Of Leadership and Courage

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In the wake of the Trump assassination attempt,  I’ve run across a few posts that raise some…psychopolitical and psychosocial…issues which I think are worthy of thought and discussion.  I don’t have time to think through and write a proper post right now, so will just put some excerpts and links out here and see what develops–I’ll probably add some commentary later.

Claire Lehmann at X:

What if the motive is Incel-related and Trump wasn’t a target because of his politics, but because of his status and success with women

My immediate reaction was, well, aren’t personal issues and demons often a major factor in why someone gets involved with an ideology, especially an extremist ideology?  But OTOH, there’s a difference between someone who acts through an ideology on behalf of his demons and someone who doesn’t even bother with much of an ideological shield, or indeed any ideological shield.  We don’t know which type this character was, yet.

Also from Claire:

The irony is that in trying to assassinate Donald Trump, Crooks inadvertently provided Trump with an opportunity to display the very qualities that have already made him a cult icon. Trump’s immediate reaction—standing up and raising his fist to the crowd despite the clear and present danger—exemplified the kind of raw, physical courage that our evolutionary programming associates with effective leadership and high status.

She has followed up with a post at Quillette:  Courage and Cowardice in Pennsylvania…the post and discussion are worth reading.  I have posted some not-fully-baked thoughts in the comments.

Comes now Stepfanie Tyler at X:

graduated in 2012 w a degree in Women’s Studies
cried in 2016 when Trump got elected
lost touch w the dems somewhere around MeToo
discovered entrepreneurship
updated my voter registration in 2018 but didn’t tell anyone
told myself i was a ‘single-issue-voting Centrist’
the last 6-12 months i’ve believed i was going to abstain from voting in the upcoming election because the options are equally terrible
but watching Trump survive an assassination attempt and act like a total fucking savage just shifted me into some strange, patriotic gear that my fancy-feminism-white-men-bad infected brain never showed me
like, the dude took a bullet and stood up with blood dripping down his face, and rallied a fucking crowd while fist pumping, yelling “FIGHT!”
sorry, but i’m voting for that. and saying it out loud feels so freeing

And, finally, a response to Stepfanie from I/O:

“I experienced a sudden political transformation because I liked that after he got grazed by a bullet he stood up and pumped his fist” is just another way of saying “I prefer to base my politics on primal animal instinct,” which I’m pretty sure is a non-ideal way to do politics.

Your thoughts?

“A Disease of the Public Mind”

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That is the title of a book about the first US Civil War that resulted in the assassination of President Lincoln. The soldiers in the South hated those in the North and vice versa. Northern soldiers have since been credited with undeserved virtue while Southern rebels were labeled racist enemies of the state, a moniker that still survives in the present day. But neither side was fighting over the abolition of slavery.

 

Trump’s opponents claim he will re-institute Jim Crow oppression, put black people back in chains, end democracy and put people in Hitler’s concentration camps. The continuous character assassinations, legal persecutions, numerous impeachments, unfounded accusations and insinuation caused what has been called Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), a disease of the public mind resulting in a recent assassination attempt.

 

Follow the Money
The Constitution the North and South agreed upon in 1788 enshrined the economic principles of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, fostering equality under the law, individual sovereignty and limited government. Slavery was still too contentious an issue to settle. Starting in the next century the British led a moral crusade to eliminate slavery globally. While politically virtuous, Britain could afford to pay off slave owners and generally didn’t face the the vexing question for US plantation owners of whether freed slaves could support themselves and, if not, whether this would lead to murderous riots as had happened elsewhere. Abolition was a contentious issue everywhere slavery was practiced, typically with long drawn out steps to complete. But the long simmering political dispute that came to a head in 1860 wasn’t about abolition, but money. The federal government relied almost exclusively on tariffs raised in Southern ports – most of which went to northern states – on imports financed with the fruits of slavery, cotton exports.

 

Since the Civil War, limited government has given way to big government. The Democratic Party has created many dependent constituencies whose continued prosperity depends upon continuing Democratic power and largess: the bureaucracy, the government at all levels, teachers, labor leaders, academic educators and administrators, trial lawyers, government contractors, social security recipients and what are still euphemistically called journalists, among many others. The current Civil War is also about money. Trump has been in both political parties, fits in neither. But ”you are fired” represents an existential threat to Party members.

 

For contemporary Democratic politicians, almost all trained as lawyers, money beyond what is available by taxing the rich exists in banks, especially the Federal Reserve Banks, to be distributed according to the spoils system. For Republican politicians (but not RINOs), mostly former businessmen, prosperity comes from productive work and from savings productively invested. For those businesses and workers who are not on the receiving end of the spoils system, whose taxes pay for political largess, limited government is the only solution. There is very little middle ground.

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Betrayal

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Recent events make it quite clear, if it wasn’t already, that a high percentage of American media people–print, television, and Internet–have been involved in a multilevel betrayal:

–They have betrayed their supposed professional responsibilities to the truth, which they frequently assert to claim credibility and moral superiority.

–They have betrayed the American people through their frequently misleading and often outright false reporting. They saw Biden’s mental state on a regular basis, and either convinced themselves that they weren’t seeing what they were actually seeing, or flat-out lied.

–Given the importance of the United States in world affairs, they have betrayed not just Americans, but the people of the world. Issues of war and peace, prosperity or want, well-being or starvation for billions of people are affected by US policies and leadership.  The US possess the world’s most powerful military and its most devastating nuclear arsenal.  Thanks in large part to media irresponsibility, this is now under the control of a man who is in severe cognitive decline.  There are probably times in the typical Biden week when he could be convinced that the nuclear Gold Codes are things that he needs to provide to get a special discount deal on his favorite ice cream.

–This point is of lesser importance than the others, but given the most of these media people work for publicly-traded corporations, they have betrayed the shareholders who own the enterprises which employ them. These traditional media have not been doing exactly brilliantly in readership/viewership and financial terms. It seems likely that with a little more balance and a little less ideology, they could be doing significantly better. But the journalists chose to put their personal political beliefs ahead of this responsibility as well as their other responsibilities.

I have previously quoted something said to me once by a wise executive:

When you’re running a large organization, you aren’t seeing reality.  It’s like you’re watching a movie where you get to see maybe one out of a thousand frames, and from that you have to figure out what is going on.

If this is true about running large organizations–and it largely is–it is even more true for the citizen and voter in a large and complex country.  The individual can directly observe only a small amount of the relevant information, for the rest–from the events on the border to international and military affairs–he is generally dependent on others.  And that gives those others–those who choose the frames and the sequence in which they are presented in the movie analogy–a tremendous amount of power.

The rise of the Internet has provided an alternative to the information dominance of the traditional media, but social media has tended to reestablish centralized control points.  It is extremely fortunate–may indeed be lifesaving–that Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X) and has established a relatively uncensored policy on that platform. Substack, too, appears so far to be a truly open platform.  AM/FM broadcast radio has also played a relatively independent role, but this appears to be under threat by acquisition of large numbers of stations by Soros interests…and, potentially, given that radio has long been government-regulated, by legislation and FCC regulation under any free-speech-unfriendly administration and Congress.

A big part of the problem is the ‘professionalization’ of media. Journalists once tended to be blue-collar people making their way up in the world; now, they tend more toward being Ivy League graduates, fully inculcated into all the correct ‘progressive’ attitudes.  And, ever since Watergate, people entering the media field tend to see themselves not so much as observers and analysts, but as participants in government–even as kingmakers.

The 1954 novel Year of Consent, which I reviewed here, posits a future United States which–while still nominally a democracy–is really controlled by those who control the communications and specialize in influence of public attitudes. It seems disturbingly prescient.

 

 

 

The Tar-Baby

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Never mind the currently-fashionable bit of wokery in the link explaining this reference, bolting on a vague accusation of racism (or raaaaacism) onto anything that a person of pallor says, does, or references – the metaphor of something nasty sticking harder and more firmly no matter how one tries to fight it off and disengage is curiously valid in the case of Joe Biden and the National Establishment Press.

The realization that Mr. Biden is a couple of sandwiches short of a full picnic comes as a horrible shocker … to practically no sane, non-partisan observer of the political scene for the past … I don’t know, decade? Two decades or more? But everyone else is shocked, horrified, discomfited! Until two weeks ago, he was almost universally painted by the National Establishment Press as the Sage of Scranton, honored and revered solon of the Senate, the experienced and steadying VP in the Obama Administration, a kindly and revered family man, beloved by all! (Or at least, somewhat better than that awful, bad, Orange Man!) Unthinkable, asking a blunt and unscreened question of the Incredible Talking Mop, Karine Jean-Pierre, at a White House press conference about Mr. Biden’s disintegrating mental facilities! The very notion – so rude, unprofessional, so very, very Deplorable!

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Who Are The Commissioners? (rereun, with updates)

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If you read English naval history, you are sure to run into a reference to The Commissioners for Executing the Office of Lord High Admiral.  Your first reaction is likely to be something like WTF?  Why couldn’t the Lord High Admiral execute the duties of his own office?  Lazy, much?

The way it worked, as I understand it, was like this:

Some of the time, there was no Lord High Admiral.  Hence, it was the duty of the Commissioners to do what a Lord High Admiral would/should have done if such an individual had existed.

At other times, there was indeed a Lord High Admiral, but his role was purely ceremonial, and the Commissioners were the ones who actually performed the duties of the office.

And at still other times, there was indeed a Lord High Admiral who did the admiral-type work.  I’m not sure whether in these cases, the Commissioners were still there to serve as assistants, or whether the Commission was temporarily suspended during the tenure of such admirals.

It strikes me that there is a certain parallel with the current situation in the US vis-a-vis Joe Biden.  One key difference being that the English people knew  who the Commissioners of the Admiralty were.  Yet while it has long been clear that Biden is getting a significant degree of direction and  ‘help’  in executing the duties of his office, we in America today don’t have a good understanding of who these helpers/directors might be.  This question has become increasingly pressing over he last couple of  weeks.

I don’t think there’s anything like a formal “cabal” for telling Joe Biden what to do.  Much more likely, we have a loosely-coupled set of influencers, with power even greater–much greater–than typical of a president’s inner circle.  Who are these people?  Barack Obama, certainly, and many members of the Obama administration: there is some truth to the statement that the Biden administration has really been the third Obama administration.  Doctor Jill Biden, playing the role of Edith Wilson. Ron Klain. Susan Rice. We can only guess who else, because the influencers are not a formal organization from whom transparency can be demanded. It is clear also that Biden is greatly influenced by prominent media figures and academics–clearly, he believes that it is very important to stand in well with the Ivy League:

Lemme tell you something Mr. Biden says, with a clenched jaw.  There’s a river of power that flows through this country.  Some people, most people, don’t even know the river is there. But it’s there. Some people know about the river, but they can’t get in, they only stand at the edge. And some people, a few, get to swim in the river. All the time. They get to swim their whole lives, in the river of power. And that river flows from the Ivy League.

Like many social climbers, Biden also cares a lot about what “Europeans” think.

Another major difference between our present situation and that of the administration of the Royal Navy:  Although the damage that the Commissioners of the Admiralty could do though mistaken decisions was quite substantial: “ships sunk, sailors lost, colonial possessions lost, possibly in the worst case an invasion of England itself,” there was no danger that a bad decision on their part would destroy the entire world.  That is not the case with the potential damage that could be done by bad advice from our present  “Commissioners.”

Last October marked the 60st anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  It is now pretty clear that, despite the previous claims of some of the involved individuals, JFK stood almost alone against the advice of his advisors, including his brother Bobby, who insisted on air strikes and/or an invasion of Cuba. (See The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, by Sheldon Stern, which makes extensive use of the now-declassified secret White House recordings.)  It is also pretty clear that the advisor-recommended reactions would have led to a very bad outcome, quite possibly including general nuclear war.

What are the odds that Biden would stand strongly against the almost-unanimous view of his advisors in a similar situation? I’d say it is pretty low.

Regarding the influence of Obama, @wretchardthecat wrote at X:

Like the dead hand of an ancient curse, Obama‘s vision, based on a now vanished world, will wreak a path of ruin until it finally collapses on the shambles of all it sought to transform…The once unipolar world is fractured — and is still fracturing — along two lines: the line of Great Powers, Russia, the West and China; and the line of civilizations, Islam and the West. Biden, now over 80, cannot hope to retrieve things in an Obama fourth term…

In less than two years, Biden and his “Commissioners” have done tremendous damage to the United States and the world.  It is hard to imagine that any future Democratic administration would not also be heavily subject to the influence of Obama and the other “commissioners” I mentioned above, leaving aside only Doctor Jill Biden.  The best hope of minimizing this damage lies in the potential for a Republican House and Republican Senate. True, many of the candidates are not what we would wish. But the best is the enemy of the good, and the issue of the moment is not establishing ideal policies but rather avoiding multiple catastrophes.

7/9/2024:  The events of the last two weeks make clear just how powerful the continuing influence of major media continues to be.  These people knew, or could have easily learned, the true situation with Biden, but they chose not to report it.  So most people, including those who think of themselves are “well-informed,” continued to be unaware of it.

 

See also:  Commissioner Doctor Jill Biden