November 4, 2024
When the Saturday Night Live’s Maya Rudolph is more “electable” than the actual candidate she portrays, we have reason to be curious about what will happen, and which electoral path serves up our next US President.
To understand our upcoming future, we can look at four categories of “players.” Voters, parties, the state, and “the people.”
First, the voters. They think they are the most important part of the election. Many of them now have met and gotten to know a bit about the “other” side’s voters, and there seems to be a consensus that the Harris voter has only two rules. Rule 1 is DC must be unchanged. Rule 2 is a woman is always the morally superior choice, so long as she follows Rule 1. They are frightened people, casting a fear vote to “save democracy.” This is how LBJ was elected, to some extent.
The Trump voter, on the other hand is angry, yet optimistic and jovial, and who also wants to “save democracy.” We have a fearful voter long past humor pitted against an angry voter who self-depreciates at the drop of a hat. This may be why the “joyful Kamala” campaign line was seen as necessary by her advisors, and why voters on both sides see it as absurd.
Second, the parties. The GOP and the Democratic Party are both defective as tools for the people, because they only represent the state. Trump’s brilliant, naive, and just plain lucky approach was to choose the right party to transform towards populism, and he did that. He created a new party out of an old one – taking into his movement the best of the democrats, accelerating the destruction of the former Democrat Party. Today, we have a state-sustaining uni-party and a state-opposed/state-questioning people’s party. The current candidates of these parties may both be statists; happily, both of the old parties have been properly and wonderfully assaulted into unrecognizability.
Third, we have the state itself, in all its complexity. Whether by design or accident, American federalism harnesses the self-preservation animus of politicians, and enables their opportunism. The permanent DC bureaucracy is middle-aged, well-off, outdated in ideas, technology, and attitude. If it is fired en masse, via Muskian design, Trumpist rage, or federal default – few would notice. I worked with these folks, and most will not fight for their idiotic jobs, but will instead simply seek to be first out the door to greener pastures. Whether valiantly quitting like Robert Kagan from the WashPost, or simply retiring and going away to talk at screens no one is watching, these nobodies remain true to American Jacobinism in word only. They are neither a revolutionary, nor a ruling force. They are bureaucrats who stand for very little, and often nothing at all. This is the everyday face of the deep state – authoritatively costumed, frightened of everyone and everything, with abysmally short attention spans.
The counterweight to D.C., by design, is state and local government. Local government is generally hostage to old ideas and government subsidy – when towns and counties run out of free money, these “governments” shrink in power and authority, and the people elect dogs and cats to serve as mayors. Governors, however, imagine themselves to be little presidents. What a playground in which to respond to an unpopular president, or to a Congress offering only complaints, demands, and worthless fiat currency in its bid to “control.”
What about the people? If the new people’s party under a GOP banner wins, some predict violence in cities incited by the panicked Democratic politicians and their frightened “masses.” Where else would it be, and who else would incite it? In 2020, gleeful governors and big city mayors watched their cities burn. Today, their righteous edginess has lost its charm. There is now competition between the major cities and states for skilled workers, entrepreneurs, and law-biding citizens. Mayors and governors of the democratic-dominated urban-scape now see the scary new reality of urbanality. They will abandon their bad ideology in a heartbeat to save their tax base. We are seeing it in advance. Some say Congressman Jamie Raskin and others will find a way to legally reject the people’s choice if it is Trump, but he and his pals jumped the shark on the American insurrection miniseries. Few Democrats in Congress would wish to be associated with such an obvious coup, particularly after the way they denied democracy in creating a Harris candidacy, and ignored the Constitution in failing to remove the incompetent Biden, making Harris the first woman president.
What if the America-first populist, limited government, pro-health and anti-war movement “loses” the election? Delightfully, their philosophy does not require crass and stupid centralized control. There will be 30 states and counting they can continue to migrate to, to find their own center. They can put American first as they wish in a thousand ways. They can resist and ignore overweening government, as they already do. They can get healthier and stronger on their own, as most never needed the government to advise them anyway. They – the backbone of the American military for a century – can refuse to fight for the empire, consistent with a well-established trend. Meanwhile, the woke, finding their cities hollowed out, and their public schools and housing dens of criminality and fraud, will inadvertently push their governors and mayors towards reality-based change. The people who remain in these great cities, and those who left them behind, will together recognize the opportunity that comes from liberty and decentralization – and some of these cities will bloom again.
I think the winner of the election will be free speech, as the uni-party loudly deconstructs and recriminates, replete with very public, hilarious and never-ending struggle sessions. The Trump component – which happily donned a million garbage bags on Halloween, days after they were called “garbage” by Biden – will keep on talking, working, playing, and laughing. The fun won’t stop.
The neocon era that forged the uni-party was fueled by post-1971 Bretton Woods, and the metastasizing Federal Reserve. Without fiat money to waste on war, to create opportunity-destroying debt, and to fund fake academia, fake science, fake history, and fake morality, whatever will they do?
Blessedly, we are not making any new neocons. Our brightest people, who in previous eras might have sought to be politicians and global planners are today communicators, technological inspirations, comedians, and creators. Younger generations of Americans are smart, and they are confident – to be an NPC is an insult, and to be a “team player” brings to mind jokes from “The Office” or “Hey, Veronica” on TikTok as much as anything else. Thanks to technology and capitalism, we all require fewer politicians, bureaucrats and bosses to live our best life.
The 2024 election, no matter how it turns out, will deliver us an America we have not seen, yet one we will recognize from segments of our own history – a proud, exuberant, empowered population, making a ton of noise and for the first time in many decades, focusing inward – by choice and by circumstance – on physical, intellectual and spiritual healing.
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