police shooting or maybe it is some new abstract concern. All of the right people are on their soapboxes and all of the best people are following along with them. It is only normal for people to want to do the right thing and support the latest thing.

So what's going to the the next "Latest Thing?" Obviously Ukraine. When will it all end?

When the current thing is real suffering, people will remember all the previous things were lies.

You mean like ditching fossil fuels and tossing gas prices into the stratosphere?

But I think we need to understand and accept the notion of The Latest Thing. I'd say it is a fundamental part of humans as social animals. As in flocks of birds. And herds of antelope.

Some Canada goose starts squawking and moments later launches itself into the air. And most of the other Canada geese in the area stop grazing on grass and launch themselves into the air as well. Or don't.

Why do so many of the nice liberal ladies in North Seattle decide to buy an electric car? Because they believe in the "Climate Change Thing." Do they know a thing about Science™? Or climate? Or variations in the Earth's orbit? Or the various theories in respect of Ice Ages? Not a thing.

And yet all over the western world educated women all feel good about their commitment to fighting climate change by appropriate shopping and voting. And when you talk to them, there is not a shred of doubt or skepticism about climate: merely a cheerful confidence. They accept the Latest Thing and feel good about accepting it.

In men, I think, the relevant instinct is the rush to join the colors when an enemy has been declared. That's what a lot of young men felt after 9/11. And the old geezers like me felt good about the CIA riding horses on the steppe in Afghanistan and the army invading Iraq and teaching Saddam Hussein a lesson. At the time.

And I dare say that, for the ordinary middle class American Donald Trump's 2016 Make America Great Again campaign was The Latest Thing.

There's only one thing to do about The Latest Thing. Make sure that your Latest Thing is better than their Latest Thing. Because if you don't fill the Thing hole with your Latest Thing someone else will fill the need. And chances are that their Latest Thing is not as good a your Latest Thing.

After the Foreign Policy Catastrophe, What Then?

Our problem, writes the Zman, is that the politicians have handed over foreign policy to a permanent cabal.

The political class in the West has handed foreign policy and war making over to a professional class that operates independently from the political class.

And so, no matter who is president or controls Congress, the professional foreign policy elite keeps on keeping on.

It is this narrow group that has been running Ukraine policy since the Obama administration, and they are the people responsible for the current war.

OK, fellahs, so what is the point? What is the grand plan behind your two-decade Ukraine policy? What is the point of being anti-Russia? What is the point of all the little wars all over the place?

Zman doesn't say, but I have an idea. The foreign policy elite really doesn't know. It's just that they all sign on to the agenda, whatever it is, in order to join the club and get ahead.

Maybe we could use the Nazi Carl Schmitt notion that in any politics there must be an enemy.

So, for any foreign policy elite, there must be an enemy. Otherwise there wouldn't be a need for a foreign policy elite.

We could say that back in 1948 and the Berlin Airlift there was a real enemy, the state of Stalin's Soviet Union. And so we had 40 years of Cold War. Jolly good fun, and all, for the foreign policy elite. Sorry about the kids killed in Vietnam and in Iraq, and all.

But after the end of the Cold War, what are we trying to do? Well, we are fighting extremist nationalism, or an expansionist China, or a revanchist Russia, or mad mullahs, or Islamic terrorists. 

In other words, we are making it up. Oh, sorry, not we. I mean the international foreign policy elite.

But really, they don't have a clue.

Don't be discouraged. The Zman sees a silver lining to the black cloud. He thinks that the Ukraine thing will end in a bloody catastrophe. And for what?

This may be what saves the West from another catastrophe. The looming disaster in Ukraine cannot be covered up with clever messaging or media censorship.

And the disaster will delegitimize the foreign policy elite,and the global elite, and the Democratic party elite. And then we can sit down and do a reset and decide just what the heck we are trying to achieve with our politics. Other than give jobs to foreign policy experts that have got everything wrong for the last 30 years.

So What if College Women are D+38

I expect you've seen the poll that shows College+ women as D+38. They are the most Democratic among men and women, educated and uneducated. Scott McKay has a long article about it at The American Spectator. He goes into the travails of the educated woman, particularly the single educated woman.

Why are educated women so strongly Democrat? It seems weird. But not if you believe my maxim that "women expect to be protected."

If a woman is protected, she is happy. If she is not protected then she's going to find a new protector today.

The reason that educated women -- and especially single educated women -- working on their careers and living in urban condos are all Democrat is that women expect to be protected. If there isn't a husband to protect her then she expects the state to protect her.

Only, of course, the state doesn't protect you. The state will shovel loot at you, in return for your vote, but it won't protect you. The subhead for the American Spectator piece is:

Why are they surprised that they’re living alone with no prospects when they still think it was a good idea to vote for Biden?

Well, because women do what they are told, and expect to be protected in return. For getting on for a century, the feminist movement has taught women not to rely on men for protection but to get an education and a career. When they find they are not protected, and find they are not happy, they get angry, and they start to complain. Did I mention my idea that women have a Culture of Complaint?

It slots in with my maxim that "women expect to be protected." What does a woman do when she finds she is not protected? She complains to her friend. She votes Democrat. Eventually, she finds a new protector.

And that is what is going to happen in the next year or two as women are terrorized by the Biden inflation. They will find themselves utterly unprotected. They will complain to each other. They will complain to their Democratic politicians. Then they will abandon the Democratic Party and go find a new protector.

As the sainted Rush Limbaugh used to say: "Don't doubt me on this."