Rather than outline one or two serious national problems that they proposed to take on, the Democrats projected an amount of money to spend, Yuval Levin says, and then stuffed everything that every Democratic interest group desired into one package until they reached that number:
They never gave the public any sense of what mattered to them. And the internal debates about the scope and contents of the package almost all involved arguments about its overall size — about how much to spend and tax rather than what to do or how to do it.
This is just one example of a broader failure to prioritize that is endemic to our politics now. Neither party can quite explain what it wants, except to keep the other party from power. That problem is vastly overdetermined, but three reasons for it do stand out among the rest.
[...]
Throughout his career, Joe Biden has tried to position himself near the center of the Democratic coalition and be a kind of generic Democrat. This is not a bad strategy for a senator with a safe seat, and it obviously worked for him. But it’s not as good a strategy for a president with an internally divided party. A president’s strength as an executive can often be measured by whether his mid-level political appointees know what he would do in their place — whether an assistant secretary in one department or another can say “If the president had my job, I know how he would make the decision I’m now facing.” This was obviously impossible on most issues in the Trump era, since President Trump’s implacable ignorance, pathological amorality, and blinding narcissism made him reactive and unpredictable. This was part of why he was such a weak president and achieved so little that will endure. But it is also practically impossible in the Biden era, because President Biden has generally refused to identify himself with any side of any dispute within the Democratic coalition. Given his history, he would seem to represent the more moderate wing of the party, but that’s not really evident in anything his administration has done, or any role he has played in any legislative process. It’s hard to say what he wants, so he isn’t helping his party tell the public what it wants either.
[...]
The habits of polarization, which have evolved over the past generation in Washington, involve party leaders in Congress asserting themselves rather than party factions negotiating. This helps the parties confront one another more starkly, but it doesn’t help the parties negotiate internal differences. Leaders in this polarized era want to mask and submerge internal divisions, rather than to work them out, and that makes bargaining within each party pretty difficult, as both parties have learned when they have held power. The Democrats tend to respond to this problem by proposing to do everything at once — stuffing every idea they’ve ever had into one big bill. Republicans tend to respond to the same problem by proposing to do nothing — just simply nothing whatsoever. That is basically what Republicans ran on in 2020, for instance. Voters tend not to be impressed by either strategy. And this problem will only become more serious as the internal differences within the parties grow.
[...]
Both parties are changing as the American elite is changing, and a lot of their internal fractures look like tensions between their past and their future. The Democrats are gradually taking the shape of something like a fun-house mirror version of the Eisenhower coalition — upscale whites plus many black voters. (Obviously the black vote was much more divided at mid-century than now, and it was also much more suppressed by Southern racism, but those were key elements of the self-understanding of Eisenhower’s coalition.) Republicans are gradually taking the shape of a fun-house mirror version of the FDR coalition — blue-collar whites and some blue-collar ethnic minorities who will eventually be considered white. (The latter described some ethnic European Catholic minorities for FDR, it describes some Hispanic voters for today’s GOP). Both analogies are lacking, to be sure, but they suggest something about the general course of things.
[...]
The key economic-policy battleground of the immediate future is likely to be the challenge of rising living costs, and if the BBB legislation is any sign, Democrats are not well equipped to fight on that front. They remain committed to addressing high costs through a combination of subsidizing demand and restricting supply. This is essentially the left’s approach to health care, higher education, housing, and now (in this new bill) child-care. Increased demand and reduced supply is, broadly speaking, a recipe for higher prices and therefore higher costs. If the new swing voters are suburban parents, a program that risks drastic increases in child-care costs is a way to lose the future.
A political moderate is someone who tries to have it both ways and ends up falling off the fence.
A true moderate isn’t political, because a real politician isn’t moderate. Factions are what it’s all about.
National Review shows us how to gnaw your thumb in print. They’re in denial over their lack of relevance.
“A president’s strength as an executive can often be measured by whether his mid-level political appointees know what he would do in their place”
That works with presidents who come from within established pathways in the parties, but with Trump, he foolishly relied on Republican insiders and bureaucrats who sabotaged his clearly established priorities at every turn. Kling ignores the other dynamic with the parties, while they focus on each other to attain power and thus strategize in reaction to that, he ignores the other dynamic, they don’t want anybody else involved. They want to be able to run things to their satisfaction without interference or input from non-DC dwellers. Kling is both informative and misleading.
“If the president had my job, I know how he would make the decision I’m now facing.” This was obviously impossible on most issues in the Trump era, since President Trump’s implacable ignorance, pathological amorality, and blinding narcissism made him reactive and unpredictable.
Does this writer live in the real world?
The problem President Trump faced was a vast bureaucracy composed of left-wing people who would NOT do what he clearly told them to do, and who could not in practice be fired. Very few of those “civil servants” thought about what the President wanted them to do — they did what they wanted to do, even if it was contrary to the objectives on which the President had been elected by the citizens.
As I am not an American citizen, I can’t comment on President Trump’s ‘implacable ignorance’ though it does strike me as an outsider that President Biden appears to have far more serious problems with a declining mental acuity. Trump may have sent out ‘mean tweets’ but Biden doesn’t look capable of even picking up a cell phone and typing his own name. In a way, we outsiders should be far more worried by the latter.
But the tone of the piece here appears not to be so much a call for some sort of sensible policy platform across the board, but a plea for the Democrats to get their act together, one presumes for the left’s idealised ‘good of us all.’ But Mr Levin is right that policies don’t appeal to the public these days, because gradually people are seeing more than ever that the people put in power have very little ability (and possibly little interest) in managing the economy and providing what we, the people, want.
Does this writer live in the real world?
No.
The problem President Trump faced was a vast bureaucracy composed of left-wing people who would NOT do what he clearly told them to do, and who could not in practice be fired. Very few of those “civil servants” thought about what the President wanted them to do. They did what they wanted to do, even if it was contrary to the objectives on which the President had been elected by the citizens.
Yes.
Voters are software, scanners, USBs. Voters are software CGI corpses. If you’re dense, VOTERS are irrelevant.
Oh, and yes, the N@tional Gu@rd was “guarding” the ballot warehouses just this month. It’s in the ballot warehouses where the good stuff happens. Like Stalin said, it’s the NG that counts, or something like that…
The Voters: Honestly am I the only one who bothered to read the Dominion user manual? The good stuff’s in Chapters 3 and 4, stuff like “adjudication” and “rank choice voting”, etc.
https://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/VotingSystems/DVS-DemocracySuite511/documentation/2-03-EMS-FunctionalityDescription-5-11-CO.pdf
Page 122, section 3.7.
====================================
Here for your entertainment is the redacted version.
https://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/VotingSystems/systemsDocumentation/Dominion/209-ADJSystemMaintenanceManual-419.pdf
I love bureaucracy! They have both versions online, courtesy of SOS CO.
I started to read some of this but when he started saying,”Pres. Biden should” I thought to myself,”the guy is only in office because of massive, stupendous fraud. He’s a fake President and while I’m sure he has good days and bad he’s basically mentally incapacitated” and skipped the rest. Of course none of this matters anyways because the Jews run this country no matter who is in office.
I keep thinking back to the comment you see frequently on the chans,”And then one day they voted for Hitler for no reason at all”.
Elsewhere on the web another someone was baffled why the Germans let themselves be led by the brownshirts but I bet today if the Hells Angels shot all the anti-fa and strung up all the Soros emplaced prosecutors that are persecuting White people they would get little to no push back from you average suburban White guy. The brownshirts, bad as they were, were preferable to the Jew run government.
The moral to this story is never be so greedy, incompetent or threatening that the population feels more comfortable with a bunch of crazy guys running around with guns in brown shirts and is the equivalent of a motorcycle gang running things over you continuing to run things.
I agree with “If a Biker Gang is preferable to your government, government is the problem.”
I don’t quite agree with “Jews are running things”. Not even Hitler went that far. Hitler regarded Anglo-Saxon Finance with as much or more trepidation than he regarded the Jews. Moreover the dramatic reaction to National Socialism far exceeds the responses to Fascism or Communism. The response I refer to is the Anglo-Saxon ruling class in England and America, not The Jews.
I have an idea as to why: The Reich having little Gold but an enormous technical base, a powerful industrial base used Industrial Barter money as the base of it’s currency. Germany had little gold but an enormous valuable commodity of education going back centuries, an enormous technical and industrial reservoir of skill, and Germany in the 1930s is using that as the basis of their currency. Germany was using essentially barter money internally between Industries [MEFO, the acronym in German] and began in the mid-late 1930s to do the same with international trade deals.
Before late 1942 and Stalingrad there is no Holocaust; there are concentration camps. Well, Concentration Camps are a staple of politics for all nations from the Boer War to the opening of the GULAG by Khrushchev in 1956. WW2 was no more fought for the Jews than WW1 was fought for the Belgians. Both world wars in Europe are England dealing with a competitor it could only beat through alliances and wars. That it cost them the Empire is their own fault.
The English Ruling Class in the 1890s sees that Eton, Oxford, and Cambridge are teaching German, not Latin and Greek. To be educated was to learn German, for Germany had the best schools, industry, and science. To the end of staying on top, the English ruling class sets up a system of alliances to check Germany. Every point of contention with the French and Americans is resolved to the advantage — or so it seemed — of the French and Americans.
The result was WW1, it’s sequel WW2, and, well, here we are.
This wasn’t the Jews. The peak Jewry running stuff was the Rothschilds, who were peacemongers from 1815 to 1914. If nothing else, war cut the value of their shares in half. The last gasp of the Rothschild’s is the Balfour declaration.
Now this is interesting history, except I said here we are: the Anglo-American Ivy League ruling class is doing the same thing, starting a war, with people they can’t compete with, non-elite White Americans, for the same reasons: they can’t compete with us.
This is all about power and after that money.
This is why, of course, the reaction to Fascism [nothing] and the reaction to Communism [buy them] was so mild compared to the Reaction to National Socialism. They couldn’t buy the Nazis.
Communists always were for sale. It is about money after all, and they always need ready money. Hell, the communists then and now will work millions of their own to death for money.
The Fascists are just war buddies who don’t want to live under Jacobinism or Communism, but they’re exclusively interested in their own countries. Even Mussolini was mainly interested in improving Italy’s position, for all his blather.
It ain’t the Jews; it’s the Anglo-American Ruling class. The Jews are just dumb enough to want to be out front ostentatiously, a recursive error on their part.
And, yes, I’ll take a Biker gang over Biden.
“Not even Hitler went that far.”
Not true. A complete and total fabrication.
“The response I refer to is the Anglo-Saxon ruling class in England and America, not The Jews.”
The Jews publicly declared war on Germany in the press they owned.
“The Reich having little Gold but an enormous technical base, a powerful industrial base used Industrial Barter money as the base of it’s currency.”
No, the Germans used “labor hours”. The Jews knew that a successful German economy without the Jews’ global banking cartel would spell the end for their banking skim scheme which has done us, and the Germans, so much harm.
“WW2 was no more fought for the Jews than WW1 was fought for the Belgians.”
They were essential for WWII to have been at all. They put in place the Bolsheviks. Jews tried to overthrow the government of Germany and in one province they did take over for a short time. They were the ones that put Churchill in power by protecting him from bankruptcy. They owned the largest part of the press that egged the whole thing on. I mean what kind of nonsense is this reasoning based on? If anti-fa shoots down people in the streets in the US, and they have, is it the “Anglo-Saxons” that did it?
“Anglo American Ivy League ruling class is doing the same thing…”
HUh? The American Ivy League has such a small amount of Anglo-Saxons per population in their schools that you might as well say they are banned. The American Ivy League schools are completely run by the Jews. They have displaced them.
“It ain’t the Jews; it’s the Anglo-American Ruling class.”
Well, tell me, we know that on 9-11 there was a false flag because of building 7 falling the same speed as if only air held it up from a few fires on 3 or 4 floors. Now tell me how many TV stations, newspapers, radio stations, cable TV channels, magazines, book publishers the Anglo-Saxons own?
All you are saying is a bunch of half-truths and a lot of smoke and gas-lighting to cover up the Jews’ behavior.
The Jews have not only stolen a large part of the industry in the US and moved it to China. They own the rest and are buying up all the land and houses as we speak with FED bucks. They covered up 9-11, cause they did it, they are covering up the fake elections and subsequently the fake President Biden in the face of over whelming evidence of fraud. They are in charge of the vax campaign that’s killing hundreds of thousands of people and I say they created the corona in the first place. They are covering up proven low cost medications that cure the corona they brought forth and covering up that in fact these drugs exist. I mean just what do they have do before it’s not the “Anglo-Saxons” fault?
If you want to use misdirection for what the Jews are doing to destroy the country and the world I think you would be better served faking that it’s the Jesuits, the Queen of England, the Pope, the Payseurs, the Masons or their newest one the Phoenicians, instead of the Anglo-American Ruling class because they don’t run anything.
I am somewhat ambivalent about the Jewish issues in western society; I accept they are major players in the entertainment industry and have strong financial interests, the former which is vital in shaping public opinion (at least while people mindlessly swallow hours and hours of movies and TV shows) and the latter pays for that shaping.
But one thing about Germany under Hitler: the battle initially for power in 1920s Germany was between the socialist version constructed by Hitler (aka National Socialism, for the clue is in the name) and the Communists (aka the International Socialists.) Hitler hated the Jews who founded Communism — before they became its victims later — who worked to bring about the International Socialism of Russia and then tried for European domination, and he resented their ideology. He countered the communist, Jewish-led thugs with his brownshirt thugs until his party achieved power.
It is true he thought the Slavs were sub-human, but he despised those who ruled over the sub-humans, too.
Albion says,”I am somewhat ambivalent about the Jewish issues in western society…”
That’s a fairly weak word for a group that has taken control of every asset in the country. Bombed buildings in the middle of the biggest city in the country, overthrown the presidential election with fraud and brought about a diminution of the percentage of the population of real Americans so drastically that if it were not Whites it was being done to would be called, and it is, genocide.
“…He [Hilter} countered the communist, Jewish-led thugs with his brownshirt thugs until his party achieved power…”
Here fixed it for you.
He [Hilter} countered the communist, Jewish-led thugs with the German people.
Imagine continuing to pretend that democratic politics is a going concern.
Sam: “That’s a fairly weak word for a group that has taken control of every asset in the country. Bombed buildings in the middle of the biggest city in the country, overthrown the presidential election with fraud and brought about a diminution of the percentage of the population of real Americans so drastically that if it were not Whites it was being done to would be called, and it is, genocide.”
No, Sam, you don’t understand. Those aren’t real Jews.