Welcoming Hitler to the White House and Other Thoughts

First, watching a smiling Joe Biden welcome Trump back to the White House caps off an eight-day period of whipsawed memory-holing. Leave aside that just a few weeks before, Biden was reported as calling the man next to him a fascist, the media has been legitimizing the American Hitler’s victory on a daily basis by alternating between breathlessly reporting his nominations and wailing about why they lost.

That’s not how you go about stopping Hitler.

Second, this is in a sense the max dopamine mark of the second Trump Administration. There is the post-election glow of victory, all things seem possible, and all nominees are virtuous and fair; even John Thune is trying to give off airs that he isn’t (quite) the craven Blob weasel that we all know him to be. Historically administrations start with a set amount of energy and intellectual capital at the beginning of the term and then the Second Law of Thermodynamics intervenes and entropy takes over.

Third, the Democrats and the Left in general is in great disorder as they face two great lessons from the Election. 1) Trump’s victory in 2016 was not an aberration and 2) while the 2024 Election was not a landslide, it was decisive and heralds a realignment in politics. The tripe that the Democrats have been serving that they alone represent “people of color” and that Trump and MAGA are just a bunch of white supremacists has been blown out of the water.

Fourth, regardless of the long-term prospectus for the Democrats I expect the Left to find its tactical footing quickly. Losing parties in elections are typically despondent and self-critical because they are responding to a situation which is by nature amorphous and open to interpretation. However within a few months of the new administration, the losing end of the election finds its footing because there is now a concrete target for it to focus its energy and rally support.

Using Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem, the Trump Administration will provide the necessary external frame of reference for the Left to cohere and take action. Enjoy the Left’s circular firing squad while it lasts.

The strategic problem the Democrat needs to resolve before 2028 is how to reconcile the various parts of their coalition. There has been a lot of ink spilled over the past eight years about the incompatibilities between MAGA and the “Never Trumpers”, but that all missed the point about the nature of the Democratic coalition. The Democrats have had problems dealing with the progressive movement since 2012. In fact you could interpret their entire 2020 primary process as organized around the central theme of how to deal with the progressive movement as personified by Bernie Sanders.

Take the establishment Democrats, a healthy dose of the Blob, corporate interests, and the various groups of the leftist spectrum from progressive to radical and you have an unwieldy mess of a party. Joe Biden’s nomination nomination in 2020 was meant to patch that mess together and for a while it worked. Each part of the coalition got its hand-outs from the Biden Administration whether in the form of Green New Deal subsidies or transgender policy trinkets, all with the threat of the Trump-MAGA bogeyman to keep everybody in line.

Well all that works until it doesn’t. Party coalitions are like magnets, some parts attract and other parts repel. The Republicans in the form of Trumpist populism attracted blue-color votes to their coalition at the cost of repelling large numbers of the college-educated. The problem the Democrats have had is that the various parts of their coalition were transgressive. Those parts wanted to radically change America so the polarity of their various magnets were aligned in relation not to one another in a stable intra-party equilibrium, but rather to an external entity as personified by Trump. For them to lose the 2024 Election to any Republican would involve a lot of soul searching, to lose it to man upon which their entire cosmology was constructed against is catastrophic as the various parts realize they really don’t like each other.

Or a a friend put it to me, “The Democrats were like a bicycle, it works great as long as it moved forward but when it stops even for a moment, it falls down.”

So to the fourth point above, I already see the Democrats and Left in general trying to find its tactical footing in relation to Trump. One method is to blame their loss on “misinformation” with their wayward Hispanic and black male voters being led astray by the the politicized cesspools of hate known as X and Joe Rogan. Witness the various media types quitting X in the last few days. Another method focuses on their long-held belief that Trump will suborn the military for his own fascist ends. Witness the severe reaction to the nomination of Pete Hesgeth as Secretary of Defense and the proposed introduction of “plucking boards” to weed out the flag ranks.

Long-term? I have read from some that it will take losing a few elections, analogous to 1980-1988, for the Democrats to finally get their act together. There’s some wisdom to that folk psychology in terms of how many times a lesson needs to beaten into someone for them to properly learn it, but there are no laws in history or politics, only guides.

The larger question is that are the problems we are facing now political in nature or something larger? If they are largely political, then a few determined presidential administrations will be that is needed to finally crush the last remnants of DEI, the anti-fossil fuel fantasy, and drain the rest of the fever swamp so the system can return to its former equilibrium.

However if you think that it is something larger, something more on the lines of a civilization-level crisis then with this election we are really no better than at the end of the beginning. As people like Mark Steyn point out, we had the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the End of History and everything else for the past 40 years, and yet the American experience and indeed the West in general has never seemed more more in peril.

I tend toward the civilization-level crisis thesis and it’s going to be a long haul from here on out. Keep in mind that even with the disaster of the Biden Administration, only 27% who think the country is on the right track, and perhaps the worst presidential ticket in history Kamala Harris still got 48% of the vote. There’s a solid, motivated core out there who still thinks the traditional American way of life is illegitimate and we have an educational system at all levels that is pumping out more of them.

This is going to take a while, but you have to start somewhere and we’ll know we’ve run when the Democrats finally their 21st Century version of Bill Clinton (1992 edition.)