One week out seems like a good time to put some stakes in the ground.
Game-Theoretic
- Irrespective of the election outcome, the 72½ days from the early hours of Wednesday 9 November to noon on Friday 20 January will be unusually dangerous both domestically and internationally. Expect a flurry of presidential pardons (including, quite possibly, one for HRC) and recess appointments, plus some bizarre executive orders.
- The transition to the new Administration will be uncomfortable at best and may descend into chaos, although partially concealed from the public if HRC is the incoming executive (unlikely).
- Adventurism by the usual suspects in the usual theaters of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia seems likely, especially if our domestic weakness is heavily publicized.
- I now think that my earlier prediction that the next President and the 115th Congress would enjoy a period of greater cooperation was not so much wildly optimistic as drastically insufficiently appreciative of the utter incompetence of first-wave Boomers at crisis management. Instead, it now looks like we are about to have the first elected President in our history – again, irrespective of the outcome next Tuesday – who will have no “honeymoon” at all: confrontation from day one. Segue to …
Generational-Temperamental
- HRC, if improbably elected, will be the weakest executive since Hoover – or possibly Buchanan, with all that that implies. She will be relatively uninterested in national security and may be unable to perform generally due to either medical issues or technical incompetence, leading to the exercise of Amendment XXV §4 or, more likely, actual governance by an oligarchy of several of the more powerful Cabinet secretaries, her chief of staff, and of course VP Kaine (with an assist, if he is still capable, from the First Husband). The cumulative risks of health problems, impeachment, and terrorism/war make it unlikely that she will serve a full term. There is very little likelihood that she will determine even one ideological Supreme Court justice, much less three. A vote for HRC is a vote for Kaine.
- Trump seems likely to attempt the sort of rule by decree that Obama’s more feverish opponents have been anticipating (and which may in fact be briefly manifested after the election; see above). Expect significant disruption to trade and international travel, ostensibly as needed responses to economic weakness, epidemics, and terrorism. Foot-dragging by Federal enforcement agencies may, in some cases, have an ironically protective effect against this kind of authoritarianism. Trump will also face the obvious risks of impeachment and terrorism/war, so a Pence succession before 2021 is nontrivially likely.
- We may expect, at minimum, open advocacy of secession virtually the moment a Trump victory is announced. I would be moderately surprised if Obama fills the Buchanan role here, but even if he takes a firm stand, that only gains us ten weeks. An irruption of the Californian fantasy of independence, in particular, seems practically inevitable.
- Resistance to HRC, again if improbably elected, will be much more decentralized/less formally organized, but thereby more difficult to suppress. There may be “no-go” zones in some rural areas.
- Trump’s more conspiratorial supporters will obviously regard any HRC victory as fraudulent, but they will also regard any neglect of their priorities during a Trump Administration as further evidence of conspiracy. I address the question of how they will react below.
Personal
- The deep divisions in the evangelical subculture over the refugee issue and support for Trump will worsen significantly during a Trump presidency due to strident (American) Jewish opposition and noxious “alt-right” Trump supporters.
- I am sufficiently well-networked and/or live in a sufficiently thin bubble that I know that I will know, personally, extremists on both sides of any upcoming domestic conflict. The Missouri of 2017 may, in that respect, resemble what I would have experienced in the Missouri of 1861.
- My own worst-case scenario is an election that is genuinely close enough to raise doubts in the minds of reasonable/relatively disinterested people as to the validity of the proclaimed outcome. The Silent Generation is nearly gone; the Boomers are the adults in the room now, and their reflexive notion for how to deal with opposition is to exterminate it.
- I will actively oppose secession purely as the result of a presidential election, irrespective of its outcome. There may be adequate reasons someday to permit the dissolution of the United States. This is not that time, notwithstanding that the major parties and their supporters have failed us even more miserably than I would have thought possible. I again call upon those supporters to repent of disdain and scapegoating and utopianism, resist demagoguery, and resolve to continue the greatest political experiment in history.
Finally, something of a Sam Houston moment.
A possibly apocryphal story relates how Houston reacted when the Texas Legislature, very much against his advice, voted for secession: he put up an American flag at the entrance to his property and dared anyone to try to take it down; and no one did.
One of the things we’re about to learn is whether the rhetoric of the “alt-right” and other conspiracy theorists will be matched by action. To be sure, people who hide behind online pseudonyms while using words like “cuck” seem, shall we say, slightly lacking in physical courage – but just in case it isn’t already obvious, I am publicly stating here that I will continue to work for exactly what they don’t want: America as destination; asylum for mankind; friend of Israel; ally and defender of civilization everywhere. (A close corollary of this is demographic dynamism; just imagine what would happen if AA women and Latinas followed the lead of their Anglo sisters and stopped getting abortions.) I wear the “race traitor” epithet as a badge of honor.
And I am not difficult to locate, should anyone feel that … face-to-face discussion is required.
I predict that your “Generational-Temperamental” group of predictions will be proven to be entirely wrong.
If HRC is elected, she will preside over the most powerful and activist executive branch ever. Obama will look like Calvin Coolidge in comparison.
If DJT is elected, he will look to make deals whenever possible. The same way he has his whole life. He’ll probably be a lot like Ahnuld in CA in that way, though he probably won’t make deals quite as awful because the national GOP has more power than the CA GOP, which is dead, and because Trump appears to have a much more honest sympathy with the GOP voting base than Ahnuld ever did.
The other points, about secession, etc., are just silly. There is no such movement, outside of twitter. The alt-right is not a thing.
The battles will be fought in Washington. Trump has no support from his party, and I’m sure he doesn’t have any from the courts. He will be attacked from many sides – Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Socialist – if elected. The Fed will start raising rates in December in hopes of crashing the ever-fragile economy (recall Janet Yellen was appointed by Bill Clinton). All branches of an out-of-control government led by the most powerful force in the shadows – the Bureaucratic Caste – will bring Americans to the brink to preempt and neutralize him the minute he steps into the White House.
I may have mentioned this before, but it must be stressed that Trump’s daughter, son-in-law, and daughter-in-law are all Jewish. He’s worked with Jews his entire life in New York City real estate. We know for a fact that Hillary will throw her support behind Palestinian statehood if someone simply pays her enough money to do so. We know Trump can’t be bought and has deeper ties to Judaism than anyone who has ever run for president before. Most Evangelicals now solidly support the Jewish state of Israel on the grounds that it fulfills biblical prophecy, and they also now form the bedrock of Trump’s political base.
I just don’t see Jewish opposition to Trump materializing.
A take on this: Trump and the GOP have sufficient common ground to get some significant things done and prevent or undo some of the progressive dreams. They are both deal makers and are well to the right of the progressives on most issues. What won’t happen is any end to crony capitalism and crony labor unions. The large issues of closing off trade and illegal immigration won’t go Trump’s way, but some give in his direction is likely based on popular support. The GOP can’t afford to ignore these deeply supported issues.
Death6
“The alt-right is not a thing”
We just found out at the trial of the Bundy Standoff in Oregon that the Feds had more informants than there were defendants. That doesn’t include the undisclosed legions of other agents patrolling, surveilling, or otherwise creeping about. I think they were all too busy working on this case to do anything about Hillary
Looks like they’ve got the no-go zones covered. They also have the go zones and no zones covered for good measure. No sense letting silly gewgaws like liberty and due process get in the way.
/copypasta’d from PJM because I already said it in full and I’m lazy
Right after Obama got reelected, I went to see my father up in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley. They have a nice farmer’s market there, selling everything from custom made knives to fresh bread to local produce.
While I was strolling around, I bumped into another California expat. He was from San Diego originally, he said, and had ‘gotten out while the getting was good’ about fifteen years ago. He must have assumed that I too was a member of the West Coast progressive club, because the third or fourth thing out of his mouth was a loud cheerful ‘so hey, man, when do we kill all the Republicans?’
I didn’t know what the hell to do. So I turned around and left.
Think about that. He was talking about friends and neighbors in one of the most hard-core red counties in a mostly red state. He’d lived amongst them for a decade and a half. He was in public. Some of them had to have heard him, and perhaps they too didn’t know what else to do except ignore him. He clearly didn’t give a damn.
Subotai Bahadur has told us about senior citizens with Trump signs getting screamed at by passing drivers in his bucolic rural corner of Colorado. We have seen vandalism and firebombings and people attending old-fashioned political rallies be beaten and chased and egged and slapped around while the local cops stood by and did nothing. We have seen an elderly black lady get the crap kicked out of her in a busy street in broad daylight as she tried pathetically to shield what was left of the Hollywood star of the man she intended to vote for.
Now this. We are deplorable, beyond redemption. We should be immolated. Nuked. (http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/10/for_gop_defeat_is_not_enough_l.html). For the sin of ideological craziness, since the sins of the progressive left are invisible to them. The rhetoric gets more incendiary. As with the militant queers and the BLM movement, as with all the special-interest tribes of the left, they keep on competing to see who can take more offense at something ordinary, and who can be the more intrusive and bellicose in response.
Nowhere is safe. There are no clear lines of demarcation. If this thing goes hot, we will be like two retarded Siamese twins gashing at each other with razor blades. I can no longer bring myself to believe that our enemies — and they *are* our enemies, apparently, simply because they are addicted to how good it makes them feel — do not understand that they are playing with fire, that words do not have consequences. They are salted among us, everywhere. This is going to be bad.
Make ready. And keep troth.
“And I’m not difficult to locate, should anyone feel…..”
Sorry but you’re not that important to anyone other than yourself. Take a break fella.
The Jewish establishment opposes Trump because it fears his comprative isolationism and Russophilia will result in an indirect advantage for Russia’s friends, Syria- and Iran. With Lebanon’s
Christian General Aoun, just elected president, in an alliance with the feared Hezbollah.
The Jewish love affair with leftism in inexplicable to me but has something, I guess, with “The Day of Atonement.”
Obama will give them an example of how well this works for them. I expect a January surprise for Israel.
The rhetoric gets more incendiary. As with the militant queers and the BLM movement, as with all the special-interest tribes of the left, they keep on competing to see who can take more offense at something ordinary, and who can be the more intrusive and bellicose in response.
If Trump is elected ,as I now think will happen, there will be riots and blockades of Interstate highways. I expect mass vandalism and destruction.
I will begin carrying my Colt 45 in the car, much as I did after the Rodney King riots.
We are moving to Arizona and plan to drive to Tucson the weekend after the election. That might be interesting.
We’ve had early voting going on all this last week – even through the weekend. At the early voting venue – the local public library branch, the line usually went out the door and most days that we went by, reached to the street. About an hour’s wait it was, when we went in on Friday. Most unusual – we’ve early-voted before, and the line never was longer than from the front door to the conference room set up as a polling place. They even had the early voting venue open on Sunday. We waited in line with some of our neighbors – and the matter of who to vote for has been discussed in a vague and tentative way, especially with those of our neighbors who are Democrat. The two of them who did open up to us confessed that they loathed Hillary and were massively unhappy with the choice put before them. One couple are the local neighborhood volunteers for precinct-walking. They have a yard sign in their garden – but for the local Dem senator. The other neighbor confessed that she is a life-time always-voting Dem ticket, but she can’t abide Hillary, either. Indications? Who’s to say. Applicable to other neighborhoods? Who knows.
As for what Phil said … the animus towards those of us middle and working-class residents of Flyoverlandia is just horrific. It’s as if these people feel they can say just anything … because it sounds righteous and signals their virtue to their friends, but they have no idea of the degree to which those of us with a sense of history are taking their big, careless bragging in deadly earnest. Otherization is the first step to the deportation camps, the firing squad, the mass graves. And fools like Leonard Pitts are indulging in it with altogether too much ignorant enthusiasm.
Sigh. The above is me. Curse you, automatic updates!
there is a sorta “green grocer” vibe to the hillary campaign.
Jews fear Russia’s friends?
You mean this friend?
A reminder: It wasn’t immigrant Californians who chanted HAIL SATAN and threw used tampons (!?!) at pro-life demonstrators while they were singing psalms in front of your state capitol, Mom. It was native Texans. Close-packed crowds of the ugly ranting raving bastards. Remember?
Nowhere is safe. No one is safe. Please remember that — and buy more ammo while prices are reasonable. Whatever you have on hand this time next year may wind up being a lifetime supply, no matter who is in the White House.
Almost every sign I’ve seen in my neighborhood is for local offices; I don’t know if it’s fear or shame – whether they believe the paranoids on their side or acknowledge the reasons the other side is disgusted by their choice. Tonight one of the few neighbors (I think they are related to a Republican leadership rep) that had two Trump signs – large yard – but tonight had only one.
I appreciate the effort that went into this post, but prediction is a fool’s game unless it is something actionable.
Let’s see what things look like and who is doing/saying what on November 9.
The old saying goes, ‘all models are wrong but some are useful.’ One thing we do know with some degree of certainty is that the contention and chaos won’t end on Election Day. Beyond that, predictions can shine some light on the paths ahead and spur the conversations about taking the fork in the road when we get to it. Lots of actions available to us.
Ginny:
You don’t say why you think your neighbor went from one Trump sign to two, so I’ll offer a guess:
It probably doesn’t mean the neighbor’s less Trump-positive – why take one down, and not the other? Trump-haters are going to hate you just as much for one as for two. Most likely someone stole one of the signs, and didn’t want to increase his risk of being caught by taking the time to try to steal both. Plus one stolen sign to hang on the living room wall is a nice souvenir for some morally-if-not-mentally-defective people, but two doesn’t really make it any nicer.
I will post anonymously (see smith crybullies in next thread) but I would like to challenge some of your thoughts about the alt right. I will hold no truck with racists who will hate an individual merely for their skin color (including black male polar bear hunters), however there is something missing in your thought about America as an asylum for mankind.
Being an asylum changes us, and not for the better. If you want a ‘Chicago Boyz’ culture, you better be in an overwhelmingly Caucasian country. Preach the ideas and ideals all you want, but among non-whites it isn’t taking in any statistically significant way. And make no mistake, when everyone other than whites are voting as an ethnic interest groups, consistently pulling the culture to the left, voting for ever increasing size, scope and depth of government, more welfare and more and more non-white immigrants, you, and your grandchildren, will not like where it ends up. It will be an amalgam of the America you fondly remember with a heavy blend of Mexico City, Lagos, Aleppo, Rio, Delhi and Beijing. And it isn’t that I don’t want that amalgam to exist…it is that I want America as it was to exist too. And it won’t. It is either/or.
If we could have the ethnic blend and the American culture I would be fine with it. But we can’t, that is not an option, not matter how much you wish it were.
I could even settle for giving up America, if there was some other (predominantly Caucasian) culture that was close enough. I would settle for a New Zealand, or an Ireland, Canada, or even a Sweden…but they are being drowned in migrants too. I want freedom, and individuality, and low corruption/high trust society. And those don’t really happen in non-predominantly Caucasian countries (can you name one that would accept a white person? Japan probably comes closest…except on the individuality scale, and I would always be a foreigner). I want a place for me and mine, to live the way we have, and want to continue to live. And that doesn’t mean I hate everyone else, and I am sick of being slandered and maligned for wanting a country like most people here want, and recognizing it has to be a country of people like us for that to happen.
You saying you wear the race traitor badge proudly is to accuse us of racism. Damn you. I don’t care if your a ‘race traitor’ so much as you are a de facto culture traitor, and you’re too high and mighty about virtue signaling to even recognize it. I won’t let your very thinly veiled accusations of racism stop me from trying to preserve our culture and way of life. Subotai is not white, but he is my people. You are TWANLOC.
Combat, nice picture. In my many thousands of hours of video game combat, in games at least as accurate as the one they train US soldiers with, I have found that the single most important combat skill, is running. Once anyone with any useful fire power know where you are, it’s time to leave. I don’t indulge in fights I did not start as they are far too dangerous for a single person. I avoid fighting in general, ambushes, are my favorite way to interact with an enemy, and done right they are just murder.
Good luck with it all. ;)
Prediction: The New York State AG will bring an indictment against Donald Trump in the next 13 months, win or lose. When it comes to lawfare, the Dems don’t joke around.