"Abundance" and "affordability" are demoralized doublespeak for socialism. Democrat policies of higher taxes and fraud will not help anyone except their cronies. Spanberger is a case study faking moderation and focus on economics, then unleashing woke after getting elected. The only way to Make America Affordable Again is mass deportations: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/make-america-affordable-again
"Abundance" and "affordability" are represented by the Cuban economy: nothing available to buy for the normal population, so no affordability problems.
Leftists are incapable of structured, logical thought processes, substituting a morass of impressionistic, emotionally-charged, verbiage for reasoning. You have just committed the formal logical fallacy of Affirming the Consequent:
A implies C.
B implies C.
Therefore A equals B!
People who think this is a valid argument should not be allowed to vote or be recognised as competent adults.
You don't understand the fallacy of affirming the consequent [p→q; q; therefore p]. Given what you just wrote, I think it's fair to add that that you don't understand also common syllogistic fallacies or even the fallacy of denying the antecedent [p→q; not p; therefore not q.]. Like all conservatards, you're unqualified to be counted as a member of a ruling class.
Harris proposed Price Controls during her campaign in 24. I immediately sensed trouble. I remembered price and wage controls under Nixon in my first job. The money of the sixties changed for a very long time. After college I read Wealth of Nations, Gilder, and Sowell. I read everything I can about money. I do have confidence in the current administration’s policies with several at the helm.
Speaking of those 2 terms, the Right needs to drop them, period. We should be speaking about the growth and expected growth of our economy and the strength of our economy. It educates people to learn that affordability and abundance come from the economic engines, and that ours is strong. Then explain how it’s increased and will increase more.
I’ve had an eye on a nice brownstone pre war apartment in the UES upper 70s for awhile - gosh, if only it were more affordable I could buy it and have a nice 12,000 sq ft pied-a-terre for NyC jaunts……think the Mayor could help me out?
How does a good neoliberal shill like yourself feel about inducting and imprisoning those corporate executives and business owners who knowingly hire illegals to undercut American workers? Seems like most Reagan-Romney defend and protect such anti-working class scum.
Do you think big business is the major employer of illegal immigrants? I doubt going after employers would result in corporate executives behind bars.
I think illegals are mostly employed by individuals or mom-and-pop shops. Many illegals are employed by the entrepreneurial illegals who set up their own businesses in construction industries or landscaping.
Yes, big business in hospitality and agribusiness. You business friendly conservatives are class enemies if native born poor and working class Americans.
My substack opinion comments repeat the refrain often about top level encouragement of immigration. My experience is that the punishment is financial loss, not incarceration, even for large firms. Is that correct.?
I don’t know of any business or corporation receiving any punishment beyond a slap on the wrist. The billionaire donor classes who fund both establishment parties love mass immigration of all kinds. The most powerful lobby for granting amnesty and ‘a path for citizenship’ for illegal immigrants are The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable not ‘cultural Marxists.’
I said it was my experience, which was accurate. The company paid big time. I didn’t say it was typical or that I agreed with it, but did ask what the punishment was per statute.
The Normies in the middle who traditionally voted on the left opened their eyes (Took the Red Pill) and voted for Trump. They mostly saw the lunacy of the far left. What should not happen is for those millions of Americans to stay home for the midterms, to let the far right weirdos divide them and have them vote for another deranged democrat or not vote for anyone on the normal right. The Socialists will NEVER stop and we should not let them get an edge.
You appear to be a bot. Biden is not in office anymore but anyone who voted for him did vote for a man who has some characteristics of a pedophile, such as showering with his young daughter.
100%. Our education system has failed to teach economics and history. Class envy is the germ of communism/socialism which has resulted in abject misery wherever tried. See Cuba and Venezuela as prime examples in this hemisphere.
The US education system has been captured, since the 1960s, by communists who, through focusing on the errors of the great US experiment and denying the hard work to correct those errors, and ignoring any broad historical analysis, has created generations of inadequately educated who lack critical thinking skills and historical perspective. The seizure of US education by communist ideology began when the American Communist Party could not win an election, federal, state, or local. They determined that indoctrinating American's youth would be an effective method of eventually controlling the US. Two excellent books discuss the infiltration of our education system: The Forgotten Man by Amit Shales and The Technological Republic by Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska
Not sure what your comment has to do with mine but I sure would like to see any reliable sources who have reported that Trump is a pedophile. There are plenty of sound reasons to criticize Trump. Wild accusations diminish credibility.
Sorry, Chris, the radical "free trade" globalists that Friedman, et al, spawned in the 1980s, are largely responsible for the collapse of the American middle class.. All of those "low prices" we were promised came at a shockingly high cost to working Americans, i.e., the loss of good jobs, the collapse of our manufacturing base, and the creation of thousands of post-industrial ghost towns across America. Not good. We cannot counter the Dems current demagoguery on "affordability" by returning to the obviously failed "free trade" policies of the past.
Chris: yes, China is/has been the main offender when it comes to the middle class- killer of "free trade," but they are by no means the only one. Trump's attempt at a total reset of US trade policy is the key to bringing back the American middle class. Here's hoping he stick with it.
China policy seems to be at this point a bipartisan consensus. Biden kept and raised trump’s tariffs on China. Also China is already a developed economy, and lots of manufacturing is now in places like Thailand and Indonesia, so how exactly do China tariffs fix problems with American manufacturing?
For all the criticism one can place on Trump's tariff policies, he is the first POTUS to recognize the damage done by the great global experiment. Manufacture of critical infrastructure should be brought back to US shores. One needs to, not only recognize a problem, but act to correct it in a bold fashion. It is a shame that too many Americans are utterly uninformed regarding the dangers to national sovereignty without bold action.
Well, Randomize, for starters, we could bring pharmaceutical production back from China, who appears to dominate it right now. And having virtually all of our PPE coming from China proved none too cool during the Plandemic, I think you would agree.
The populist right is making strides to fix the country’s outsourcing of manufacturing jobs and importing of cheap labor. The left and the right both screwed that up, and either side could have championed the revitalization of our ability to manufacture and construct real things. It’s astonishing that the right has chosen this as a major issue and it’s a winner politically. JD is well positioned in ‘28 if Trump stays focused on domestic issues and lays off the weird foreign military dramas.
Was the offshoring of manufacturing jobs to China not the result, at least in part, of the time of Deng Xiaoping who radically changed the way of "doing business" in China to make it more favorable to the idea of a freer enterprise? Was this not encouraged here at home as vehicle to move China more into the realm of capitalist economics - an economic adversary vs a military adversary? While we're talking about nasty billionaires, it seems to be a bit hard for the (D) to overlook or give a pass to the Hoffmans and Pritzkers, unless of course they are funding anti-Trump lawfare and a presidential campaign or attempting to foil ICE.
Yes, our foreign policy "elites" confidently predicted that trade liberalization would inevitably--inevitably--lead to political liberalization and the demise of the CCP. But even a cursory understanding of Chinese/CCP history and culture made it clear (dare I say "inevitable") that they would not long play second fiddle in America's globalist parade. They were/are too proud for that, too certain of their own cultural superiority to do that. At the first chance, they would flip the script, and the US would be the regime facing inevitable decline.
And here we are. Maybe it's not too late to do something about it.
If I were China, after the devastation of the Great Leap, and I was given the golden opportunity that Nixon afforded -- how could I not? In a competitive world, China has PLAYED the West. Understandably. As Pacificus says, the US then faces decline -- without extraordinary effort, which Trump has put forward. Trying, against all odds, to do something about it.
Hey, I'm not blaming China... China gonna China when dealing with the "foul smelling, hairy barbarians" (China's 19th century cute name for Westerners)... Westerners have been being played by China for centuries.. literally kow-towing to them, past, present. and future, at least for some. Nixon's China pivot was smart. Things went wrong under Reagan, and then really wrong under Bush the Elder and Clinton. And here we are.
When Queen Victoria first sent envoys to China, the Imperial Court was outraged that the British refused to kowtow before His Divine Presence. For the next meeting, the Emperor ordered wooden tunnels built, intending that the British would be forced into a grovelling position. The Brits responded by emerging from those tunnels ass-first, so the requirement to kowtow was quietly dropped.
I disagree about the free market. We cannot have a global free market and local tax systems. Every country taxes its citizens and uses those taxes to provide services to their citizens. That only works if countries are able to control the influx of external workers and goods.
Both immigration and imports should be used as a tool to improve the quality of life of citizens, not that of other countries.
We can all sympathize with people on the other side of the world making a living by cheaply manufacturing goods that will be sold in the USA, but the focus of our government should be our citizens, not those from China, India, Taiwan or any other place.
So, I think that if we still want to have countries, borders and sovereignty, we cannot have a global free market.
Of the 3, I think you should have made the case that class warfare is the most dangerous and the easiest to wage when you have a large underclass and a wildly rich and powerful elite. We are at that stage. It is a very dangerous time in my opinion.
Many of the wildly rich and powerful elite have been waging class warfare against the majority of the USA for quite a while now and even created the growing underclass with their support for outsourcing, etc. The majority of the country are starting to see this clearly. It is the wildly rich and powerful elite that are in spotlight for their egregious deeds. They need to demonstrate respect for those they have harmed before this gets worse. President Trump is showing the way. The wildly rich and powerful elite need to support border enforcement, elimination of H1bs, etc.
Another thing that conservatives need to keep in mind is that egalitarian crusading has rarely been driven by the downtrodden but by a malcontent middle class. So “Conservatives should celebrate the defeat of BLM and trans ideology”? Not so fast!
These things might have been defeated amongst the political pundity but not amongst large sections of the voting public. They are a kind of competitive mind game amongst millions of “more-virtuous-than-thou” public sector laptop classes. And this isn’t going to go away anytime soon. The whole two hundred year history of Progressivism could be viewed as one long purity spiral up ‘Social Justice’ Mountain. Yes we’re currently back to “What about the workers?” but there’s still plenty of “What about my new ‘gender’?” too amongst Democrats in the coastal metropolises. [from: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/stairway-to-equiheaven ]
Graham, 4 Hospitals including Rady Children's have just announced no more "Gender Care". I thank people like you(intellectuals) and Harmeet Dhillon and Chris for exposing this travesty. Chris should have got a medal last night for his many months of hard work exposing this evil.
Very interesting thesis. Could not agree more with the need to counter the class warfare pillar. Hopefully we will be aided by visible failures in NY and CA by Mandami and Newsome respectively.
Our country has so many problems, many caused by Democrats, rhino Republicans. Everything you mentioned is true. Can you write about what they are doing to Christians? Our education is destroyed, the financial system is hanging on by a thread, so the next thing to be attacked is faith. Islam is here.
Free trade vs protectionism is not an either/or proposition. Just as all governments involve some elements of socialism, all governments restrict trade, whether through tax regimes, regulatory frameworks, or tariffs. The US is finally coming out of its orgiastic WW II hangover and recognizing that it needs to level the international playing field to some degree. We are still a long way from shutting down the US markets.
In 1999 John Ellis sounded the trumpet on this movement with LITERATURE LOST: SOCIAL AGENDAS AND THE CORRUPTION OF THE HIMANITIES…. It all rapidly went to hell at least a decade before this book came out… Ellis got panned as a reactionary by the Maoists and Leninists that had already made the long March through the institutions. Ellis was lighting fires on the mountaintops
Yes … at the time we thought the English depts were just driving themselves into a weird oblivion cultivating ever increasing irrelevance…. I recall a colleague at the time gleefully bloviating that by destroying the canon, dead white males, and any arguments for high vs low culture or better vs worse aesthetic performance they were changing the world… I of course did my thing and jumped in on poststructural analysis etc (to survive) thinking it was an odd side show with some interesting intellectual challenges…. But the boast that this was attacking logos and pulling down the pillars of western civilization seemed over the top…. This guppie jumped the bowl and became a leviathan
I'm not sure conservatives realize what an ace the class issue is for liberals in that it speaks beyond external identity markers and shoots directly at the power structures that favor the rich -- this is a point which people of all stripes and backgrounds can get revved up about. And they will.
The great irony is this message will be championed by idiots like pelosi who've benefitted in a surreal manner from these very power structures. Careful what you wish for congresspeople.
I don't think the BLM stuff really is in hibernation. Just go watch some Netflix. It just became normalized. The left can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Until we understand the root psychological causes of leftism everyone will be in a constant state of reacting to whatever random dark age they're trying to create next. It wasn't neat Sowellian arguments about supply side economics that killed off the left's fascination with trying to liquidate the rich in the 1980s, it was the comprehensive demolition of the USSR and China's abandonment of leftist economics in favor of state-controlled capitalism. The two biggest most visible examples of collectivist economics simply gave up on it.
Everyone saw, and everyone saw that everyone saw. But now we have a new generation that didn't see. So the bad ideas come back.
The right have to focus WAY more aggressively on reforming education between 12-18. The curriculum and textbooks need a radical overhaul to focus much more on 20th century history, in particular stressing:
We can't sacrifice a major country every generation to teach people why leftist economics results in mass famines, this HAS to be addressed through comprehensive education programs. The left has totally captured education to the extent that kids are taught all about colonialism (centuries ago) and nearly nothing about communism (still exists). The right has to get smarter about this.
It's not quite the same though, it's explicitly racial socialism. "Tax white neighborhoods" was a real plank of Mamdanism. We don't need to be Reaganites to recognize the guy saying South Africa is his model for reform is not the way.
Hi Christopher, well said as always. I sit here considering what you said and what others have said and what my own thoughts repeatedly tell me after many, many trips around the sun. The left always seems to be able to move the needle in any direction they want. Because they are activists and they are willing to put the sweat equity into what they want to do to ruin the world. They seem oblivious to the fact that what they want would ruin the world, or maybe they’re just that diabolical and they actually do want to ruin it, even for themselves. That being said, those of us here on the conservative (not Republican or Libertarian) side of things sit and read the news. I just read the news you wrote, and I don’t disagree with you. But I wonder why we can’t organize. I wonder why we can’t unify and agree together on a path to take towards the freedom and liberty that we wish and hope would continue. I wonder why we can’t move the needle in any direction we really want to go most of the time. When the left wants to move they move and we sit and watch them, then later when it’s harder, we try to put them in check. When we want to move, the left is right there in our face checking us at full court press. What this means is, We seem to be able to check the left sometimes, kind of sorta. And sometimes we check them for a while, and we’re able to sort of do what we want ,as long as we can continue to sit and read the news. But I don’t see the right as some group of people who feels motivated or activated to really conquer this and make it stop completely. you know, the dog needs to be in the fight, but where is the fight in the dog? I think of myself as a constitutionalist and these days probably even more of a declarationist because it is that freedom and liberty that I desire. and in spite of the constitution, nobody follows it. Except for when they can use it as a club to beat the other side with, as a matter of perfunctory rules of order. I do want my business to be minded by me, and I want everybody else’s business to be minded by them, a minimal government to supply me the things that I don’t have time for, like civil infrastructure, and defense, and then the rest I want left to us to do or not do as we see fit. Kind of like the founders did envision it. But unfortunately our constitution however unfollowed that it may be, did not spell out succinctly enough that it was meant to be read as a document of what you must do and if it’s not written in there, you must not do that. In other words, as Justice Scalia once said, “it says what it says and it does not say what it does not say,” and even in as much as that makes sense it does not stop those who want power to pick it up and weild it inappropriately, anyway. This may sound defeatist but I don’t think that we have one country here, I think we have two. We may only have 20-30 years left to find that out if we don’t find it out sooner. As a Cold War veteran, I never thought in my young years that the manifesto would come all the way to my front door. As it turns out, the hippies were more powerful than Khrushchev. I’m sure we will find out as we all sit back and read the news.
You may be reading the news but we GOP women are out there fighting hard. We will also get help from Turning Point youth and Scott Pressler who are knocking on doors and setting up booths to Register Voters. We are looking for lists of Congressional Candidates who have a good chance to replace Dems. We will work for them and give money to them. So, yes, you sound like a defeatest.
I understand you, and I also understand what you’re saying. I am also quite active I just didn’t mention it. It was not pertinent to the point I was making. It’s still not. I’m just one person. Even though I may team up with others, it’s still not enough of us yet. Conservatives would prefer to be left alone, it’s one of those values of liberty you know, but sometimes you have to fight for that liberty. And being a veteran I understand that all too well. But I do know a lot of people who would prefer to sit on their hands and read the news, and if you’re honest with me, you do too.
Reaganism was the answer for our problems in he 1980's: sky high inflation, high marginal tax rates, and the USSR. None of those are present today.
What is present today: a huge trade deficit, stagnant incomes at the bottom 2 quintiles, a rising GINI coefficient, and a debt of 120% of GDP.
Encouraging job growth is important. Rewarding entrepreneurship is critical. But supply side economics was a solution for its time, and this isn't it. We're nowhere near the top of the Laffer curve, which means higher marginal tax rates will do little to dampen growth or risk-taking. So use the extra revenue (and yes, there will be extra revenue) to pay down the debt or at least eat into the deficit, which will improve several of those current problems I listed.
Populism isn't an add-on to Reaganism. It's a replacement.
"Abundance" and "affordability" are demoralized doublespeak for socialism. Democrat policies of higher taxes and fraud will not help anyone except their cronies. Spanberger is a case study faking moderation and focus on economics, then unleashing woke after getting elected. The only way to Make America Affordable Again is mass deportations: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/make-america-affordable-again
"Abundance" and "affordability" are represented by the Cuban economy: nothing available to buy for the normal population, so no affordability problems.
You're pretending not to remember that the USA has waged an economic war against Cuba for decades.
You're pretending not to remember that the Cuban regime has waged an economic war against its own citizens for decades.
So the USA and the Cuban regime are, in effect, on the same team. Together they are waging a war against Cuba.
American conservatardism is best explained through irony.
Leftists are incapable of structured, logical thought processes, substituting a morass of impressionistic, emotionally-charged, verbiage for reasoning. You have just committed the formal logical fallacy of Affirming the Consequent:
A implies C.
B implies C.
Therefore A equals B!
People who think this is a valid argument should not be allowed to vote or be recognised as competent adults.
You don't understand the fallacy of affirming the consequent [p→q; q; therefore p]. Given what you just wrote, I think it's fair to add that that you don't understand also common syllogistic fallacies or even the fallacy of denying the antecedent [p→q; not p; therefore not q.]. Like all conservatards, you're unqualified to be counted as a member of a ruling class.
Harris proposed Price Controls during her campaign in 24. I immediately sensed trouble. I remembered price and wage controls under Nixon in my first job. The money of the sixties changed for a very long time. After college I read Wealth of Nations, Gilder, and Sowell. I read everything I can about money. I do have confidence in the current administration’s policies with several at the helm.
Deportations and a strong labor movement.
Speaking of those 2 terms, the Right needs to drop them, period. We should be speaking about the growth and expected growth of our economy and the strength of our economy. It educates people to learn that affordability and abundance come from the economic engines, and that ours is strong. Then explain how it’s increased and will increase more.
Ah "Abundance"...I am thinking of Ezra Klein...
I’ve had an eye on a nice brownstone pre war apartment in the UES upper 70s for awhile - gosh, if only it were more affordable I could buy it and have a nice 12,000 sq ft pied-a-terre for NyC jaunts……think the Mayor could help me out?
Definitely! You know his Mom, right?
How does a good neoliberal shill like yourself feel about inducting and imprisoning those corporate executives and business owners who knowingly hire illegals to undercut American workers? Seems like most Reagan-Romney defend and protect such anti-working class scum.
Do you think big business is the major employer of illegal immigrants? I doubt going after employers would result in corporate executives behind bars.
I think illegals are mostly employed by individuals or mom-and-pop shops. Many illegals are employed by the entrepreneurial illegals who set up their own businesses in construction industries or landscaping.
Yes, big business in hospitality and agribusiness. You business friendly conservatives are class enemies if native born poor and working class Americans.
My substack opinion comments repeat the refrain often about top level encouragement of immigration. My experience is that the punishment is financial loss, not incarceration, even for large firms. Is that correct.?
I don’t know of any business or corporation receiving any punishment beyond a slap on the wrist. The billionaire donor classes who fund both establishment parties love mass immigration of all kinds. The most powerful lobby for granting amnesty and ‘a path for citizenship’ for illegal immigrants are The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable not ‘cultural Marxists.’
I said it was my experience, which was accurate. The company paid big time. I didn’t say it was typical or that I agreed with it, but did ask what the punishment was per statute.
Well I have never been called that, but I would not be in that camp of hiring illegals for any reason. 🇺🇸 First.
The Normies in the middle who traditionally voted on the left opened their eyes (Took the Red Pill) and voted for Trump. They mostly saw the lunacy of the far left. What should not happen is for those millions of Americans to stay home for the midterms, to let the far right weirdos divide them and have them vote for another deranged democrat or not vote for anyone on the normal right. The Socialists will NEVER stop and we should not let them get an edge.
You voted for a pedophile.
You appear to be a bot. Biden is not in office anymore but anyone who voted for him did vote for a man who has some characteristics of a pedophile, such as showering with his young daughter.
We’ve always had socialism for the rich but you don’t complain about that.
Yeah, it was called "communism". I know I shouldn't engage but I couldn't resist...
No, it’s called neoliberalism. You love bailouts for corporations while holding unemployed and poor people in contempt.
100%. Our education system has failed to teach economics and history. Class envy is the germ of communism/socialism which has resulted in abject misery wherever tried. See Cuba and Venezuela as prime examples in this hemisphere.
The US education system has been captured, since the 1960s, by communists who, through focusing on the errors of the great US experiment and denying the hard work to correct those errors, and ignoring any broad historical analysis, has created generations of inadequately educated who lack critical thinking skills and historical perspective. The seizure of US education by communist ideology began when the American Communist Party could not win an election, federal, state, or local. They determined that indoctrinating American's youth would be an effective method of eventually controlling the US. Two excellent books discuss the infiltration of our education system: The Forgotten Man by Amit Shales and The Technological Republic by Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska
Exactly. You want your upcoming generation stupid and brainwashed. Much easier to control.
You voted for a pedophile.
Not sure what your comment has to do with mine but I sure would like to see any reliable sources who have reported that Trump is a pedophile. There are plenty of sound reasons to criticize Trump. Wild accusations diminish credibility.
You don't want sources. You want to waste my time. You're just going to dismiss every source as invalid no matter what.
It is not an accusation. It is a fact that Trump preys on little kids.
Sorry, Chris, the radical "free trade" globalists that Friedman, et al, spawned in the 1980s, are largely responsible for the collapse of the American middle class.. All of those "low prices" we were promised came at a shockingly high cost to working Americans, i.e., the loss of good jobs, the collapse of our manufacturing base, and the creation of thousands of post-industrial ghost towns across America. Not good. We cannot counter the Dems current demagoguery on "affordability" by returning to the obviously failed "free trade" policies of the past.
As I mention in passing in the piece, I think this has mostly to do with China policy, which Trump is rightfully trying to correct
Chris: yes, China is/has been the main offender when it comes to the middle class- killer of "free trade," but they are by no means the only one. Trump's attempt at a total reset of US trade policy is the key to bringing back the American middle class. Here's hoping he stick with it.
China policy seems to be at this point a bipartisan consensus. Biden kept and raised trump’s tariffs on China. Also China is already a developed economy, and lots of manufacturing is now in places like Thailand and Indonesia, so how exactly do China tariffs fix problems with American manufacturing?
For all the criticism one can place on Trump's tariff policies, he is the first POTUS to recognize the damage done by the great global experiment. Manufacture of critical infrastructure should be brought back to US shores. One needs to, not only recognize a problem, but act to correct it in a bold fashion. It is a shame that too many Americans are utterly uninformed regarding the dangers to national sovereignty without bold action.
Well, Randomize, for starters, we could bring pharmaceutical production back from China, who appears to dominate it right now. And having virtually all of our PPE coming from China proved none too cool during the Plandemic, I think you would agree.
That's just for starters.
At the start of Covid, during his Mad Money program, Jim Cramer spot-lighted this fact and how it hamstrung our ability to respond.
You voted for a pedophile.
The populist right is making strides to fix the country’s outsourcing of manufacturing jobs and importing of cheap labor. The left and the right both screwed that up, and either side could have championed the revitalization of our ability to manufacture and construct real things. It’s astonishing that the right has chosen this as a major issue and it’s a winner politically. JD is well positioned in ‘28 if Trump stays focused on domestic issues and lays off the weird foreign military dramas.
Was the offshoring of manufacturing jobs to China not the result, at least in part, of the time of Deng Xiaoping who radically changed the way of "doing business" in China to make it more favorable to the idea of a freer enterprise? Was this not encouraged here at home as vehicle to move China more into the realm of capitalist economics - an economic adversary vs a military adversary? While we're talking about nasty billionaires, it seems to be a bit hard for the (D) to overlook or give a pass to the Hoffmans and Pritzkers, unless of course they are funding anti-Trump lawfare and a presidential campaign or attempting to foil ICE.
Yes, our foreign policy "elites" confidently predicted that trade liberalization would inevitably--inevitably--lead to political liberalization and the demise of the CCP. But even a cursory understanding of Chinese/CCP history and culture made it clear (dare I say "inevitable") that they would not long play second fiddle in America's globalist parade. They were/are too proud for that, too certain of their own cultural superiority to do that. At the first chance, they would flip the script, and the US would be the regime facing inevitable decline.
And here we are. Maybe it's not too late to do something about it.
If I were China, after the devastation of the Great Leap, and I was given the golden opportunity that Nixon afforded -- how could I not? In a competitive world, China has PLAYED the West. Understandably. As Pacificus says, the US then faces decline -- without extraordinary effort, which Trump has put forward. Trying, against all odds, to do something about it.
Hey, I'm not blaming China... China gonna China when dealing with the "foul smelling, hairy barbarians" (China's 19th century cute name for Westerners)... Westerners have been being played by China for centuries.. literally kow-towing to them, past, present. and future, at least for some. Nixon's China pivot was smart. Things went wrong under Reagan, and then really wrong under Bush the Elder and Clinton. And here we are.
When Queen Victoria first sent envoys to China, the Imperial Court was outraged that the British refused to kowtow before His Divine Presence. For the next meeting, the Emperor ordered wooden tunnels built, intending that the British would be forced into a grovelling position. The Brits responded by emerging from those tunnels ass-first, so the requirement to kowtow was quietly dropped.
Good story. Funny how so many Westerners seem to have, in effect, returned to that humiliating practice....
Yep. Not going to get fooled......again!
I disagree about the free market. We cannot have a global free market and local tax systems. Every country taxes its citizens and uses those taxes to provide services to their citizens. That only works if countries are able to control the influx of external workers and goods.
Both immigration and imports should be used as a tool to improve the quality of life of citizens, not that of other countries.
We can all sympathize with people on the other side of the world making a living by cheaply manufacturing goods that will be sold in the USA, but the focus of our government should be our citizens, not those from China, India, Taiwan or any other place.
So, I think that if we still want to have countries, borders and sovereignty, we cannot have a global free market.
Precisely.
Very well said Marco Polo!
Spot on! Thank you.
Of the 3, I think you should have made the case that class warfare is the most dangerous and the easiest to wage when you have a large underclass and a wildly rich and powerful elite. We are at that stage. It is a very dangerous time in my opinion.
Many of the wildly rich and powerful elite have been waging class warfare against the majority of the USA for quite a while now and even created the growing underclass with their support for outsourcing, etc. The majority of the country are starting to see this clearly. It is the wildly rich and powerful elite that are in spotlight for their egregious deeds. They need to demonstrate respect for those they have harmed before this gets worse. President Trump is showing the way. The wildly rich and powerful elite need to support border enforcement, elimination of H1bs, etc.
Excellent point. But Chris is correct that there is this constant pivot/rotation between these 3 arguments, which will be revived in time.
Chris is a Maoist and an enemy of America
Another thing that conservatives need to keep in mind is that egalitarian crusading has rarely been driven by the downtrodden but by a malcontent middle class. So “Conservatives should celebrate the defeat of BLM and trans ideology”? Not so fast!
These things might have been defeated amongst the political pundity but not amongst large sections of the voting public. They are a kind of competitive mind game amongst millions of “more-virtuous-than-thou” public sector laptop classes. And this isn’t going to go away anytime soon. The whole two hundred year history of Progressivism could be viewed as one long purity spiral up ‘Social Justice’ Mountain. Yes we’re currently back to “What about the workers?” but there’s still plenty of “What about my new ‘gender’?” too amongst Democrats in the coastal metropolises. [from: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/stairway-to-equiheaven ]
Graham, 4 Hospitals including Rady Children's have just announced no more "Gender Care". I thank people like you(intellectuals) and Harmeet Dhillon and Chris for exposing this travesty. Chris should have got a medal last night for his many months of hard work exposing this evil.
Chris is a Maoist and an enemy of America
Very interesting thesis. Could not agree more with the need to counter the class warfare pillar. Hopefully we will be aided by visible failures in NY and CA by Mandami and Newsome respectively.
Chris is a Maoist and an enemy of America
Dan. Don't be a stupid troll.
If you think I'm trolling, you suck at it
Our country has so many problems, many caused by Democrats, rhino Republicans. Everything you mentioned is true. Can you write about what they are doing to Christians? Our education is destroyed, the financial system is hanging on by a thread, so the next thing to be attacked is faith. Islam is here.
Chris is a Maoist and an enemy of America
Free trade vs protectionism is not an either/or proposition. Just as all governments involve some elements of socialism, all governments restrict trade, whether through tax regimes, regulatory frameworks, or tariffs. The US is finally coming out of its orgiastic WW II hangover and recognizing that it needs to level the international playing field to some degree. We are still a long way from shutting down the US markets.
In 1999 John Ellis sounded the trumpet on this movement with LITERATURE LOST: SOCIAL AGENDAS AND THE CORRUPTION OF THE HIMANITIES…. It all rapidly went to hell at least a decade before this book came out… Ellis got panned as a reactionary by the Maoists and Leninists that had already made the long March through the institutions. Ellis was lighting fires on the mountaintops
and too few heeded the warning…
https://a.co/d/08K3PVFw
And now with an additional 2.5 decades of transmission, we can see how this has spread into practically every aspect of our civilization. 😞
Yes … at the time we thought the English depts were just driving themselves into a weird oblivion cultivating ever increasing irrelevance…. I recall a colleague at the time gleefully bloviating that by destroying the canon, dead white males, and any arguments for high vs low culture or better vs worse aesthetic performance they were changing the world… I of course did my thing and jumped in on poststructural analysis etc (to survive) thinking it was an odd side show with some interesting intellectual challenges…. But the boast that this was attacking logos and pulling down the pillars of western civilization seemed over the top…. This guppie jumped the bowl and became a leviathan
I'm not sure conservatives realize what an ace the class issue is for liberals in that it speaks beyond external identity markers and shoots directly at the power structures that favor the rich -- this is a point which people of all stripes and backgrounds can get revved up about. And they will.
The great irony is this message will be championed by idiots like pelosi who've benefitted in a surreal manner from these very power structures. Careful what you wish for congresspeople.
Chris is a Maoist and an enemy of America
Ok whaaaaat are you talking about… truly wanting to know how you came up with that
I don't think the BLM stuff really is in hibernation. Just go watch some Netflix. It just became normalized. The left can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Until we understand the root psychological causes of leftism everyone will be in a constant state of reacting to whatever random dark age they're trying to create next. It wasn't neat Sowellian arguments about supply side economics that killed off the left's fascination with trying to liquidate the rich in the 1980s, it was the comprehensive demolition of the USSR and China's abandonment of leftist economics in favor of state-controlled capitalism. The two biggest most visible examples of collectivist economics simply gave up on it.
Everyone saw, and everyone saw that everyone saw. But now we have a new generation that didn't see. So the bad ideas come back.
The right have to focus WAY more aggressively on reforming education between 12-18. The curriculum and textbooks need a radical overhaul to focus much more on 20th century history, in particular stressing:
- The disastrous results of socialism
- The reasons it failed
- That the Nazis were far left socialists, not "far right": https://penbroke.substack.com/p/the-nazis-were-a-far-left-party
We can't sacrifice a major country every generation to teach people why leftist economics results in mass famines, this HAS to be addressed through comprehensive education programs. The left has totally captured education to the extent that kids are taught all about colonialism (centuries ago) and nearly nothing about communism (still exists). The right has to get smarter about this.
It's not quite the same though, it's explicitly racial socialism. "Tax white neighborhoods" was a real plank of Mamdanism. We don't need to be Reaganites to recognize the guy saying South Africa is his model for reform is not the way.
Hi Christopher, well said as always. I sit here considering what you said and what others have said and what my own thoughts repeatedly tell me after many, many trips around the sun. The left always seems to be able to move the needle in any direction they want. Because they are activists and they are willing to put the sweat equity into what they want to do to ruin the world. They seem oblivious to the fact that what they want would ruin the world, or maybe they’re just that diabolical and they actually do want to ruin it, even for themselves. That being said, those of us here on the conservative (not Republican or Libertarian) side of things sit and read the news. I just read the news you wrote, and I don’t disagree with you. But I wonder why we can’t organize. I wonder why we can’t unify and agree together on a path to take towards the freedom and liberty that we wish and hope would continue. I wonder why we can’t move the needle in any direction we really want to go most of the time. When the left wants to move they move and we sit and watch them, then later when it’s harder, we try to put them in check. When we want to move, the left is right there in our face checking us at full court press. What this means is, We seem to be able to check the left sometimes, kind of sorta. And sometimes we check them for a while, and we’re able to sort of do what we want ,as long as we can continue to sit and read the news. But I don’t see the right as some group of people who feels motivated or activated to really conquer this and make it stop completely. you know, the dog needs to be in the fight, but where is the fight in the dog? I think of myself as a constitutionalist and these days probably even more of a declarationist because it is that freedom and liberty that I desire. and in spite of the constitution, nobody follows it. Except for when they can use it as a club to beat the other side with, as a matter of perfunctory rules of order. I do want my business to be minded by me, and I want everybody else’s business to be minded by them, a minimal government to supply me the things that I don’t have time for, like civil infrastructure, and defense, and then the rest I want left to us to do or not do as we see fit. Kind of like the founders did envision it. But unfortunately our constitution however unfollowed that it may be, did not spell out succinctly enough that it was meant to be read as a document of what you must do and if it’s not written in there, you must not do that. In other words, as Justice Scalia once said, “it says what it says and it does not say what it does not say,” and even in as much as that makes sense it does not stop those who want power to pick it up and weild it inappropriately, anyway. This may sound defeatist but I don’t think that we have one country here, I think we have two. We may only have 20-30 years left to find that out if we don’t find it out sooner. As a Cold War veteran, I never thought in my young years that the manifesto would come all the way to my front door. As it turns out, the hippies were more powerful than Khrushchev. I’m sure we will find out as we all sit back and read the news.
You may be reading the news but we GOP women are out there fighting hard. We will also get help from Turning Point youth and Scott Pressler who are knocking on doors and setting up booths to Register Voters. We are looking for lists of Congressional Candidates who have a good chance to replace Dems. We will work for them and give money to them. So, yes, you sound like a defeatest.
I understand you, and I also understand what you’re saying. I am also quite active I just didn’t mention it. It was not pertinent to the point I was making. It’s still not. I’m just one person. Even though I may team up with others, it’s still not enough of us yet. Conservatives would prefer to be left alone, it’s one of those values of liberty you know, but sometimes you have to fight for that liberty. And being a veteran I understand that all too well. But I do know a lot of people who would prefer to sit on their hands and read the news, and if you’re honest with me, you do too.
Reaganism was the answer for our problems in he 1980's: sky high inflation, high marginal tax rates, and the USSR. None of those are present today.
What is present today: a huge trade deficit, stagnant incomes at the bottom 2 quintiles, a rising GINI coefficient, and a debt of 120% of GDP.
Encouraging job growth is important. Rewarding entrepreneurship is critical. But supply side economics was a solution for its time, and this isn't it. We're nowhere near the top of the Laffer curve, which means higher marginal tax rates will do little to dampen growth or risk-taking. So use the extra revenue (and yes, there will be extra revenue) to pay down the debt or at least eat into the deficit, which will improve several of those current problems I listed.
Populism isn't an add-on to Reaganism. It's a replacement.