The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: 2024 American Elections Page 1 of 3

If Kamala Wins It’ll Be the Supreme Court Who Won It For Her

(This blog is for understanding the present, making educated guesses at the future, and telling truths, usually unpleasant ones. There aren’t a lot of places like this left on the Web. Every year I fundraise to keep it going. If you’d like to help, and can afford to, please Subscribe or Donate.)

Back in 2022 almost everyone expected the midterms to go Republican. They didn’t.

The Supremes won it for Democrats, because women were furious about the over-turning of Roe v.s. Wade.

Harris is a terrible candidate, but the Supremes seem likely to win it for her, too.

Men tend to vote Republican, women tend to vote Democratic. Women are far more likely to vote than men, and if they remains true on election day, Trump is toast.

What Republicans don’t get is that abortion is a health issue as well as a choice issue. There is a constant drumbeat of stories of women dying because doctors and hospitals were unwilling or scared to do an abortion when medically necessary. I recently saw a story of a late term 18 year old. She went to a hospital with Sepsis, they sent her home. She went to another one, they dragged their feet and insisted on two scans, and by the time they were willing to do what was needed, she was dead.

And the problems, electorally, is that while there is a hard minority of men who really care about abortion, more women care, and are pro-choice and pro-women’s lives. After all, but for the Grace of God, there they go, or their friends or children.

Added to the numbers above we have the Selzer poll which found Iowa, of all places, going Harris by 3 points. Selzer has historically been very reliable, but it’s the shock of it being Oiwa.

If the gender gap or the Iowa poll are accurate (Selzer), Harris isn’t just going to win, she’s going to blow Trump out of the water.

The problems I see with a Harris victory in this manner are:

  1. The democrats won’t do anything major about abortion, because they’ll figure if they keep it as a problem it’ll continue to win them elections;
  2. Harris winning will be seen as a sign that Biden’s policies are good, and should continue.

All this said, I suck at electoral prediction, so we’ll see. But this does seem to be the scenario.

Seven Days Till The US Federal Election

And Trump is very slightly ahead in the polls.

As is usually the case in modern American elections, much that is important isn’t at stake in this election: most notably whether or not the genocide in Palestine will continue. Both candidates and both parties are under the thumb of the Israeli lobby. Nor is an end to the terminal decline of the American Empire on the ballot, though Trump pretends it is.

That isn’t to say the election doesn’t matter, but it’s a choice between two terrible candidates. Trump is clearly senile and mercurial is the kindest word one can use to describe him. Harris is not that bright, and appears to fall into the Bush Jr. category: something happened to damage her. Plenty of rumors of alcohol problems, though I don’t know if they’re valid.

Both candidates are moral and ethical monsters, whose ambition and vanity are such that they would kill or impoverish any number of people to achieve their personal goals. (No, don’t even. This isn’t in question.)

I can’t be bothered to endorse either of them. This is a case of “would you prefer Satan or Beelzebub?” Unless you’re in a swing state I’d strongly urge you to vote third party or spoil your ballot. Even in a swing state you should seriously consider it.

About sixty percent of Americans think that the two-party system is broken, but they won’t vote for a third party because they think it’s a wasted vote, and this collective action problem makes continued decline inevitable.

(This blog is for understanding the present, making educated guesses at the future, and telling truths, usually unpleasant ones. There aren’t a lot of places like this left on the Web. Every year I fundraise to keep it going. If you’d like to help, and can afford to, please Subscribe or Donate.)

Domestically it’s clear that Harris, who says she wouldn’t have done a single thing differently than Biden, is the candidate of status quo decline. Things will keep getting worse in about the same way. Trump will shake things up, primarily because of who he will appoint to government and their plans of taking over the bureaucracy.

Democrats aren’t serious about abortion rights, but Trump will make the situation even worse. His economic policies will be disastrous in different ways than Harris’s: tariffs aren’t a bad idea, but without industrial policy and policies designed to end rent-seeking and funnel resources into industry they won’t don’t do much but cause different types of pain. His appointments to the supreme court will be awful, though that ship has sailed and until Democrats are willing to court pack it seems unlikely there will be any near-term change.

This election was Harris’s to win, but she didn’t want it enough to distance herself strategically from Biden. It wouldn’t have taken much, I’d bet that just some serious talk about taming the inflation which ordinary people feel but economists insist doesn’t exist would have done it. Or she could have come out against genocide, and courted the left instead of the right by campaigning with Liz Cheney, et al.

But at the end of the day, people like Harris would rather the right win than do anything seriously left-wing like “not mass murder”, which is now so far from the central axis of American politics that it amounts to extremism, and is treated by universities, the political class and the justice system as the hand maiden to terrorism.

In such a decaying Empire, the truth is there are few good, viable, choices left. Pick your arch-demon or vote for someone who at least isn’t into mass murder but won’t win.

Postliberalism, Liberal Apogee, Routine Elite Failure and Then?

I was alerted to Nathan Pinkoski’s “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” by N.S. Lyons’ response “The Post-Cold War Apotheosis of Liberal Managerialism,” and enjoyed both tremendously.

Pinkosi’s piece is an excellent short history of the public-private partnership currently aiming for absolute global cultural control via the weaponization of finance that he calls postliberalism.

I thought it would be fun to excerpt all the times Antony Blinken’s name appears in the piece.

First mention:

When Bill Clinton took office, he continued the pursuit of openness. In 1993, he ratified NAFTA and relaxed the ban on homosexuals in the military. However, he made it clear that the old liberalism was not enough. Eager to extend the reach of democracy and confront foreign enemies who stood in its way, his administration developed new tools to advance America’s global power. In September, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake outlined a new paradigm. His speech, “From Containment to Enlargement,” bespeaks a political revolution. It provided the blueprint not only for the foreign policy agenda of nearly every U.S. president since then, but for the convictions of every right-thinking person. Lake’s speechwriter was Anthony (sic) Blinken.

Second mention:

After Biden was sworn in as president, his administration shelved a plan to overhaul sanctions policy. A consensus held that if the kinks of the past could be worked out, then the Americans and Europeans had all the weapons in place to launch a devastating financial first strike against their preferred targets. Planning began in the first year of the new administration, with Secretary Blinken’s State Department taking the lead. So by February 2022, just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine faltered, the arrangements were already in place. The strategic possibilities seemed limitless. Russia could be brought to its knees; Putin would follow in the ignominious footsteps of ­Milosevic and Gaddafi.

The execution of the strike was dazzling. The scale, especially the involvement of SWIFT and the targeting of Russia’s central bank, caught the Kremlin by surprise. It was ­Barbarossa for the twenty-­first century. Yet the first strike did not yield the promised results. Nor did the second, third, or fourth. Putin’s approval ratings soared, Russia’s industrial output increased, and its military continues to grind away at the Ukrainian army. Despite implementing nearly 6,000 sanctions in two-plus years, the euphoria of spring 2022 (let alone that of the holiday parties of 2011) is long gone. Although American policymakers have said again and again that they have mobilized a global coalition against Russia that has left the country isolated, that is not the case. The map of the countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia closely resembles the map of the countries that have legalized same-sex marriage. Economic warfare against Russia has exposed the limits of the global American empire.

Lyons applauds Pinkoski’s essay but rejects the notion that this is a revolution against liberalism — instead, it is its apogee.

Sadly, he doesn’t mention Blinken, but he does elaborate on the frightening ambition of this movement:

The managerial ideal is the perfect frictionless mass of totally liberated (that is, totally deracinated and atomized) individuals, totally contained within the loving arms of the singular unity of the managerial state. To achieve its utopia of perfect liberty and equality, liberalism requires perfect control.

This ideal is, of course, the very essence of totalitarianism. Yet if we wonder why the distinction between public and private has everywhere collapsed into “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics,” this is the most fundamental reason why. Perhaps, for that matter, this is also why the U.S. and EU now habitually sponsor LGBT groups in Hungary or India, and finance human-trafficking “human rights” NGOs in Central America and the Mediterranean: because managerialism’s blind crusade to crush any competing spheres of social power has gone global.

In response, a comforting tonic from The Archdruid, John Michael Greer at Ecosophia, whose reader “Dave” asks him:

I’ve noticed a growing and extremely worrying trend of the “elites” of politics and entertainment pursuing reckless and (to me) clearly wrong courses of actions that blow up in their faces, and then instead of honestly looking at the situation they’ve had a large hand in creating and doing a mea culpa, either doubling down and getting mad at regular people when they’re less keen to do what the elites tell them, or trying something else without ever really honestly accounting for their mistakes. The actions remind me of signs of elite collapse that this blog has talked about for years now and it’s very surreal and worrying to see happening in real time. What is going on and why can’t the “elites”, the people with access to more data and resources and advisers than anyone else, seem to realize what’s going wrong? Do they not care or are their actions part of a larger plan, not to sound conspiratorial?

Greer’s response was just what I needed to hear:

Dave, I don’t think that it’s any kind of plan. Quite the contrary, this is normal elite failure, the thing that comes right before an elite replacement crisis. Just as the capitalist elite of the 1920s crashed and burned, and was replaced by a managerial elite in the 1930s and 1940s, the managerial elite of the 2010s is crashing and burning, and will be replaced by an entrepreneurial elite in the 2020s and 2030s. The entitled cluelessness of a class that has remained in power too long is a familiar thing; comparisons to French aristocrats just before the French Revolution also come to mind.

Although, honestly if this means that Elon Musk and company are going to win what Chris Hedges calls “The Choice Between Corporate and Oligarchic Power”eek!

Kamala Harris, anointed by the richest Democratic Party donors without receiving a single primary vote, is the face of corporate power. Donald Trump is the buffoonish mascot for the oligarchs. This is the split within the ruling class. It is a civil war within capitalism played out on the political stage. The public is little more than a prop in an election where neither party will advance their interests or protect their rights.

And what do the oligarchs want?

Warlord capitalism seeks the total eradication of all impediments to the accumulation of profits including regulations, laws and taxes. It makes its money by charging rent, by erecting toll booths to every service we need to survive and collecting exorbitant fees.

Trump’s cohort of Silicon Valley backers, led by Elon Musk, were what The New York Times writes, “finished with Democrats, regulators, stability, all of it. They were opting instead for the freewheeling, fortune-generating chaos that they knew from the startup world.” They planned to “plant devices in people’s brains, replace national currencies with unregulated digital tokens, [and] replace generals with artificial intelligence systems.”

As much as I eagerly anticipate the long-overdue fall of our current elite, I truly dread what’s coming up in their wake.

The Deep State Is Scared

Say whatever you want about Trump, and I will agree. Got that? Okay, good.

But, when I saw that Dick Cheney–the fastigium of the Deep State–endorse Kamala Harris I was speechless.

I had wondered for a long time if Liz Cheney was Dick’s cat’s-paw, but now I’m just gobsmacked. The Deep State is truly scared of a Trump 2.0 and they have clearly mobilized every asset they have to make sure our managed reality stays properly managed. At least, managed according to Deep State preferences.

The media may spin this as some sort of last ditch attempt for the GOP to save itself from a populist monster, but that is clamjamfry of the worst kind. Twaddle. Horseapples. This is the Deep State in action and it hasn’t got a damn thing to do with the GOP.

And after Harris confirmed that Uncle Joe’s foreign policy will remain unchanged last night I’m convinced. Sure, she’ll be allowed to manage a few pet projects on the margins, but do not expect any adults to attend to her foreign policy.

I don’t necessarily dislike managed reality. I’ve seen direct reality and experienced a bit of it myself and it ain’t all its cracked up to be. I’d just like better managers.

PS–I’ve been very busy lately and have not forgotten to complete my Russia series. But writing a post on nuclear policy and the potential of nuclear war is distasteful to say the least. I appreciate your patience.

What if We Threw a Civil War and Nobody Came?

UPDATE: I forgot to include a hilarious bit of business involving the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation vs. the Millersville (TN) Police Department. Have added it below:

Sean Paul’s post on the 2nd Amendment got me thinking about the prospects for civil war in the USA, in particular this spicy quote:

So, Sean Paul, what does this have to do with the Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms?

Everything to do with slavery, and nothing to do with holding our government accountable. Seriously, do you honestly think a couple thousand Texans with AR-15s could out fight an armored brigade? GTFOH.

It won’t be lard-ass militias that matter if there is a civil implosion in the US.

These things always come down to intra-elite splits and/or intra-military splits.

There seems to be a split between the Trump-supporting majority of American police forces, right-wing military personnel, some military officers & at least some FBI vs the Trump-hating “Deep State” CIA, NSA, Pentagon elite and the rest of the active duty military.

As NPR reported in 2021, some po-po’s were even willing to put their bodies on the line for whatever it was they were trying to do on Jan 6.

Nearly 30 sworn police officers from a dozen departments attended the pro-Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol last week, and several stormed the building with rioters and are facing federal criminal charges as well as possible expulsion or other discipline.

The officers are from departments large and small. There was veteran officer in Houston, the nation’s eighth-largest department; a sergeant in the small town of Rocky Mount, Va., and a group of Philadelphia transit officers.

Note that caveat in the headline about the vast majority of them being retired. Are we too “demographically advanced” ie old to get a war on?

Also check these nifty stats from Seton Hall’s “A Demographic and Legal Profile of January 6 Prosecutions”:

The government has won all but 12 cases brought to date (five died, four fled, one acquitted, two dismissed);

517 of 716 (72%) were charged as the result of tipsters and informants;

Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, and California are home to 43.9% of those charged;

Only states not represented among the 716 arrested were North Dakota, Nebraska and Vermont;

35.1% of defendants were identified as going to the Capitol alone;

25% were armed;

18.5 % had a background in law enforcement or the military;

Largest employment group identified is the Business Owner group, which accounts for 24.7%;

Only 35 of the 716 individuals were identified as unemployed;

22.2% had a criminal record.

Note that a disproportionate amount of the Jan 6ers came from just five states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, and California.

And two of those states are “solid blue” and even the red and purple states each feature very Democratic cities.

If there’s no geographic continuity to the two sides are we just going to have a nationwide running gun battle instead?

But wait, the case for imminent civil war has a couple more points to make.

TX Gov Greg Abbott turning the Texas National Guard against the US Border Patrol was a very ominous sign:

Most explosively, Texas Governor Greg Abbott in January deployed the state National Guard to block the U.S. Border Patrol from accessing a 2.5-mile-long section of the border in the city of Eagle Pass. The section includes Shelby Park, a 47-acre city park along the Rio Grande named for a Confederate general who fled to Mexico rather than surrender. Border Patrol officials had been using the park for processing encountered migrants. Now, they are effectively locked out of the park, and are mostly unable to access a heavily crossed border area to do their jobs.

Fl Gov Ron DeSantis’ creation of the Florida Guard outside federal control and his proposal to send them to the Texas border is another clown show that is also actually quite scary:

DeSantis established the Florida Guard on June 15, 2022, purportedly to enhance Florida’s capacity to deal with hurricanes. It was announced as a civilian force of approximately 400 volunteers to supplement the Florida National Guard, which balances both state and federal government control. The governor asked for $2 million.

Within a year, DeSantis and the super-majority Republican Legislature converted the small volunteer force into DeSantis’ expensive private army.

MORE BUDGET, MORE POLICE POWERS

House Bill 1285 skyrocketed the budget to $107.6 million, with half of the funds designated for “military” equipment. The number of “volunteers”— handpicked by the governor — increased from 400 to 1,500, and they were granted “police powers” to detain and arrest.

Although there is a titular head of the volunteers, the Guard may be “activated only by the governor and is at all times under the final command and control of the governor as the commander in chief of all military and guard forces of the state.”

And it is not under the state’s military control because the law further provides that: “The division [i.e. State Guard] shall not be subject to control, supervision or direction of the Department of Military Affairs in any manner…”

DeSantis moved quickly after that. He set up a military training center for millions of dollars and hired a combat-training company to recruit and train members of the Guard. The contractor was awarded a non-competitive $1.2 million contract and the company’s manual provides for hand-to-hand combat, busting down walls and interdiction in the sea.

These developments show an ominous willingness to escalate political fights into military conflict on the part of the two southern GOP governors.

But militarily this is pipsqueak stuff at this point. Were a war to erupt between the Feds and Abbot and DeSantis it would be over in a few savage minutes, as long as it takes for a pit bull to maul a baby.

And the yokel governors are not the pit bull in this scenario.

But things get very interesting, in the ancient Chinese curse sense, if Trump wins the presidential election and actually manages to place loyalists in key positions at the federal level.

But that’s a big if.

Politically Trump seems way off his game from 2016. Steve Bannon’s in jail and Trump has his head up his own ass. The rousing populism and ‘did he really say that?’ demagoguery are missing.

That makes it less likely that he could motivate supporters to truly crazy extremes.

Does Trump really seem to care enough to organize a civil war?

Also there’s the matter of social cohesion — oddly, it’s a critical ingredient for a civil war. Each side has to at least some internal unity to present a sufficient problem to the other side necessary for the brouhaha to go from “civic disturbance” or “riot” to CIVIL WAR.

Aurelian argues we don’t have enough social cohesion to get a war on.

For all the fashionable talk of “civil war,” a civil war requires organised parties competing for control of the future of the political system. We don’t have that, we just have individuals, and small groups without much cohesion, united only in their detestation for the system.

It may be the case that we can bumble our way into something really nasty without  leadership on either side capable of catalyzing discontent into a coherent force.

If there’s a major economic collapse or a military disaster on a foreign front all bets are off.

But even in those scenarios, I’d anticipate more of a gradual disintegration into warlordism than an 1860 type thing.

UPDATE: I can’t believe I forgot to include the piece de resistance. This is a classic real-world example of a conflict between MAGA chuds in power locally vs. a state law enforcement agency:

In a perplexing pair of podcast interviews, the Millersville chief of police says the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has begun limiting his department’s access to certain sensitive law enforcement data.

It follows a scandal first dug up by NewsChannel 5 Investigates into the troubled police department for the community of 6,000 just north of Nashville.

“Once we start getting this bad publicity, our access starts getting cut off to financial reports, FinCen,” Chief Bryan Morris said in an interview with far-right podcaster Tom Renz. The interview was posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“We can’t do investigations,” the chief continued. “We don’t have everything in this office that we need, you know.”

Renz chimed in, “You need the tools provided by federal law enforcement and other agencies, and state agencies.”

“And now we’re being denied that,” Morris insisted.

Morris — who also serves as interim city manager — claimed his department is now cut off from one of the most sensitive law enforcement data sources available.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — sometimes known as FinCen — is a program run by the U.S. Department of Treasury that can give police access to certain banking and other financial records of individuals when there is a legitimate law enforcement purpose.

Morris claimed that, because of NewsChannel 5’s investigations into his conspiracy-minded assistant police chief, Shawn Taylor, the TBI has now cut them off.

Renz asked, “Have they given you a good reason that they are denying you access?”

“No,” the chief answered. “I’ve actually called down there and talked to them, and what I’ve been told is we’re on hold because they are auditing us.”

As part of Taylor’s many bizarre conspiracy theories — including claims that some of the nation’s most powerful political figures are involved in child sex trafficking — Taylor has sometimes boasted about having access to sensitive data linked to some powerful people.

That includes the banking records for U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn’s campaign.

 

Kamala Makes Her Bones On Palestine

At the DNC:

“Israel always has the right to defend itself, and as president I will ensure that it has the means to defend itself against the horrors of attacks like October 7th which included unspeakable sexual violence.”

Lying and clear support of a genocide.

Harris is better domestically, but she’s toed the line on Israel.

Oh, and AOC has clearly chosen ambition over principle. She’s refused to call Gaza a genocide, and she was allowed to speak at the DNC.  It was explained to her, forcibly, I expect, the limits of how far having principles would get her and she’s made her choice and been rewarded for it.

Neither of these women have any real principles. If you’re willing to skate on genocide, you’ll skate on anything if you feel the need. Don’t think they wouldn’t do the same thing to Americans if it came to it.


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Tim Walz Is Excellent Domestically & Pro-Genocide

If I were an American, I’d be pretty happy about the guy, unless I have a problem with mass murder of foreigners.

On the good side:

  • signed a bill giving free breakfast lunch to all students;
  • 20 weeks of paid family & medical leave, for America, excellent;
  • right to repair bill;
  • free college tuition for students whose families make less than 80K;
  • banned non-competes;
  • and so on.

So, domestically, excellent. But he’s pro-Israel:

At AIPAC:

Israel is our truest and closest ally in the region, with a commitment to values of personal freedoms and liberties, surrounded by a pretty tough neighborhood.

“The values of personal freedoms of liberties” about an apartheid state is pretty rich.

To the Jewish Community Relationship Council, June 2, 2024 (aka, while the genocide was ongoing):

I see people debating something I don’t feel is debatable here. The ability of Jewish people to self-determine is foundational to everything […] and the failure to recognize the State of Israel taking away that self-determination. So it is anti-semitic, and that is a statement of fact.

If what you’re going to do with your “self determination” is commit a genocide, then you shouldn’t have self-determination. Note also the conflation of Israel with being Jewish, which if I were Jewish, I’d object to on the strongest terms, not wanting to be associated with mass murder.

Of course he’s the VP pick, Harris is healthy and he’s unlikely to matter a great deal. That said, he’s about as good as Harris was likely to pick. I’d say that the Harris/Walz ticket is better for more Americans than Trump/Vance, as long as you can get past the whole genocide thing.

Consider that damning with faint praise.


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Will Kamala Harris Be A Worse President Because She Doesn’t Have Children?

Here’s the case, put relatively well:

Moral superiority aside, a somewhat general rule of thumb is that if you have children AND they live in the same country, then you have a HIGHER vested interest in the wellbeing of your country.

I’ll take “wellbeing of your country” to mean wellbeing of the residents of your country, though it doesn’t have to mean that.

Now, this argument is one that’s true sometimes. But only sometimes. It also assumes that parents care about the wellbeing of their children, which isn’t always true, but we’ll assume it is for now.

Let’s run thru why it doesn’t work for powerful people, which includes most politicians, certainly anyone with a decent chance of winding up President of the United States.

It is possible to take actions which increase the wellbeing of your children, which also harm the wellbeing of your country. American politicians and oligarchs, for example, sold America’s manufacturing base to China. They become filthy rich as a result and their children will be very well taken care of even if America is in serious decline. It did, however, harm the majority of Americans. (There are thousands of other examples, feel free to add some in comments.)

Your children may live in a worse-off America, but they are better off than if you did not do that harm. (Or, at least, that is your belief.)

If you prioritize the wellbeing of a small group over a larger group it usually possible to hurt the larger group to benefit the smaller group.

In fact, there is a strong argument that people without children are far more likely to prioritize the wellbeing of the residents of their country than those with children: they don’t have to make a choice: “should I make my kids better off OR the everyone else better off?”

Even at the simplest level, of “should I spend more time with my kids OR spend more time doing my job” there is this conflict. Great men and women are often bad parents, because if working an extra hour means helping a thousand of someone else’s children, they do that even if it hurts their own kids.

There is no free lunch. You always have to prioritize.

Harris will be a terrible President, I’m confident of that. But it has nothing to do with whether or not she has kids and, in fact, if she intended to do the right things for ordinary Americans, the fact that she didn’t have children would be a significant plus.

Most cultures have a family worship disease: the idea that you should always put your family first.

NO.

If you are willing to put your family first when doing so means that large numbers of people will suffer, you’re a monster. In fact, one of the necessities of having power over large numbers of people has to be that you don’t put your family first IF doing so will result in harm to others.

If you reach a point where it’s your family or a large number of others, and you can’t choose the “others” then you should step down and give the job to someone who can take care of the others.

Only those without power can, ethically, prioritize their own family without being monsters.

That this has to be explained to people is another sign of our inability to reason clearly about moral and ethical issues.


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