Thanks to the illustrious Trump Presidency – which had a political realigning effect equivalent to 12 terms packed into a single, superb, term – the Republican Party has been restored, on a policy basis, back into the Federalist Party.
In addition to Trump masterfully demonstrating the effectiveness of Federalist policies the GOP’s new platform will be further cemented in place as the Party consensus by a Cold War with China that will force it to adhere to Hamilton’s system of trade protectionism and Hamilton’s foreign policy .
The effect Trump had on the GOP compared to where its platform was before he ran is ground breaking; basically comparable to how, if Goldwater had defeated Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and (even if only for one term) governed well, he would have proven the concept of Reaganism 16 years before Reagan.
This policy transformation couldn’t come at a better time because the rest of the American “Right” is a political failure; everywhere on the ideological spectrum from the craven lamestream think tank hacks to the “dissident” right whose “leadership” (thanks to gross mismanagement) has largely either been flipped by the FBI into becoming FedGov informants, and/or were just con-artists to start.
Pragmatically Distributed congratulates FBI Director Wray on the acquisition of his new, “managed”, altright/dissident right toy and wishes all of you boys and girls at the J. Edgar Hoover building the best of luck because you’re going to need it managing a political operation as screwed up as the altright.
Progressivism, as it has for its entire 150 year history in America, works perfectly for the Progressives.
Progressivism is dictatorship of the bureaucrats, and today the bureaucrats are the dictators.
Which means Progressivism is doing nothing more nor less than what it was designed to do.
The Progressives and their institutions keep gaining more and more dictatorial power (and trillions of tax dollars to match) no matter the fact that the results of their policies all suck.
Excellent job!
For the Progressives.
The failure of the mainstream Right is a fairly straightforward case of their longstanding tradition of cowardice and extreme foolishness.
But the failure of the inferior reich is still largely unexplained because disastrous decisions by its “leaders” have not been researched.
What started about 10 to 15 years ago as a fledgling movement called “HBD” which had some modest promise was destroyed after it was rebranded in the early 2010s by clowns calling themselves the “altright.”
For some mysterious reason, the supposed “elder statesmen” of the dissident right, Steve Sailer, Peter Brimelow, and Taki Theodoracopulos, were either corrupt and/or moronic enough to hand out think tank titles and senior editorial promotions at their websites to the three stooges – Richard Spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Gavin McInnes. The point of advancing their careers of these three characters was to maneuver them into a position where they could become the leaders of the altright –
“Famously, during yet another publicity stunt, McInnes once sodomized himself with a dildo, live on The Gavin McInnes Show.”
A decade later, at a time when rumors (some of them good, and an even smaller number being very good) are spreading by the day that the FBI “flipped” central “altright” figures, the question is more pressing than ever as to why the elder bigwigs Sailer, Brimelow, and Taki (to name only a few) thought such obviously damaged people as Spencer, Milo, and McInnes were appropriate frontmen for the dissident “right.”
Was Sailer, the supposed “godfather” of HBD, asleep, drunk, or on drugs when he let the three stooges hijack his movement?
To this day he still seems perfectly uninterested in how the FBI wound up in control of what used to be known as HBD, we can only presume because Sailer never cared about it in the first place or because that’s the outcome he intended to happen.
But it’s no big deal, Steve.
It’s only your career’s defining legacy that’s been run into the ground.
No worries, buddy.
In Brimelow’s case, did he promote the likes of Spencer because he was actually clueless enough to think this would work out well, or was he “encouraged” by someone in DC to help promote compromised people at forums such as the National Policy Institute who, at a later date, could be easily pressured by Federal investigators?
Idiocy, as always, cannot be ruled out. This is, after all, someone who is still whining about being fired by Bill Buckley from National Review back in the late Permian.
Instead of damning Buckley, Brimelow should be grateful because Buckley (who, even if we assume, for the sake of argument, was a complete, and total, evil bastard) wasn’t stupid enough to promote Richard Spencer, and Brimelow was. If he really thought that Spencer would work out nicely then Buckley’s mistake wasn’t firing Brimelow, it was hiring him in the first place.
But the one with the highest likelihood of playing a double game is Taki.
By day he runs an antisemitic website called Takimag, a site that once had Richard Spencer work as a senior editor.
But by night, and by Taki’s own admission, Theodoracopulos partied heartily with none other than the one, the only, the great Liberal champion of feminism and women’s rights, Harvey Weinstein (See here and here ) and, to a lesser extent, Ghislaine Maxwell whom he apparently knew and liked well enough to cautiously defend in the UK Spectator. It’s a more cautious defense than Taki makes for Weinstein; and Taki, naturally, denies having known Jeffrey, but it is a defense nonetheless
Which is nice, but………….. Why defend Ghislaine at all???.
Either Taki is misrepresenting himself as a dissident statesman to his website’s readership, or, Taki was misrepresenting himself to Weinstein as a chum of the Progressive establishment. I seriously doubt it was the worldly Weinstein who would have been fooled by an acting performance.
If, as is likely, the Taki known to Harvey Weinstein, the Taki who cared enough to come to Harvey’s defense during his arrest and trial, was the genuine article, then that raises the question of why the hell would Weinstein and Theodoracopulos be friends unless both are fellow members of the establishment (well, in the case of Weinstein, a former member of the establishment since his lifelong “friends” no longer call him in prison – but such is friendship in Hollywood).
Was the very Progressive Weinstein friendly with any other American Rightist from outside Hollywood (he may have had a few Republican-leaning buddies within the movie industry) except Taki?
Why, of all people on earth, would this old lounge lizard with (purported) antisemitic sympathies be given an exception by Harvey in the first place?
And if Taki is an establishmentarian in good standing (by his own account he does attend a lot of elite parties in New York that have little to no inclination to invite any kind of Conservative, except for… Taki…) then that makes his decision to hire Richard Spencer as a senior editor at website look less like a mistake, and suspiciously more like a favor to DC investigators who would love to build for the future a “managed” farm team of altright leaders staffed with the most compromised people possible – it just makes future plea agreements so much easier to get the more skeletons someone already has in their closet.
What else would they have in common considering the great distance between their (stated) political positions?
Did Weinstein entertain Taki with stories of how many women he raped while Taki gave Harvey a good laugh when recalling what losers the writers and readership of Takimag are?
Were they first introduced by Ghislaine Maxwell?
Did Harvey and Taki get along so well because neither of them have any balls?
Either way, whether the smoking ruins of the altright can be better “managed” by the FBI, and regardless of whatever disastrous sequence of events led to the altright falling into the hands of Federal investigators, the Federalist Party can now celebrate that the Republican Party has adopted the Federalist platform.
But this great Federalist policy victory is still not enough.
While the GOP is now a de facto Federalist Party, it is still an outer party – not least because the Republican hierarchy has neither the iron will of the Donald nor of father Abraham.
The real fun we are told is in being the inner party.
The only way to convert this weak minded, cowardly, Federalist outer-Party into a proper continuation of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists, into the inner party that Lincoln meant it to be, is to change the political mechanics instead of through policy advances.
Republicans can already point to a number of policy victories over past decades, none of which created the structural changes needed to turn them into an inner party.
Progressive policies are only the symptom, the disease is Progressive bureaucracy itself and its hallmark characteristic of independence from the Executive branch.
The (very) short answer to ending this bureaucratic malfunction is not policy.
The answer is to restore the spoils system whereby 100% of the currently heavily protected and difficult to fire Federal workforce (except for the military which already has sensible hire-fire policies) is converted into at-will employees who can all be immediately fired and replaced at any time, without numeric restriction, for any reason or no reason, by the Executive with new employees who share the Executive’s partisan, political, leanings.
In fact, policy wins have only served to lull the GOP into complacency to mask the underlying structural (non-policy) problems of Progressive institutions that only reemerge again during the inevitable change of political fortunes. Or, in other cases, reforms to the Federal workforce are either cosmetic, or ineffective, because the Republican legislators offering “reform” do not understand the agent-principal relationship well enough to correct it.
Reagan successfully created a cross-party economic consensus lasting 30 years. Bill Clinton briefly tried to modestly adjust tax policy only to have the 1994 Republican sweep force him to “triangulate” into leaving Reaganomics in place (Clinton’s one, great, virtue is that he did nothing politically substantive as President).
Obama swept away Clinton’s economically centrist DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) to directly challenge the Reaganomics. This (along with the continual antagonizing of Reagan’s base by Bush version 1.0 and Bush version 2.0) led to Trump, whose policy achievements completed the revolution Reagan started, but which not even Reagan was great enough to finish: Trumpism is simply Reagan’s economics and Reagan’s foreign policy combined with Hamilton’s trade protectionism, infrastructure program, and immigration restrictionism, along with an ever so slightly unconventional communication style.
The most effective lobbying organization on the Right, the NRA, has won so many gun rights victories since 1994 that Democrats to this day rarely try to pass serious gun reform legislation; instead the most they offer are empty promises to their base.
Yet the GOP remains an outer party for reasons of agent-principal mechanics.
Yet here, again, Trump’s mentality towards the agent-principal relationship was on the right track.
Continue reading “Welcoming the Party of Lincoln to its Federalist Party Future & The Problem With Ex Nihilo Conservatism”
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