How We Are

Every time I get disappointed with President Trump, which is quite often, I remember the alternative that the U.S. political system gives us.


No question that Trump has disappointed his earliest and most faithful supporters. He has even attacked some of them. His use of the military violates what we all saw as an important part of his platform. I don’t think many of his supporters like his extreme Zionism. His economic policies puzzle us.


All this certainly needs explanation.


I think one explanation is that the U.S. Presidency is simply beyond the strength of any one person. Psychopaths like Clinton and Obama and irresponsible adolescents like George W. Bush can coast along and enjoy the White House. Unlike these worthies, I think Trump actually cares about the American people, which subjects him to great stress.


His buccaneering personality is a problem, and like his predecessors he has succumbed to the glamour of doing whatever is necessary to secure lasting fame. The quest for lasting fame is an illusion that never meets the payroll.


Trump’s greatest failure is his involvement with the Republican party, an organisation of intellectually and ethically shallow self-promoters, who can’t wait to get rid of Trump and his ideas and return to safe pablum politics. These people are not capable of caring about the future beyond the next brown bag of money. Their idea of America is a few abstract slogans borrowed from Lincoln.


The Democrats are a political party - they know what they want and whose interests they represent. The Republican party is an advertising agency selling candidates and slogans. The latest ad campaign is hostility to China. I would bet that most Republican spokesmen can’t read or speak Chinese and know less than nothing about Chinese history.


I have never shared any enthusiasm for Vance. He trashed his own mother in his novel and he is too tightly tied in with the AI oligarchs. He may trump the organisation Republicans for the Presidential nomination but that promises nothing good.


It was a sad day when the old Southern Democrats became Republicans. The old Southern Democrats were tough and cynical but they were rooted in a real America. They were the only real conservative force in our politics, the only effective restraint on bad “progressive” notions becoming law. The South is now mostly represented by photogenic products of the Republican ad agency.


The most rabid blue Democratic areas of today are exactly the same regions that were Radical Republican in earlier times. The red areas are parts of American once inhabited by conservative Democrats. A great change that is hardly noticed.


I have always enjoyed attacking Yankees, but lately it has started to resemble beating a dead horse.


Readers of my scribblings know that by “Yankee” I do not mean all you good Northern folk, but a lapsed Puritan breed of the Deep North which every generation or so considers itself possessor the revolutionary truth and disrupts and damages American society. In the 1850s their unconstructive fanaticism brought on the War between the States. Exactly he same Radical Republican people and regions flourished, along with other elements, in the 1960s-70s. They now occupy the Deep North with their virtue signaling and hatred for the real America.