This is seriously an awesome encapsulation of the state of play.
I just finished the outstanding Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980, and this is where what Reagan began with his embrace of the then rising Religous Right. The path was paved for Trump, and the neocons, the new right, and the business interests felt they could control the beast they had leashed.
They were fooling themselves then, and are fooling themselves now.
Go back and take a look at the Republican platforms from around 1952-1976. They are actually quite moderate and reasonable
compared to today's retrogrades. It’s the trajectory between 76 and 80 where they move to the right. Gone are support for the ERA and abortion rights as well as labor unions. Schlafly and the others and of course Reagan moved the party there.
Oh yeah, and there were plenty of liberal Republicans. Nelson Rockefeller is one name that comes to mind.
That era (76-80) was really when the hard right turn happened. And I just finished Reaganland, and the media of that era were just as bad as they are today in how they let Reagan get away with such massive falsehoods.
The Rockefeller Republicans - Hillary Clinton was one in her youth - are now basically Clinton Democrats. We know how far the GOP has fallen when even Reagan/Bush Republicans are getting pushed out by the MAGA mob.
Completely agree. And they still haven’t completely woken up to the that fact that they are the useful idiots of the folks they thought were their useful idiots.
The crass and vitriolic nature of social media anti-semitism (e.g. “It was promised to them 3000 years ago,” penny on sidewalk jokes etc) is both extremely disturbing and I think suggestive that this is not about Israel.
It's hard not to see an echo of the 2020 woke moment in these institutions struggling to reconcile themselves to an uncomfortably radical set of views among their staffer and intern class, birthed almost entirely through their internet consciousness.
On the one hand that should make one mindful about people on the right seeing corporations and universities and whatnot "surrendering" to the "woke mob" as an irresistible tide radically reshaping American life and thought when a lot of us could clearly see how paper thin and fake it all was because we were closer to it.
But then on the other hand this movement holds actual executive power and discretion and means of state violence in a way the wokesters never could have dreamed of.
I, too, have no doubt on which side is going to win over MAGA's hearts and minds, but it could well be a win-the-primary-lose-the-general type of situation. As Paul Krugman likes pointing out, there have been many authoritarian movements that have managed to build long-lasting regimes, but they were typically buoyed by wide popularity backed by some core kitchen-table competence. The Trump administration currently seems to enjoy neither.
Brian Roberts: [as Max and Brian are leaving the beer garden where the audience, led by a Hitler Youth boy, is singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me"] Do you still think you can control them?
Claiming to be the people who don't "cancel," while you cancel (i.e. fire, cut, prosecute, deport, sue, defund) any person or institution with insufficient fealty to the Boss, is already quite the feat. Then the worst creatures crawl out of the sewer and you let them in the house because "we don't cancel."
And this is the movement that pretends it is saving civilization.
There is no GOP civil war. A civil war implies both the existence of a central authority and the desire to do something with its power after the conflict ends and one faction or factional coalition is victorious.
No faction of the GOP wants to submit to a central authority outside itself and no faction has or wants a comprehensive agenda like a formal party platform that tells voters definitively what the party does and doesn't believe.
What the GOP has now is an endless culture war with individuals and factions trending for a time before falling back into the background noise of continuous chaos. This is all fine for now because the factions can organize around the principle of 'do whatever Trump says, regardless of consistency or sanity.'
After Trump passes we will either have continued chaos focused on a different charismatic leader, or the leader will have to fight and win a real GOP civil war if he wants to employ the central authority of party leadership and have defined policy agenda.
Once a student asked me why the Nazis called themselves "national socialists." I think this student was pretty conservative and maybe kind of admired the Nazis a bit, but didn't like it that they were "socialists." He was confused. Fortunately I had researched this a bit, and I said that they called themselves socialists to fool working-class people into thinking that they were on the side of the working class. And in fact Hitler's party probably did do more for working class people in Germany than our present American fascists will ever do for working class people. So maybe it wasn't a total lie. But now it would be.
> this student was pretty conservative and maybe kind of admired the Nazis a bit, but didn't like it that they were "socialists."
A quintessential Americana here, thank you. Also makes me think that we should portray Trump as communist more, first, surely not for nothing, with his penchant for state management of the private sector enterprises and whatnot, and second, because the toxicity of the branding is of the utmost importance in this country.
Ooh ooh I know this one. The OG fascists and Nazis called themselves socialists because all the radical political movements of the preceding century or so had been some flavour of socialism.
Fascists got into politics for the revolutionary violence primarily, therefore what they were doing had to be some kind of socialism because in their world that's what revolutionaries were. That's why so many first generation fascist leaders had been card carrying socialists a decade or two before.
The opposition between fascism and socialism that we perceive as obvious and inherent, stems from the alliance between the fascist street-fighters and the 'respectable' conservative/nationalist parties to put the communists down in the wake of post-war socialist revolutions. That alliance started to gel pretty quickly ofc, but it didn't exist in the really early days.
This is the party bedding down and tucking in for their very own Night of the Long Knives, but the unconvincingly closeted Brownshirts may fare very differently in this rhyme.
Have you been digging into David Horowitz, John ? He seems like an interesting neocon-to-MAGA link. He was a long-time mentor to Stephen Miller, he kickstarted Charlie Kirk and TPUSA, Jack Posobiec was a member of his student org Students for Academic Freedom (as was Miller). He's the father of Marc Andreessen associate Ben Horowitz & in the Andreessen-Douthat NYT interview, Douthat says about him that "everyone who is a young person on the political right in the 1990s and early 2000s, as I was, has had at least one encounter with David Horowitz of one kind or another."
He was a former member of the New Left and a marxist who turned against the left in the 70s (for somewhat understandable reasons). In 1988, he founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (which then became the David Horowitz Freedom Center) in order to wage a cultural fight with the left, using its own tools.
I have found little on the links between both men (except one of the comments in the Chronicles eulogy saying that "Sam Francis gave him some measured praise that he deserved"), but he may be one of the sources where Francis picked up that idea of waging a Gramcian battle for hegemony on the right.
I found some more through this Washington Post article on David Horowitz's status as an "intellectual godfather to the [MAGA] far right" and his long winded work with the David Horowitz Freedom Center (which had a charity status !) to promote right wing narratives :
He's been since the 90s in connection with Bannon, who was a regular guest of his Wednesday Morning Club in LA. Ben Shapiro became a fellow to his Freedom Center around 2012 and the time he joined Breitbart. David Horowitz also wrote several articles for Breitbart, starting around 2012.
Fun part from that article (story takes place in 2013) :
"It came from Patrick Caddell, a veteran Democratic pollster who had once worked for President Jimmy Carter. He was speaking about his recent study of Americans’ sentiments toward Washington, the economy and the nation’s future. He said Americans were feeling glum: Two-thirds blamed self-serving elites in both parties for their troubles. They craved an outsider to shake things up.
(...)
Bannon and the Mercers huddled with Caddell in a second-floor lounge at the Breakers. The Mercers were entranced by what they were hearing, Caddell told The Post, and Bannon “was ecstatic.”
“Being a basic rabble-rouser, it fit his views,” Caddell said."
Doesn't this (as well as Stephen Miller's influence, etc) complicate the neocon and antisemitism story ?
The most sad - or maybe ironic, depends how you see it - thing is people like Laura Loomer and Ben Shapiro will take the route from 2016 nevertrumpers and will endorse Gavin Newsom...
This is seriously an awesome encapsulation of the state of play.
I just finished the outstanding Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980, and this is where what Reagan began with his embrace of the then rising Religous Right. The path was paved for Trump, and the neocons, the new right, and the business interests felt they could control the beast they had leashed.
They were fooling themselves then, and are fooling themselves now.
Go back and take a look at the Republican platforms from around 1952-1976. They are actually quite moderate and reasonable
compared to today's retrogrades. It’s the trajectory between 76 and 80 where they move to the right. Gone are support for the ERA and abortion rights as well as labor unions. Schlafly and the others and of course Reagan moved the party there.
Oh yeah, and there were plenty of liberal Republicans. Nelson Rockefeller is one name that comes to mind.
That era (76-80) was really when the hard right turn happened. And I just finished Reaganland, and the media of that era were just as bad as they are today in how they let Reagan get away with such massive falsehoods.
The Rockefeller Republicans - Hillary Clinton was one in her youth - are now basically Clinton Democrats. We know how far the GOP has fallen when even Reagan/Bush Republicans are getting pushed out by the MAGA mob.
Completely agree. And they still haven’t completely woken up to the that fact that they are the useful idiots of the folks they thought were their useful idiots.
The crass and vitriolic nature of social media anti-semitism (e.g. “It was promised to them 3000 years ago,” penny on sidewalk jokes etc) is both extremely disturbing and I think suggestive that this is not about Israel.
It's hard not to see an echo of the 2020 woke moment in these institutions struggling to reconcile themselves to an uncomfortably radical set of views among their staffer and intern class, birthed almost entirely through their internet consciousness.
On the one hand that should make one mindful about people on the right seeing corporations and universities and whatnot "surrendering" to the "woke mob" as an irresistible tide radically reshaping American life and thought when a lot of us could clearly see how paper thin and fake it all was because we were closer to it.
But then on the other hand this movement holds actual executive power and discretion and means of state violence in a way the wokesters never could have dreamed of.
I, too, have no doubt on which side is going to win over MAGA's hearts and minds, but it could well be a win-the-primary-lose-the-general type of situation. As Paul Krugman likes pointing out, there have been many authoritarian movements that have managed to build long-lasting regimes, but they were typically buoyed by wide popularity backed by some core kitchen-table competence. The Trump administration currently seems to enjoy neither.
Brian Roberts: [as Max and Brian are leaving the beer garden where the audience, led by a Hitler Youth boy, is singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me"] Do you still think you can control them?
Like Bain’s line in one of those Batman movies: “Do you feel like you’re in charge?”.
Bill Kristol has gone from NeoCon OG to endorsing Zohran.
Not exactly, but closer than I ever thought he’d come.
He also calls Trump communist! He's come a long way, baby!
Claiming to be the people who don't "cancel," while you cancel (i.e. fire, cut, prosecute, deport, sue, defund) any person or institution with insufficient fealty to the Boss, is already quite the feat. Then the worst creatures crawl out of the sewer and you let them in the house because "we don't cancel."
And this is the movement that pretends it is saving civilization.
There is no GOP civil war. A civil war implies both the existence of a central authority and the desire to do something with its power after the conflict ends and one faction or factional coalition is victorious.
No faction of the GOP wants to submit to a central authority outside itself and no faction has or wants a comprehensive agenda like a formal party platform that tells voters definitively what the party does and doesn't believe.
What the GOP has now is an endless culture war with individuals and factions trending for a time before falling back into the background noise of continuous chaos. This is all fine for now because the factions can organize around the principle of 'do whatever Trump says, regardless of consistency or sanity.'
After Trump passes we will either have continued chaos focused on a different charismatic leader, or the leader will have to fight and win a real GOP civil war if he wants to employ the central authority of party leadership and have defined policy agenda.
Once a student asked me why the Nazis called themselves "national socialists." I think this student was pretty conservative and maybe kind of admired the Nazis a bit, but didn't like it that they were "socialists." He was confused. Fortunately I had researched this a bit, and I said that they called themselves socialists to fool working-class people into thinking that they were on the side of the working class. And in fact Hitler's party probably did do more for working class people in Germany than our present American fascists will ever do for working class people. So maybe it wasn't a total lie. But now it would be.
> this student was pretty conservative and maybe kind of admired the Nazis a bit, but didn't like it that they were "socialists."
A quintessential Americana here, thank you. Also makes me think that we should portray Trump as communist more, first, surely not for nothing, with his penchant for state management of the private sector enterprises and whatnot, and second, because the toxicity of the branding is of the utmost importance in this country.
Ooh ooh I know this one. The OG fascists and Nazis called themselves socialists because all the radical political movements of the preceding century or so had been some flavour of socialism.
Fascists got into politics for the revolutionary violence primarily, therefore what they were doing had to be some kind of socialism because in their world that's what revolutionaries were. That's why so many first generation fascist leaders had been card carrying socialists a decade or two before.
The opposition between fascism and socialism that we perceive as obvious and inherent, stems from the alliance between the fascist street-fighters and the 'respectable' conservative/nationalist parties to put the communists down in the wake of post-war socialist revolutions. That alliance started to gel pretty quickly ofc, but it didn't exist in the really early days.
This is the party bedding down and tucking in for their very own Night of the Long Knives, but the unconvincingly closeted Brownshirts may fare very differently in this rhyme.
If only someone had told the Jews lining up with the Nazis that the guys they were lining up with are Nazis.
“For now.”
Indeed. It’s turkeys jostling for the baster as they debate the contents of the stuffing. Sad to see, but see it we might.
Have you been digging into David Horowitz, John ? He seems like an interesting neocon-to-MAGA link. He was a long-time mentor to Stephen Miller, he kickstarted Charlie Kirk and TPUSA, Jack Posobiec was a member of his student org Students for Academic Freedom (as was Miller). He's the father of Marc Andreessen associate Ben Horowitz & in the Andreessen-Douthat NYT interview, Douthat says about him that "everyone who is a young person on the political right in the 1990s and early 2000s, as I was, has had at least one encounter with David Horowitz of one kind or another."
He seems to have been held in some esteem by paleocons, as this Chronicles eulogy and the, hum, edifying comments on it suggest (https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/in-memoriam-david-horowitz/)
He was a former member of the New Left and a marxist who turned against the left in the 70s (for somewhat understandable reasons). In 1988, he founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (which then became the David Horowitz Freedom Center) in order to wage a cultural fight with the left, using its own tools.
I have found little on the links between both men (except one of the comments in the Chronicles eulogy saying that "Sam Francis gave him some measured praise that he deserved"), but he may be one of the sources where Francis picked up that idea of waging a Gramcian battle for hegemony on the right.
I found some more through this Washington Post article on David Horowitz's status as an "intellectual godfather to the [MAGA] far right" and his long winded work with the David Horowitz Freedom Center (which had a charity status !) to promote right wing narratives :
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/how-a-shadow-universe-of-charities-joined-with-political-warriors-to-fuel-trumps-rise/2017/06/03/ff5626ac-3a77-11e7-a058-ddbb23c75d82_story.html
He's been since the 90s in connection with Bannon, who was a regular guest of his Wednesday Morning Club in LA. Ben Shapiro became a fellow to his Freedom Center around 2012 and the time he joined Breitbart. David Horowitz also wrote several articles for Breitbart, starting around 2012.
Fun part from that article (story takes place in 2013) :
"It came from Patrick Caddell, a veteran Democratic pollster who had once worked for President Jimmy Carter. He was speaking about his recent study of Americans’ sentiments toward Washington, the economy and the nation’s future. He said Americans were feeling glum: Two-thirds blamed self-serving elites in both parties for their troubles. They craved an outsider to shake things up.
(...)
Bannon and the Mercers huddled with Caddell in a second-floor lounge at the Breakers. The Mercers were entranced by what they were hearing, Caddell told The Post, and Bannon “was ecstatic.”
“Being a basic rabble-rouser, it fit his views,” Caddell said."
Doesn't this (as well as Stephen Miller's influence, etc) complicate the neocon and antisemitism story ?
Apropos post: “Are Jews White?” https://open.substack.com/pub/anniegottlieb/p/are-jews-white?r=16gkv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
The most sad - or maybe ironic, depends how you see it - thing is people like Laura Loomer and Ben Shapiro will take the route from 2016 nevertrumpers and will endorse Gavin Newsom...
never happen for loomer
Nick Fuetes already vibed out on Newsome and his Aryan looking family.
I think it was just to troll Vance who has an Indian wife. And look now what Vance is saying about her wife's religion
Strange that you don't mention the Catholicism of many groypers.