A few propositions on the present moment:
• Someday we’ll look back on this period as we do 1950, with some demagogue saying, “I have in my hand a list of 57 genders and pronouns. . .” (With the due caveat that the first guy was more right than wrong. . .)
• What prompted this was an amazing self-own by Bruce Bartlett, a once-sound supply-side economist who succumbed somehow to the precursor of Trump Derangement Syndrome—in his case, Bush Derangement Syndrome back in the aughts:
Answer: It isn’t different. Communists in both cases. (Though in fact a lot of the Communists in the federal government by 1950 had been quietly purged by the Truman Administration before Joe McCarthy got on to the issue. Truman had to cover up the extent of Communist penetration of the federal government because it would have been damaging to the Democratic Party in the 1948 election.)
So what’s the problem?
• More: I expect that we’ll also look back on the current transgender explosion, especially “trans-women,” in much the same way we look back on the hippies of the late 1960s, with their ridiculous hair, wardrobe, communal ethic that always crashed and burned, lack of hygiene, and above all cocksureness that they had all the answers to everything, and demanded to stand up the The Man. One part of their disposition was partly right: Today, many of them have become The Man, and deserve toppling. The point is: no one want to be a 60s hippie today.
• I was re-reading Lord Charnwood’s 1916 biography of Lincoln today (still the finest biography of Lincoln ever written in my opinion) for something I am working on, and I was arrested by this passage: Lincoln “was the most surprising nomination ever made in America. . . At this critical moment the fit man was chosen on the very ground of his supposed unfitness.” Hmmm.
• Have any of the progressive critics of the Constitution stopped to reflect that all those features they want to junk because they frustrate their progressive desires for Action Now! are the very features that will prevent an actual Trump dictatorship? … I’ll wait.
• We’ll see how far Trump gets with being able to fire federal employees with civil service status. But let’s remember: the current civil service system was set up to avoid partisan patronage and have a professional class of neutral civil servants. But the current structure of the administrative state is the partisan instrument of the Democratic Party, and the majority of career civil servants are Democrats. Ergo. . .
• This is genius (and likely true):
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