In my previous post, I observed that when the Republican party machine says one thing, and Sarah Palin says a different thing, Republican party activists do what Sarah Palin says, and not what the party machine says. But, of course, we next have to ask do Republican voters do what Republican party activists say, or do they do what the party machine says?
“Former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, is promoting her new book and she’s going to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Sarah and Oprah. On the one hand, a very powerful woman qualified to be President of the United States, and on the other hand, you have Sarah.” –David Letterman
[…] But on October 27 I wrote “Sarah Palin in charge” […]
And part of pretending to be working class is pretending to be less intelligent than you are, just as I said.
But why do you think this of Palin? Her parents and parents in-law are unimpressive. Her educational credentials are unimpressive. Her children are losers. Her husband works with his hands. If she is faking prole-ness, she has been doing it since young adulthood and in a remarkably comprehensive way. Utterly unlike Bush who took it up in 2000.
On your account she gave her children those names because she was planning some day to run for VP and knew that looking prole would be good for her? She wandered aimlessly from crappy college to crappy college because it made her look stupid, and she brilliantly knew that this would work to her great benefit decades in the future when she would run for VP? Seriously?
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Tancredo is leaving politics. That should tell you the answer.
I ask this question a fair bit, here and there, because I am curious about the answer. I have yet to hear a convincing one. The R establishment hates Tancredo because of his immigration stand. Tancredo and Paul and hypothetical candidates like them are unviable because Rush and Hannity and all the rest of the R establishment call them nuts all day long (Tancredo is also funny looking and not very articulate). This does nothing to explain why the R establishment hates his immigration stand.
I’m not inclinded to blame much on the Jews, since they would promptly recede to their former level of influence were Christians to reassert themselves.
But what you are saying does not make much sense to me. You explained the predominance and critical role of Jews in Enlightenment movements by saying that they are apostate Jews who have converted to various post-protestant religions. You also say that their predominance and critical role in Communism was because they apostasized to post-Jewish Communism. Finally, you conclude that the problem is predominantly apostate Christians today.
So, you have a, like, geneological notion of blame, I guess. Had Christians been the movers and shakers in Communism, then Communism would still have been Jews fault, for you, since you say it is a post-Jewish religion. Why is this the right notion of blame here?
It’s much more straightforward to blame the people actually doing the bad stuff, and to blame the religion which, on your account, keeps throwing off scads of apostates who convert to noxious stuff.
Bill:
She is impressive. Her personal success and her insight is impressive. She explains the crisis as another example of the law of unintended consequences, the truth of which explanation is obvious once stated – at least obvious to those who are sufficiently smart. She jumps into the republican spill in New York at exactly the critical moment to succeed. She says a striking phrase about government health care that transforms the debate. When she transformed the health care debate, she did what great intellectuals do. And in the longer run, she is transforming the debate on the economic crisis.
The Republican establishment is also backing Dede Scozzafava – it is the Cathedral. Right now, backing Dede Scozzafava is career suicide for a career in the Republican party, yet it remains a career requirement for a job in the Cathedral. Party politics 101: After a party spill, the losers renounce their lost cause and proclaim their loyalty to the winners. Some in the party are doing this – and some are not, showing that their party is not the Republican party, but the Cathedral. The republican party establishment backs mass immigration of welfare spongers to transform the American electorate, because that is Cathedral policy, and to oppose that policy is difficult and dangerous. Anyone in the Republican party that is still sticking with Dede Scozzafava after the rest of the party dropped her perceives their career as identified with the progress, success, and power of the Cathedral, not the party, and is willing to burn his bridges with the party if there is a split between the Cathedral and the Party – which split Palin is trying to engineer on grounds more popular than immigration reform. She does not want to line up with Steve Sailer and company, because their economic program is stupid.
If the policy was to import cheap labor, then the illegal immigrants would be eligible for work, but ineligible for welfare. Instead, they are eligible for welfare, but ineligible for work. Thus the policy, Republican party policy, is to import cheap voters, not cheap workers.
She has been pursuing a career in politics her whole adult life. Looking prole has been good for her for her whole adult life. Smart people with a plausibly prole background and appearance are exactly what the Republican party needs and wants. George Bush started learning to talk prole the moment it became apparent he was going into politics.
Jews do not have a predominant role. They have a disproportionate role, both in the Cathedral, and in opposition to the Cathedral. Consider the Bolshevik party. Since the Bolsheviks that seized power were mostly Jewish, it looked like Jews had seized power, that Jews were running Russia, but as events showed, they were mostly Jews who hated Jews. As a result, the people running the Bolshevik party were not Jews, they were Lenin and Stalin, and every old Bolshevik Jew wound up in Siberia, or exiled, or tortured and dead, because each Bolshevik Jew suspected each of the other Bolshevik Jews of disloyalty to the party. When the Bolshevik Jews wound up in Siberia, it became apparent that not only did they not have a dominant role, they never had had one. Lenin had a dominant role. Obama has a dominant role. Obama’s numerous Czars have a dominant role. Where is the Zionist Occupation Government?
Apostate Jews thought Lenin was the Messiah. They now think Obama is the Messiah. That does not make Lenin a Jewish plot, nor Obama a Jewish plot. Obama is in charge. Jews are not.
Grazi for mkanig it nice and EZ.
The working class is a) more intelligent than the elite, or b) less intelligent than the elite. Guys with PhDs really are smarter than Joe the Plumber. I’d like to think that is false, but it is manifestly true. Of course, pro-freedom stupid people are better on policy than are anti-freedom smart people . . .
Anyway, there are strong indications that Bush is smart (college degrees obtained, being a fighter pilot, important roles in daddy Bush campaigns, running two very good presidential campaigns). Not only are these absent with Palin, but there are indicators going the other way: although Half Sigma is obviously consumed by hatred for the lady, he makes a bunch of telling points (well, when he isn’t ranting about how he thinks her pregnancy was faked). Her “writings” could have been written by anyone, unless you are talking about writings written before she was nominated VP candidate.
The slams on Sailer are pointless. Obviously, there must be something fucked up about the guy — something must make him willing to put up with being called a Nazi. This is an extremely common syndrome with right wing intellectuals. Since normal people don’t voluntarily associate with lots of people who hate them, only abnormal people become right wing academics/pundits/etc. As far as I can tell, he pokes the Jewish thing for the same reason he pokes the black thing and the hispanic thing — he seems to get some exhibitionistic thrill out of saying taboo things the truth of which there are good arguments for. By the way, where is the evidence that Sailer favors compulsory race purity or genocide or centrally planned economics? Those are the characteristic positions of Nazis.
John Zmirak and Paul Gottfried both have pretty effectively countered the claim that the decline of the US / the West is the Jews fault, essentially by pointing out that the problems dragging us down are present in all Western countries, whether Jews are present in significant numbers or not. Also by pointing out that the WASP elite went away entirely without a fight. Woody Allen got it right, “80% of life is just showing up.” The Jews happened to be standing around when the WASPs left. It could just as easily have been the Chinese or the Indians or anyone else.
And where the analysis (here of demographic change and Republican electoral chances) comes from is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that it is right, and there is very little doubt that it is right.
Why does Hoffman, a candidate of the “Conservative” party, take such a leftist position on immigration? It’s weird. Cutting off immigration would add decades to the right’s chances of electoral success. It would almost certainly gain them net votes in the short run, too. The Republican party’s current behavior is baffling. They look like they are playing to lose and arguing about whether they should start permanently losing right now or in ten years. They could go all Tancredo any time they wanted, and this would with near certainty pick them up votes both in the short and long runs. Why don’t they do this?
One possible answer is that they don’t do this for John McCain type reasons — they value the opinion of SWPLs or at least fear their scorn. The good thing about Palin is that this fear is irrelevant for her. Since SWPLs will now hate her no matter what, the hatred has no incentive power. She can be expected to attract advisors similarly immune. But, SWPLs can hate you and think you stupid either because you are stupid or because you are dangerous to them, so their mere hatred is not enough to recommend someone.
And previously, the post-protestant religion of communism, I guess. I don’t get how this leads in a less anti-semitic direction than Sailer’s (alleged) position. Essentially it says that religious Jews are not a problem, it’s apostate Jews. OK, and? You and Moldbug have a method for stopping Jews going apostate or something? A method for preventing the emergence of attractive, totalitarian religion substitutes?
Apostate Jews tend to be big fans of Enlightenment movements like Communism, Social Democracy, Liberal Democracy, Libertarianism. But blaming the Jews for the Enlightenment or the Reformation or whatever (if this is what Sailer is doing, which I doubt) is goofy.
Bill:
Bush is not working class, neither is Palin. Bush was pretending, badly, to be working class. Palin cultivates and emphasizes those elements of her background and origins that make her culturally working class. They are both of them upper class intellectuals, as leading politicians usually are, but of course the public, and especially the Republican base, despises upper class intellectuals, and with good reason.
It is easy to find telling points when a politician is making a big effort to be a prole. Palin, like Bush, drops out of character often enough. A genuinely stupid prole can never fake being an upper class intellectual. An upper class intellectual can easily fake being a stupid prole well enough to convince those that wish to be convinced.
I observed that Steve Sailer was a Nazi to diagnose the fallacy in his analysis of economics, and his prescriptions for fixing the problem, not to suggest he was wrong about demographic change. Indeed, I specifically said that Nazis are right about race (though wrong about the supposed Jewish conspiracy).
Tancredo is leaving politics. That should tell you the answer.
Communism derives from Judaism in the same way as transnational progressivism derives from protestant Christianity.
Nope, it says that now the problem is predominantly apostate Christians. Back in the 1920s the problem was predominantly apostate Jews.
The Republicans have a severe intermediate term problem. They currently appeal to around 65% of whites and to nobody else. Whites are steadily declining as a percentage of the US population.
The Bushies thought that the right response to this problem was to be very soft on immigration and give away a lot of free money in the form of housing to Hispanics to try to raise republican vote percentages there. That has worked out badly.
The David Frum types think that it would be a good idea to move left on cultural issues to appeal to SWPLs in order to raise their %age of the white vote by getting people like Stanley Fish and Michael Berube to vote for them. All sane people can see that this is loony (thus that voting for Scozzafava is loony).
The Palin types are all about denying that there is any problem at all. Palin herself may be too stupid to even understand that there is a problem, though I don’t think her level of intelligence is entirely clear at this point — she could be acting stupid, the way Bush was. Hoffman’s website could have been written in 1980 by one of Reagan’s advisors, as could virtually everything Palin says. Their entire approach consists of “Let’s just do what Reagan did. He won, didn’t he?” This might work for a little while longer, but definitely not ten years longer. As an aside, it’s also a problem that their memory of what Reagan did is pretty selective.
And that’s it. There is no mainstream Republican figure or recognizable movement within the party with any even borderline sane answer to the demographic problem.
Bill:
Bush was not acting stupid. He was faking a working class tex mex dialect, which the elite associate with stupidity. Not the same thing at all. Nor is Palin acting stupid – her writings show a level of intelligence and insight far superior to that which is typical of the liberal elite. You need to read them, rather than elite accounts of what she wrote – compare her writings on the economic crisis with those of Nobel Prize winning economist Krugman. She is way smarter than he is. Rather, what makes people think she is stupid is that she has the common touch – that she is genuinely a part of the blue collar culture that Bush was faking.
Palin tells us that the crisis is an instance of the law of unintended consequences: That the government attempted to suspend the laws of economics in favor of “compassion” – that Fannie and Freddie bought up bad mortgages from people who were not credit worthy so that they could have housing, that the ratings agencies rated bad paper AAA, and the regulators pressured banks to buy AAA paper without regard to its actual risk because they wanted people who were not credit worthy to be able to buy houses, and that if you try to suspend the laws of economics, something will blow.
You are I suspect getting your analysis from Steve Sailer: He is a Nazi, therefore right on race, wrong on economics, and wrong on Jews. He thinks the trouble with the elite is that its full of Jews, and we should have instead the authentic, genuinely superior elite making collective decisions. He mistakes the Cathedral for the Jews, and the Jews for the Cathedral. It is true that the Cathedral is full of Jews, but the leadership of the opposition to the Cathedral was also full of Jews. Moldbugs analysis of Cathedral Jewry is more accurate. Cathedral Jews are converts away from Judaism, having converted into the post protestant religions of global warming and transnational progressivism, which conversion manifests as their hatred of Israel.
Steve Sailer’s analysis of what the elite is doing badly wrong is accurate, as is Moldbug’s, but their proposed solutions are unworkable or likely to be disastrous. There is no system of collective decision making that works. We just have to find ways of getting stuff done without collective decisions.
As Moldbug says, the system is terminal, and there is no cure. Palin, however, propose to try the Reagan solution a second time.
Actually ten years is about what I give it, if it works, which it might. And after that the deluge. Ten years, however, is not nothing.
The reason voters vote for a candidate from among the two parties is that voting for a third party candidate would be a waste of a vote. This is therefore the function of each party: to collect as many votes as possible into one candidate so that similar candidates don’t steal each other’s votes. Now that Hoffmann is in the lead, Scozzafava becomes the spoiler, and a vote for Scozzafava becomes a waste of a vote and the Republican Party ceases to serve its function. Should Hoffmann lose it will be Scozzafava’s fault and the Republican Party’s fault for siphoning away voters from Hoffmann. If voters are aware of what’s going on and if they are motivated by a desire not to throw away their vote, then what should happen next is a further collapse of support for Scozzafava.
It was already obvious from George W. Bush’s nomination that the Republican Party had moved left. In fact it was obvious from the first Bush, but that could be put down to Ronald Reagan’s influence. For eight years I was amazed at liberals’ delusion that Bush was a right winger. Compared to what, exactly? Compared to Castro, I suppose. And then came McCain. Who had been celebrated for years by liberals as an acceptable Republican, but who, come election time, was portrayed as extreme right wing, and doubtless would have been portrayed throughout his term even while he implemented every policy that Obama implemented.
The nomination of Scozzafava represents the Republican Party moving further left, and Newt Gingrich’s endorsement, and criticism of those who oppose Scozzafava, demonstrates that this isn’t just a local New York thing. This is, after all, Gingrich, author of Contract with America, whose free market policies produced a prosperity which is now attributed to Clinton, who went along apparently because he is a fundamentally weak man (and thank God for that). We need more Democrats like that, Democrats whose main interest is getting blow jobs from their interns, rather than transforming America.
Meanwhile many of the leading so-called conservatives have been saying that the reason for the Republican failure is that the Republicans had gone too far to the right. What!?! This is what they’ve been saying. The Republicans have, of course, gone far to the left. Maybe they didn’t go far enough – maybe one could argue for that. But to argue that the Republicans had gone too far to the right one must argue that they had gone to the right at all. And that is not a tenable belief. I have not tracked them very well on the question of religion, so as far as I know they may have moved to the right religiously. But they have moved far to the left economically, and this is contrary to what leading so-called conservatives have been saying lately.
Constantinopoli
Republicans are as committed as Democrats to using the schools against Christianity, however Bush did “faith based initiatives”, which has upset the left. On the other hand, as far as I can tell the only beneficiaries of “faith based initiatives” are Muslims and the Christian left. Predictably, the Christian right has not received any gravy. It appears that in practice a precondition for receiving gravy is that you must be politically active in promoting a pro-gravy position, and may not be active in promoting conventional Christianity, even if your initiative is supposedly “faith based”.
Constantinopoli
The republican party machine is arguing loudly and frequently that a vote for Hoffman is a wasted vote. Should this argument be widely disbelieved …