Category: Politics

Larry Correia has an article well worth reading that takes apart the current memes suggesting the 2nd Amendment is obsolete.

The confiscators don’t live on base. They live in apartment complexes and houses in the suburbs next door to the people you expect them to murder. Every time they go out to kick in some redneck’s door, their convoy is moving through an area with lots of angry people who shoot small animals from far away for fun, and the only thing they remember about chemistry is the formula for Tannerite.

In something that I find profoundly troubling, when I’ve had this discussion before, I’ve had a Caring Liberal tell me that the example of Iraq doesn’t apply, because “we kept the gloves on”, whereas fighting America’s gun nuts would be a righteous total war with nothing held back… Holy shit, I’ve got to wonder about the mentality of people who demand rigorous ROEs to prevent civilian casualties in a foreign country, are blood thirsty enough to carpet bomb Texas.

If we have another Civil War, and the military is as divided as our society on its loyalties, we won’t have room for all the bodies it’s going to generate. It’s going to be ugly. And that’s even before our foreign rivals use the chaos to take what they can. Remember, the last time we had a Civil War, we didn’t have to worry about the rest of the world as much because the British Empire mostly had that under control, and they weren’t going to intervene on behalf of a CSA avowing to preserve slavery. We won’t have that luxury this time around. If we have another go, you can expect everyone and their brother to make a play for any asset they think they can get.

I suspect in that case we’d need to have an accommodation with both sides in the Second Civil War that control of the nukes stays in neutral hands, maybe military leaders both sides trust, where our policy would be to nuke any power making a grab for US assets like Guam, Hawaii, or Alaska and use the nuclear umbrella to secure things while we killed each other like civilized people. That would really be the only option.

Salena Zito has an article out in the Washington Examiner that’s worth your time. The whole notion that “The Republicans have lost the suburbs” is way overstated. If that were true, the Dems blue wave would have materialized as they expected, rather than being a historically ho-hum midterm performance for the party out of power. But that’s not to say I think the Republicans are playing all the right moves. The Dems are doing a far better job of selling to wealthy suburbanites than the GOP is doing of selling to working class voters. What you’re seeing now is wealthy suburbs shifting hard for Democrats, while working class suburbs that have been traditionally democratic are shifting more slowly.

The GOP will find its home not necessarily just with blue collar workers: there’s whole classes of educated, middle-class voters out there who are working professional jobs, but aren’t rich enough to afford the wild redistributionist schemes of the progressive left. We aren’t going to pay for universal health care and free college by taxes on the wealthy. You and I will pay for those things, and if you think they’re expensive now, wait until they’re free. If I were running the GOP, here’s what I’d tell them:

• Forget the Chambers of Commerce. Let the Dems have them. A lot of the small business people are in that “not quite rich enough” category, so you’re not going to lose them by telling the chambers to piss off.
• Forget free trade. Smacks of globalism, and whether you like it or not, Trump has positioned the GOP as a nationalist party that believes in borders and trade agreements that benefit the American worker.
• You’ve lost the rich to the Dems, so why promote corporate friendly policies and tax structures that benefit them? They are begging to pay more in taxes. So have it!
• Use the immigration issue to crack into the black working-class vote. You might also find that latinos who are already here aren’t keen on wage competition with new arrivals either. You want to break tech workers away from their oligarchical overlords? Run on ending the H1B program. Sure, your donors will squeal, but you need votes more than donors.
• Front candidates who are talented at retail politics, and who get what that means in the 21st century. You can win elections on the cheap if you know what you’re doing. The great conceit of all the consultants is that they can take the most Quasimodo of political candidates and make them winners. That is an exhausted model that takes a lot of money, which needs a lot of donors. You can get donors by kissing ass to wealthy elites, but at the cost of votes from your base. Trump defeated Hillary on a shoestring budget. Sure, Hillary had more money to showcase the country how awful she was, but that’s not to say Trump didn’t do a lot of things right.
• Religious, but not too much. The wear your religion on your sleeve model of politicking is as dead as a doornail. This will vary from region to region, but if you want the rust belt states, you’ll scare them with too much overt religiosity. Trump should have shred to pieces the notion that you can’t win the Jesus vote without praising Jesus publicly and loudly.

I’d note that a lot of these aren’t my preferred position: if you’ll notice, economic libertarianism is the loser in this realignment. But it’s not like it really had a home before. This is where I see all this going. The overall realignment, and not just here but globally, is between nationalists and globalists. Globalism will probably win in the end, but the fight is going to be over whether globalism happens democratically, with nation-states in voluntary cooperation, or whether we continue creating international institutions controlled by the wealthy for their own benefit.

Where do guns end up in all of this? The ruling classes have never been in favor of the peasants being able to shoot back. Unfortunately, I do not see the Democratic Party coming back to gun rights any time soon. Our home will be with the Republicans for the foreseeable future. What we have to hope for is that even when the Dems take control, they can never take enough control to really push the worst. We’re also playing the court game very well, and that could provide a firewall against the Dems’ worst excesses.

What will the Dem coalition look like? A party of wealthy elites is a losing party. The Dem coalition will be between the wealthy and urban and suburban poor. You see this in California. The wealthy will provide the money, from both themselves, but also from their political opponents in the working class, to provide benefits for their poor coalition members.

I think there might be something to this WSJ article.

The left had important achievements. It did rescue America from an unsustainable moral illegitimacy. It also established the great menace of racism as America’s most intolerable disgrace. But the left’s success has plunged it into its greatest crisis since the ’60s. The Achilles’ heel of the left has been its dependence on menace for power. Think of all the things it can ask for in the name of fighting menaces like “systemic racism” and “structural inequality.” But what happens when the evils that menace us begin to fade, and then keep fading?

Read the whole thing. I’m not saying there’s no racism anymore, but I do get the sense that the Democratic coalition has been rocked by its own success in the culture wars, and has been desperately looking for issues to hold their coalition together.