Ooh boy.
> The first, second, and third rule of GOP politics is: never work with the ChiCom woke fascist cabal of secret communist pedophiles actively trying to trans your children through DEI and execute the Great Reset through walkable cities. Actual goddamn lizards. Satan’s army. Do any of them actually believe this? That is, is there anybody in the House or Senate, at all, who actually, honest to Jehovah, believes this? Or is it all, 100 per cent, baiting of the mentally ill for votes?
This is important, and it explains the world better than any other insight I've come across: Liberals operate on principle. Populists operate on affinity. The fundamental argument of Jonathan Haidt, chicken fucker, is that a very small percentage of the world actually aligns and organizes based on logic. He makes this argument because he's a psychologist who did a fuckton of testing. He calls those who do "WEIRDs" - Western-Educated Industrial Rich & Democratic. The fundamental argument of Harari, Wallerstein, Ferguson and the Geopolitical Rationalists writ large is that "WEIRDs" dominate the earth because rationalism leads to capitalism leads to utter societal extinction by any culture that doesn't adapt to a world with constant innovation. Wallerstein further argued that societies advance through liberalism but people within society advance through populism. There's a fundamental tension at play in capitalist society - cut-throat competition is what moves the ball and the best way to win that competition is to prevent anyone else from playing. This plays out in politics exactly as we're seeing: Bill Clinton, arch-neoliberal, was fond of saying "when people think, we win" while the 2020 Republican platform was literally "RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda." So no. None of them actually believe this. Nobody actually believed that uppity women who didn't kowtow to the church were witches either but they burned them just the same. A fundamental feature of tribalism is it has no cognitive dissonance. It has no hypocrisy. Liberal Christians can talk about the philosophical meaning of the Holy Trinity but fundamentalist Christians know that if you don't accept the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as one being you're a blasphemer, full stop. In general, the more conservative a religion, the more it depends on the edicts of holy leaders to guide the faithful. Islam, during its golden age, had the Quran, the Hadith and the Sunnah, where the Quran was the writings of Mohammed, the Hadith were first-person anecdotes about Mohammed and the Sunnah were scholarly interpretations of the Hadith and other errata. There was an entire class of clerics whose job it was to scry rules for living from what writings were available and give guidance as to how to improvise in a changing world. Wahabism? If it wasn't written by Mohammed or Ibn al'Wahab it's takfir. It's really frustrating to see once you grasp it - liberals lose their goddamn minds about the hypocrisy within the Republican Party and steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that populists deploy hypocrisy as a weapon against liberals. They don't fucking care. They never fucking will. If they cared in the smallest, tiniest amount the cognitive dissonance would eject them from the party like a potato gun. But their fundamental tenet is "I'm with the Party" so they don't have to deal with that shit. It's great from a psychological standpoint, actually - if your team can do no wrong, you basically get to hand over all moral arguments to someone else. That's the basic value of religion if you think about it - you don't have to worry about how your choices affect other people because (1) you aren't making any choices (2) they aren't really people. The only thing you need to worry about is inter-tribal relations. This is why there's such a dichotomy of opinion on Liz Cheney, by the way - yeah, she's Republican through and through but also, she betrayed her tribe. It's also why Kevin McCarthy is in such a spot - he had the job of presiding over the greatest schism American politics has ever seen. Over the past 60 years the Republican Party has gone from a civil-rights-leaning capitalist party of industrialists to legit, unabashed nativist fascism and anybody clever has figured out that if you have no principles to bank on you can't build a future within it. Unfortunately the past 60 years has attracted hordes of unabashed nativist fascists who understand that the only thing that matters is proximity to power. There's no steady-state here. It cannot continue. Through the long lens of history, Donald Trump is the culmination of a crisis created by Reconstruction. What we end up with will be different. Better, I think. The WEIRDs always win, but not always immediately.
>It's really frustrating to see once you grasp it - liberals lose their goddamn minds about the hypocrisy within the Republican Party and steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that populists deploy hypocrisy as a weapon against liberals Your point hits me hard right now. Not sure if you're getting any coverage of it in the US, but down here we're about to hold a referendum on whether to alter the constitution to establish a Voice to Parliament for the First Peoples. The farrago of misinformation and dog whistling coming from regressives, though perhaps inevitable, has been enraging. Most perplexing is the sheer open fucking hypocrisy of the Opposition Leader, this guy, who since losing government has switched his party's position on the Voice from Yes to No; is publicly warning how bad Australia will look on the international stage if the majority of Australians vote No; claims the Prime Minister will be to blame if Australians vote No - all while actively participating in a campaign of bullshit and misdirection to sabotage the Yes campaign. Heard and read a bit of Haidt. Hadn't heard of Wallerstein et al. Thank you for introducing me to them. I hope you're well up there.
End-stage for any political faction within a market economy is "fuck your principles, let's get back to the old system." Beginning stage for any political faction within a market economy is "fuck the old system, let's get back to principles." For your reference as a Notamerican, our civil war ran from 1861-1863 and the period before that was...fraught. When they say the Republican Party is the "party of Lincoln" the mean he was literally the first Republican president. Like, founded in 1854 against the expansion of slavery, first ran nationally in 1856, won in 1860, time for civil war. Bad Things Happen when we follow leaders rather than their ideas. Honestly? This is what happens when resources become limited. Every culture goes through it eventually - when you're used to getting whatever you want whenever you want and then you don't, Bad Things Happen. Growing up? I knew the following: (1) We were going to die in a nuclear fireball (2) but probably not before acid rain made us all live in caves (3) where we were probably heading anyway because a new ice age was coming so fukkit burn rubber wear fur eat beef and wipe your ass with the Amazon. That whole "ackshully we're heating the planet up an absolutely cataclysmic amount" thing took some real whiplash because the previous ten years had been all about Peak Oil, Soylent Green, Club for Growth and Silent Spring and in among that the petroleum lobbies had us all convinced the glaciers would starve us all out before any of it mattered anyway. Lo and behold, turns out you can outlive a cold war. I hate economists. Openly, publicly, perennially. I hate them because clear back to Adam Smith, their argument is "this is moral that is not, this is worth modeling that is not." Wallerstein is the first one I know of to go there are no externalities in a closed system, morality has nothing to do with it. His take is the "world system" goes back to the Dutch, who were the first people to trade in a system without any real frontiers. The English took over but slowly and doing the same thing; the Americans took over from the English but slowly and doing the same thing. You can have your theories and theorems about isolated economic systems but the minute you start trading with every player on the map, the whole game changes. Start here. I've only read that one Haidt book. I've a good idea why liberals hate it; he argues that their way of thinking is not only atypical, it's only about 10% thought. He even goes as far as implying that conservatives are being more true to themselves. He's a lot easier to take when you've drunk from the cup of the Hoover Institution because once you accept craven opportunism as your religion, you really don't give a shit what the suckers think. I wish I had happier things to say. I guess that whole "the arc of freedom is long but it bends towards justice" thing still holds true; the expansions last longer and do more good than the contractions but that's small consolation when you're living through a contraction. Ultimately? Everyone would rather avoid conflict, they'd rather be rewarded for conforming to society and they want their children to have better lives than their own. Every now and then, though, a bunch of shitsticks have to fuck it up for everyone to remind us all why we bother. Shitstick Season started in 2016. Not sure when it's over. Sooner Russia collapses the happier we'll all be.
Say Biden dies. Between now and the 2024 election. Harris becomes President. How long does it take to appoint a V-P under her? During that interval, the House Speaker is America's 2IC, right? So whatever even more extremist RWNJ the GOP appoints to replace McCarthy is literally one bullet away from becoming President? Edit. Also, the next couple of months would be a really bad time for everybody if China decided now's the time to rattle the sabre in the South China Sea or (God help us) blockade Taiwan.