#Paleocon

[grayrazor]

So apparently on twitter there's a whole thing going on where anti-woke Warhammer fans performatively stormed out by declaring that they were going to play the horror-themed WWI wargame Trench Crusade instead, only to be mass-banned from its discord because the moderators didn't want a bunch of paleocon trolls stinking up the place.

The thing that blows my mind isn't just that they thought the thoroughly subversive Trench Crusade was positive Christian rep, but that they thought Warhammer 40,000 was. The setting where the messiah is explicitly dead and rotting and was an anti-religion crusader in life. Meanwhile Warhammer Fantasy's Sigmar is much more Thor than Jesus. A lot of conservative evangelicals and tradcaths seem to fall into liking straight up pagan gods if they have a sufficiently macho and traditionalist (western European) aesthetic.

Honestly, this is beyond media illiteracy, it's just straight-up blindness. Obliviousness beyond even the people who think Robocop and Starship Troopers are gung-ho pro-American action movies. Now I'm left to wonder how many fans of the Blasphemous game series are passionate reactionary Christians who get the happy feelings from the aesthetics and totally ignore the story and themes.

Still, I am glad to have learned about Trench Crusade through this, looks like a cool game. Aesthetic and themes kind of remind me of the Trench Foot/Countrycide mod for Doom (which, granted, started off as a Warhammer 40K mod...).

[argumate]

I've made this post before -- I've made every post before -- but I keep being reminded of the way that back in 2005 there was bipartisan consensus that nazis were the bad guys, specifically I'm thinking of how the centre right coalition in favour of invading Iraq (and ultimately Iran) with the goal of reshaping the Middle East justified their vision as a continuation of America's Greatest Hits winning WWII and then the Cold War (*cough* don't mention Vietnam) and that involved portraying an amorphous Plot against the West on the scale of the nazis, which ranged from incoherent (is Saudi Arabia an enemy or ally?) to kinda insane (Eurabia) but the contradictions were papered over by the impact of 9/11, so it held together ideologically for a few years until the grinding reality of failed counterinsurgency made the whole thing unfun and then the Bush administration ended as the global financial crisis began.

obviously there was a whole lot of bigotry lurking behind the idea of invading Iraq, anti-Arab racism and anti-Islamic prejudice mostly, which complicated attempts to identify with the side that beat Hitler; there was a pro-Jewish aspect that was sufficiently vocal to drown out the antisemitic paleocons, although if you looked closer most of them turned out to be pro-Israel specifically, or more accurately pro-IDF, who they felt was doing a better job of bombing the Arabs than the US was at the time.

still, in 2005 there was consensus that the nazis were bad guys, "Bush = Hitler" was laughed off as coming from the lunatic hippy fringe, and right-wing idiot Jonah Goldberg could write shitty books about how "liberals are the real fascists" as it was generally understood that being a fascist was a bad thing.

but a decade later things had shifted: there were enough alt-right haha-only-serious shitpost supporters of I Can't Believe It's Not Nazism that it became mainstream to critique the centre right generally as nazis, and more worryingly for the centre right to defend those accusations instead of laughing them off, to the point that nazism became a partisan thing intertwined with MAGA generally.

clearly not every Trump voter is a nazi in the literal sense, or even a supporter of nazi policies, but it's striking how the role of nazis in the discourse could shift so dramatically and so quickly, an extreme example of how everything is contingent in politics, sadly.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The conservative movement is cracking up

I'll be in Stratford, Ontario, appearing onstage with Vass Bednar as part of the CBC IDEAS Festival. I'm also doing an afternoon session for middle-schoolers at the Stratford Public Library.

Politics always requires coalitions. In parliamentary democracies, the coalitions are visible, when they come together to form the government. In a dictatorship, the coalitions are hidden to everyone except infighting princelings and courtiers (until a general or minister is executed, exiled or thrown in prison.)

In a two-party system, the coalitions are inside the parties – not quite as explicit as the coalition governments in a multiparty parliament, but not so opaque as the factions in a dictatorship. Sometimes, there are even explicit structures to formalize the coalition, like the Biden Administration's Unity Task Force, which parceled out key appointments among two important blocs within the party (the finance wing and the Sanders/Warren wing).

Conservative politics are also a coalition, of course. As an outsider, I confess that I am much less conversant with the internal power-struggles in the GOP and the conservative movement, though I'm trying to remedy that. Books like Nathan J Robinson's Responding to the Right present a great overview of various conservative belief-systems:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/14/nathan-robinson/#arguendo

And the Know Your Enemy podcast does an amazing job of diving deep into right-wing beliefs, especially when it comes to identifying fracture lines in the conservative establishment. A recent episode on the roots of contemporary right-wing antisemitism in the paleocon/neocon split was hugely informative and fascinating:

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/know-your-enemy-in-search-of-anti-semitism-with-john-ganz/

Political parties are weak institutions, liable to capture and hospitable to corruption. General elections aren't foolproof or impervious to fraud, but they're miles more robust than parties, whose own leadership selection processes and other key decisions can be made in the shadows, according to rules that can be changed on a whim:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Which means that parties are brittle, weak vessels that we rely on to contain the volatile mixture of factions who might actually hate each other, sometimes even more than they hate the other party. Remember the defenestration of GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy? That:

https://apnews.com/article/mccarthy-gaetz-speaker-motion-to-vacate-congress-327e294a39f8de079ef5e4abfb1fa555

Even outsiders like me know that there's a deep fracture in the Republican Party, with Trumpists on one side and the "establishment" on the other side. Reading accounts of the 2016 GOP leadership race, I get the distinct impression that Trump's win was even more shocking to party insiders than it was to the rest of us.

Which makes sense. They thought they had the party under control, knew where its levers were and how to pull them. For us, Trump's win was a terrible mystery. For GOP power-brokers, it was a different kind of a nightmare, the kind where you discover that controls to the the car you're driving in high-speed traffic aren't connected to anything and you're not really the driver.

But as Trump's backers – another coalition – fall out among each other, it's becoming easier for the rest of us to understand what happened. Take FBI informant Peter Thiel's defection from the Trump camp:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/12/silicon-valley-billionaire-donors-presidential-candidates/

Thiel was the judas goat who led tech's reactionary billionaires into Trump's tent, blazing a trail and raising a fortune on the way. Thiel's support for Trump was superficially surprising. After all, Thiel is gay, and Trump's running mate, Mike Pence, openly swore war on queers of all kinds. Today, Thiel has rebuffed Trump's fundraising efforts and is reportedly on Trump's shit-list.

But as a Washington Post report – drawing heavily on gossiping anonymous insiders – explains. Thiel has never let homophobia blind him to the money and power he stands to gain by backing bigots:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/12/silicon-valley-billionaire-donors-presidential-candidates/

Thiel bankrolled Blake Masterson's Senate race, despite Masterson's promise to roll back marriage equality – and despite the fact that Masterton attended Thiel's wedding to another man.

According to the post, the Thiel faction's abandonment of Trump wasn't driven by culture war issues. Rather, they were fed up with Trump's chaotic, undisciplined governance strategy, which scuttled many opportunities to increase the wealth and power of America's oligarchs. Thiel insiders complained that Trump's "character traits sabotaged the policy changes" and decried Trump's habit of causing "turmoil and chaos…that would interfere with his agenda" rather than "executing relentlessly."

For Trump's base, the cruelty might be the point. But for his backers, the cruelty was the tactic, and the point was money, and the power it brings. When Trump seemed like he might use cruel tactics to achieve power, his backers went along for the ride. But when Trump made it clear that he would trade opportunities for power solely to indulge his cruelty, they bailed.

That's an important fracture line in the modern American conservative coalition, but it's not the only one.

Writing in the BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller and Lee Hepner describes the emerging conservative split over antitrust and monopoly:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/is-there-an-establishment-plan-to

Antitrust has been the centerpiece of the Biden Administration's most progressive political project. For the left wing of the Dems, blunting corporate power is seen as the necessary condition for rolling back the entire conservative program, which depends on oligarch-provided cash infusions, media campaigns, and thinktank respectability.

But elements of the right have also latched onto antitrust, for reasons of their own. Take the Catholic traditionalists who see weakening corporate power as a path to restoring a "traditional" household where a single breadwinner can support a family:

https://www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/when-capitalism-becomes-tyranny-with-sohrab-ahmari

There's another reason to support antitrust, of course – it's popular. There are large, bipartisan majorities opposed to monopoly and in favor of antitrust action:

https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Antitrust_Policy_poll_results.pdf

Two-thirds of Americans support anti-monopoly laws. 70% of Americans say monopolies are bad for the economy. The Biden administration is doing more on antitrust than any presidency since the Carter years, but 52% of Americans haven't heard about it:

https://www.ft.com/content/c17c35a3-e030-4e3b-9f49-c6bdf7d3da7f

There's a big opportunity latent in the facts of antitrust's popularity, and the Biden antitrust agenda's obscurity. So far, the Biden administration hasn't figured out how to seize that opportunity, but some Dems are trying to grab it. Take Montana Senator John Tester, a Democrat in a Trump-voting state, whose campaign has taken aim at the meat-packing monopolies that are screwing the state's ranchers.

The right wants in on this. At a Federalist Society black-tie event last week during the National Lawyer's Convention, Biden's top antitrust enforcers got a warm welcome. Jonathan Kanter, the DOJ's top antitrust cop, was praised onstage by Todd Zywicki, whom Stoller and Hepner call "a highly influential law professors," from George Mason Univeristy, a fortress of pro-corporate law and economics. Zywicki praised the DoJ and FTC's new antitrust guidelines – which have been endlessly damned in the WSJ and other conservative outlets – as a reasonable and necessary compromise:

https://fedsoc.org/events/national-press-club-event

Even Lina Khan – the bogeywoman of the WSJ editorial page – got a warm reception at her fireside chat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FwdAxOSznE

And the convention's hot Saturday ticket was "a debate between two conservatives over whether social media platforms had sufficient monopoly power that the state could regulate them as common carriers":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwoO7bZajXk

This is pretty amazing. And yet…lawmakers haven't gotten the memo. During markup for last week's appropriations bill, lawmakers inserted a flurry of anti-antitrust amendments into the must-pass legislation:

https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/fsgg-approps-bill-must-support-enforcers-not-kneecap-them/#

These amendments were just wild. Rep Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI) introduced an amendment that would give companies carte blanche to stick you with unlimited junk fees, and allow corporations to take away their workers' rights to change jobs through noncompetes:

https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/118th-congress/house-report/269

Another amendment would block the FTC from enforcing against "unfair methods of competition." Translation: the FTC couldn't punish companies like Amazon for using algorithms to hike prices, or for conspiring to raise insulin prices, or its predatory pricing aimed at killing small- and medium-sized grocers.

An amendment from Rep Kat Cammack (R-FL) would kill the FTC's "click to cancel" rule, which will force companies to let you cancel your subscriptions the same way you sign up for them – instead of making you wait on hold to beg a customer service rep to let you cancel.

Another one: "a provision to let auto dealers cheat customers with undisclosed added fees":

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-118hr4664rh/pdf/BILLS-118hr4664rh.pdf

Dems got in on the action, too. A bipartisan pair, Rep Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep Lou Correa (D-FL), unsuccessfully attempted to strip the Department of Transport of its powers to block mergers, which were most recently used to block the merger of Jetblue and Spirit:

https://www.congress.gov/amendment/118th-congress/house-amendment/640

And 206 Republicans voted to block the DoT from investigating airline price-gouging. As Stoller and Hepner point out, these reps serve constituents from low-population states that are especially vulnerable to this kind of extraction.

This morning, Jim Jordan hosted a Judiciary Committee meeting where he raked DOJ antitrust boss Jonathan Kanter over the coals, condemning the same merger guidelines that Zywicki praised to the Federalist Society:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7jxc8dp8erhe1q3wpndre/GOP-oversight-hearing-memo-11.13.23.pdf?rlkey=d54ur91ry3mc69bta5vhgg13z&dl=0

Jordan's prep memo reveals his plan to accuse Kanter of being an incompetent who keeps failing in his expensive bids to hold corporate power to account, and being an all-powerful government goon who's got a boot on the chest of American industry. Stoller and Hepner invoke the old Yiddish joke: "The food at this restaurant is terrible, and the portions are too small!"

Stoller and Hepner close by wondering what to make of this factional split in the American right. Is it that these members of the GOP Congressional caucus just haven't gotten the memo? Or is this a peek at what corporate lobbyists home to accomplish after the 2024 elections?

They suggest that both Democrats and Republican primary contesters in that race could do well by embracing antitrust, "Establishment Republicans want you to pay more for groceries, healthcare, and travel, and are perfectly fine letting monopoly corporations make decisions about your daily life."

I don't know if Republicans will take them up on it. The party's most important donors are pathologically loss-averse and unwilling to budge on even the smallest compromise. Even a faint whiff of state action against unlimited corporate power can provoke a blitz of frenzied scare-ads. In New York state, a proposal to ban noncompetes has triggered a seven-figure ad-buy from the state's Business Council:

https://www.timesunion.com/state/article/noncompete-campaign-raises-state-lobbying-18442769.php

It's hard to overstate how unhinged these ads are. Writing for The American Prospect, Terri Gerstein describes one: "a hammer smashes first an alarm clock, then a light bulb, with shards of glass flying everywhere. An ominous voice predicts imminent doom. Then, for good measure, a second alarm clock is shattered":

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-11-10-business-groups-reflexive-anti-worker-demagogy/

Banning noncompetes is good for workers, but it's also unambiguously good for business and the economy. They "reduce new firm entry, innovation by startups, and the ability of new firms to grow." 44% of small business owners report having been blocked from starting a new company because of a noncompete; 35% have been blocked from hiring the right person for a vacancy due to a noncompete. :

https://eig.org/noncompetes-research-brief/

As Gerstein writes, it's not unusual for the business lobby to lobby against things that are good for business – and lobby hard. The Chamber of Commerce has gone Hulk-mode on simple proposals to adapt workplaces for rising temperatures, acting as though permitting "rest, shade, water, and gradual acclimatization" on the jobsite will bring business to a halt. But actual businesses who've implemented these measures describe them as an easy lift that increases productivity.

The Chamber lobbies against things its members support – like paid sick days. The Chamber complains endlessly about the "patchwork" of state sick leave rules – but scuttles any attempt to harmonize these rules nationally, even though members who've implemented them call them "no big deal":

https://cepr.net/report/no-big-deal-the-impact-of-new-york-city-s-paid-sick-days-law-on-employers/

The Chamber's fight against American businesses is another one of those fracture lines in the conservative coalition. Working with far right dark money groups, they've worked in statehouses nationwide to roll back child labor laws:

https://www.epi.org/blog/florida-legislature-proposes-dangerous-roll-back-of-child-labor-protections-at-least-16-states-have-introduced-bills-putting-children-at-risk/

They also fight tooth-and-nail against minimum wage rises, despite 80% of their members supporting them:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/04/leaked-documents-show-strong-business-support-for-raising-the-minimum-wage/

The spectacle of Republicans in disarray is fascinating to watch and even a little exciting, giving me hope for real progressive gains. Of course, it would help if the Democratic coalition wasn't such a mess.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/14/when-youve-lost-the-fedsoc/#anti-buster-buster

Image: Jason Auch, modified https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Antarctic_mountains,_pack_ice_and_ice_floes.jpg

CC BY 2.0

[collapsedsquid]

This shit going on with the executive orders seems weird and novel and you can link it to moldbug and friends but I think it's important to note that this is basically what the paleocons were hoping Reagan would do when he was elected president.

[racefortheironthrone]

So what's the big deal about Kissinger, why are you so happy he's dead, and why are you on the same page with my hard right, paleocon, John Birch Society family members?

People on the left are happy because Kissinger was a murderous imperialist, people on the right are happy because Kissinger was part of the "Eastern Establishment" (which is code for, you know) and because he was the ur-neocon and the architect of internationalist realpolitik rather than racially-tinged isolationism.

As the meme goes, we are not the same.

[visenyaism]

greens and blacks paleocons and neocons. not thats not right greens as moral majority true believer ites otto jerry falwell hightower no. you know what modern political system equations are all useless because modern politicians all need to contend with working in a democratic system somehow even if like the majority of the right they are actively working to undermine it, leading to a lot of anti democratic intellectual work being incorporated into populist appeals. however, feudal characters are fundamentally not concerned with that and instead work in the pursuit of power founded of course in fundamentally conservative rigid social structures and within those aiming to for social standing based on far more intangible concepts like honor, that an older participant like the hightowers in that structure would object to being upturned by the targaryens as conquerors and thus deriving power in those social structures through force. This then somewhat shows why the common casting is of the greens religious conservatives and the blacks as progressives as the greens need to derive their legitimacy from such factors within the traditional system. however this does absolutely not make the blacks modern progressives they are still aiming for feudal power they simply opposed tradition by doing it through strength, creating to traditionalists the idea of upending the structures while still very much working within them. therefore, trying to put these things that are fundamentally rooted into the structures of modern conservatism and progressivism is fundamentally stupid that being said based on what i've written that means. put upponly morally outraged never trumpers greens still supporting the same issues and neolib order versus. DISRUPTOR QUEEN RHAENYRA 2020 MAKING WESTEROS VALYRIA AGAIN

this took me on a whole voyage. i think where it took me is that i would rephrase as team green is more status quo old order tradcath social conservatives (except for their literal leader, otto hightower, who is not a true believer in anything except power and is just doing fantasy realpolitik) while team black are the valyrian might-makes-right truthers which sounds about right to me

[norelationtodonkeykong]

I've been immersed a lot in reading & listening to stuff about the GWOT for research, and truly, we do not have enough hatred in our hearts for neoconservatives and their liberal and paleocon allies.

These people must be destroyed as a class. It's not too late

[marinetti-dinner-party]

a clear-cut difference between capitalist posturing (of the 'free trade stops wars' variety) and what i might call a paleocon outlook in terms of "we're all one nation, the european nation" pan-europeanism. i wonder if the political stances would be the same though, allowing for an alliance.

[grandhotelabyss]

Thoughts on Steve Sailer?

I'm old enough to remember when you could read Sam Francis's weekly column in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, so Sailer, as a moderate paleocon of proudly middling cultural tastes, a pure golfing product of Reagan's California, and a business-school quant with an interest in race-and-IQ, does not for me rise to the level of a figure so startlingly transgressive as to possess the glow of the forbidden.[*]

Why, then, beyond this sense of the "forbidden," has Sailer in particular become an icon to the reactionary avant-garde? If we disaggregate the component parts of his persona as I've listed them above, then it must be because his persona manages to associate a human-capital view of the world—which we would otherwise link to soulless bureaucracies public and private, to the death of culture and art and thought as bearers of unquantifiable inspiration, and which worldview seems obviously despicable even when expressed by left-of-center thinkers who disclaim racism, like Matthew Yglesias—instead with the bygone sun-washed glamor of the American Century, lowered sunglasses and the ripple of pool-light across a tanned thigh, just as Costin Alamariu affiliates the same unpropitious ideology with the solar glint of a Mediterranean dawn across the colonnade of the Acropolis.

Sailer has expressed his admiration-since-boyhood for Robert A. Heinlein, on whose novels I also grew up; but, when I was a boy, I mostly skipped the libertarian and Californian-by-adoption author's boys'-own-adventure tales, culminating in the Spartan Starship Troopers, in preference to sexy philosophical novels of the 1960s and '70s, from the free-love cultus of Stranger in a Strange Land to the autogynophile extravaganza I Will Fear No Evil to the proto-cyberpunk femme heroism of Friday, all of which tend to overrun and overwhelm, if only in tone, Heinlein's own literary sources in the social comedy and utopianism of Twain and Shaw, a culturally sterile intellectual satirism become a richer and more novelistic satyriasis. I doubt Sailer has this or anything like it in his repertoire, and it limits how fascinating a writer he can ultimately be—though, with his modesty, he would almost certainly disavow any such ambition.

If you're asking because of the present schism between the tech right and the American cultural nationalists over the question of high-skilled immigration, with Sailer taking the part of the latter, albeit defining himself as a patriot rather than a nationalist, well, I do suspect his vision of America is not ambitious enough, and, applying novelistic perception, I find something poignant in an adopted child's obsession with lineage. Now, precisely because I am an immigrant's child reared in part in an only half-assimilated immigrant milieu, I am a moderate on this subject. I consider myself an American without hyphenation, and I don't believe in open borders, except as a distant utopian horizon for a more fully matured humanity. It probably is too disruptive to the polity, any polity, to bring in too many new people too fast, and it is, as Bernie used to say, a corporate scheme for cheap labor. In that sense, quantity does bear some relation to quality. But if needful borders become an excuse for the human-capital worldview to police everyone with biometric surveillance or to reduce everyone to gene and lineage, then this, too, is America getting away from itself, from what it is and was meant to be, perhaps not in the eyes of its somewhat too-Enlightened founding figures, like the life-hacking self-optimizing Franklin or the plantation CEO Jefferson, but in the eyes of those Romantics who took over its definition from the Deists: Crèvecœur and Emerson and Cather, for all of whom America was an aspiration with the power to transfigure the merely given, the wearily biological. America enjoins both its native sons and its recent arrivals to transcend their origin, or else what's the point of America?

_______________________________

[*] I'm only three years older than Anna K., however, so I'm not sure what her excuse is.

[max1461]

I like the paleocons and the "don't tread on me" libertarians. I don't agree with them about almost anything, but I get along with them. I'll get along with any doomsday prepper. Maybe he's homophobic. Ok, so, fine, I won't bring up gay people. He won't ask if I'm gay (etc.) because I'm charming and friendly with people and make them feel at ease. I'll get along with any doomsday prepper and we'll talk about the best water tanks or whatever. I'll learn something about water tanks.

The econ guy libertarians make me uncomfortable to be around. They're very collectivist. "The market distributes resources in the most efficient way and increases human flourishing". Ok... I mean obviously I'm not against human flourishing. Whether he's right or wrong it's not like I think this guy is a bad person or something. But it's like. Whatever. Ok that's how you think society should be. How about you. I mean what do you do. I think they like to nerdsnipe each other with econ problems. I can't be nerdsniped. I don't have much of a problem-solving urge. I like to know stuff, I'm not that interested in puzzles-for-puzzles-sake. A "hard Grothendieck" as they say. That sounds dirty.

[cockatude]

Its kinds funny that hardcore MAGA/Paleocon people think the US -Has a government that is entirely corrupt in, with every single aspect of every single agency devoted to just laundering money -Has been in decline since at least the late 1800s -Is the number one cause of social degeneracy worldwide -routinely pushes super deadly injection to everyone - is weaker in every way than a decaying petrostate Even leftists have a more positive view of America than these people.

[collapsedsquid]

That paleocon group chat piece perfectly confirmed my biases, there was a lot of talk about enemy nations that needed to be Dealt With in vague but ominous terms, Iran need only it's monarch to return for the grateful people to accept them but "occupation" is out of the question, genocide is preferable.

[toseedash]

conservatives would actually love open source if they weren’t so allergic to basement people

mini-essaying part #2

i always thought free and open-source software (foss) was a lefty thing. like linux nerds and dei hires type of thing. but look closer and it’s kinda... conservative-coded? freedom, self-reliance, no government forcing you to pay subscription fees to adobe. beautiful.

but the conservative brain splits in weird directions here. some see foss as patriotic. anti-big-tech. digital freedom. others see it as some weird hippie hacker cult trying to undermine capitalism.

the real twist is that foss is whatever you project into it. libertarians see free markets. tradcons see moral chaos. paleocons see digital farming. populists see digital sovereignty. it’s just code. the politics are vibes.

maybe the only reason more conservatives don’t support open source is because it looks like it smells like monster energy and reddit. if foss wore a cowboy hat and talked about freedom from silicon valley instead of “gnu/linux” maybe it’d get invited to cpac.

open source is what you make of it. like legos. or the constitution.

[thepoliticalvulcan]

This might very well be the rugpull that makes me an accelerationist.

Not really. I've got too much compassion and cynicism for that.

Compassion in that I think its morally HIDEOUS to expect people to suffer to manifest the endgame of your slam dunk, iron clad theory of history and human behavior.

Cynicism in that I don't believe in slam dunk, iron clad theories of history and human behavior.

But I'm so tired and angry at all the rug pulls.

Oh look, a 90 day pause on the most extreme tariffs with China following "really promising talks."

Who could ever have predicted it?

That's sarcasm for those who can't read tone or are rightfully suspicious that you can never truly be sure if a person possesses a conventional understanding of reality when reading their prose.

There's a pause and no substantive re-negotiations because of course there isn't. There will be mild tweaks that don't address any of the administration's stated problems and don't address any of the problems with China that the economic left, the social justice left, the DC security consensus, or the "America first" economic populist right. And Trump will claim its the best deal anyone has ever negotiated, a minimum of 60ish million people will probably believe him, and it will in no way be criticized by a Republican political class that is a mix of grifters, Trump cultists, and old school Paleocons with tangible ideological commitments who are nonetheless cowed by the threat of violent mobs and lawfare.

And I'm left stewing in large part because I sort of want this and I'm angry that I do.

Of course I don't want to suddenly discover what its like to live in a country like post Ukraine Invasion Russia circa 2022 where because of the stupidity and malignancy of my leaders, I'm staring at empty shelves and massive inflation on goods that were very affordable a week ago.

I'm a selfish American lefty who wants to be weaned off of cheap goods crafted through the sort of abysmal labor and environmental processes that my forefathers fought hard to overcome. Because while I deplore the indignities and environmental ruin that we've offshored, I don't believe that any sort of cosmic moral score is being settled by rugpulling industrial work from China et al. while we spend years rebuilding the tools to build the tools to build the tools to achieve some sort of more ethical and environmentally friendly form of autarky.

I neither believe the "developing world" will or can amiably return to whatever pastoral Edenic fantasy degrowthers think was the state of affairs prior to the 3rd world industrializing; nor do I think that the average American's moral culpability is serious enough that we, in some sense, "deserve this." The offshoring was done to us as much as it was done to the developing world, and while I loathe the pernicious mix of ignorance and animosity that animates the typical Trump voter I think they too at least when it comes to the economy and re-industrialization are being rug pulled too.

But if the fever is ever to break, they have to actually feel betrayed. Feel betrayed so profoundly that they can't "but the Democrats!" anymore. I don't know that a "Russia in the first quarter of sanctions" level experience would actually do that and the amount of collateral damage to people who don't need to "find out" would be profound. It's already pretty damn profound.

So here we are, in what may be the worst of all worlds: at least when it comes to Trumpinomics.

A lot of rage, fury, livelihoods lost, but with nothing to show for it.

We didn't break the addiction to foreign autocratic industry, Trump will probably get credit (among his followers) for achieving nothing of substance, Trump will likely not be punished for nearly stealing Christmas, and we will continue to live in this bizarre paradox where our livelihoods are subsidized by cheap goods but ironically the things we do make in this country, like housing, are increasingly unaffordable.

Also IF defending Taiwan IS something that we can and should do and it were possible to do that without burning down half the planet in nuclear fire, China is still going to be able to wield access to microchips as a weapon in the event of a Taiwan invasion. Although realistically if Taiwan puts up a fight, the chip fabbers are probably going to be destroyed. The human expertise and the infrastructure are just too fragile and if the Taiwanese government doesn't wreck it out of spite, then partisans surely will. So we have no real strategic leverage on that front either.

Which, again, I have complicated thoughts about Taiwan and the sanity of doing what I acknowledge is the morally forthright thing, but I seriously doubt now that if a Taiwan invasion happens on Trump's watch we're doing much of anything about it. If Trump is cowed by the prospect of empty shelves, then I simply cannot conceive of him having the fire in the belly to send aircraft carriers into the teeth of a hypersonic missile storm. Which is probably better for the world but a shit sandwich for Taiwan and that sucks. I don't think nationalism is entirely a scam, culture is real, and so are norms of how a people expect to be governed and how they experience their civil liberties.

[darkmaga-returns]

Michael Anton and I got off on the wrong foot.

It’s a dead-and-buried Trumpworld feud, but at one point in time, Michael Anton was on the wrong side of it—or at least he was perceived to be. An April 9, 2018 National Interest article by yours truly declared that “Michael Anton Lost the Faith of the Populist Right.” 

The piece featured anonymous quotes by senior Trump administration officials that diagnosed that the then-deputy assistant to the president for strategic communications “was a shill” and to not “believe for a second he resigned out of principle.” Another major Trumpworld interlocutor emailed, “Anton came in as [former National Security Advisor Michael] Flynn’s guy as the biggest proponent of Trump’s ‘America First’ and went to the dark side.” 

I stand by the reporting: The quotes were real, and the sentiment against Anton wasn’t beneath the surface; it was piping hot magma spewing from the Trump volcano that weird and fateful spring. 

People had it out for Anton. And that’s all I said. 

But what wasn’t in the piece (I tried to call balls and strikes a little more fastidiously in those days than I do now as the paleocon crank reporter you know and love) is that the whole feud was doltish. Anton had been a pseudonymous penman behind the virtuoso and now-defunct Journal of American Greatness (one of the few honest outlets in 2016), and put his money where his mouth was by leaving a cush comms job at BlackRock and joining a now self-admittedly ramshackle administration in 2017.

[quarantinezone00]

Honestly I get why the conservatives love Israel, this is trad in the truest sense of the word. Not just people being ground into paste by unconscious processes but people looking at children, seeing them as a valid threat, and choosing to starve them to death. It's thinking like this that got all of the nations we all live in to where they are right now. Paleocons are truly living large rn.