Saturday, February 25, 2017

Surveying the Never-Trump Right and Camp-Follower Globaloney Types

Some pretty interesting material here from Matthew Continetti, a guy who is son-in-law to a Never Trump rightist.

He begins with a prophetic quote from Reagan (1977):  "The new Republican Party I am speaking about," he said, "is going to have room for the man and the woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat, and the millions of Americans who may never have thought of joining our party before, but whose interests coincide with those represented by principled Republicanism."...

Continetti found a new magazine to be interesting.

....The first issue of American Affairs, a quarterly journal of policy and political thought, was feted at a reception in New York City on Tuesday. I found the magazine lively and thought provoking and at times deeply insightful. In their mission statement the editors reject "a misguided and complacent consensus" that too easily dismisses widespread protest against social problems as populist exercises in nostalgia. "But our intellectuals as well as our politicians are subservient to an even more debilitating nostalgia," the editors say, "which views the ideologies of the last few decades as the only alternatives and their policies as the only solutions. They are nostalgic for a present they think they inhabit, but which has already slipped away." And this nostalgia led the intellectuals and politicians so far afield that they missed completely the economic crisis, the Arab Spring, Brexit, and the rise and victory of Donald Trump....

Holy pistol-whipping, Batman!

And--please, Sir--here's another one:

"What binds globalism and identity politics together," says Joshua Mitchell of Georgetown, "is the judgment that national sovereignty is not the final word on how to order collective life. This judgment against national sovereignty—let us state that matter boldly—was the animating principle of the post-1989 world order, an order that is now collapsing before our eyes."...

Yes, indeed.  Remember that Trump came after Brexit; and both France and Italy are about to have elections with similar stakes on the table.

Anyhow, that 'new world order' required a Managerial Class to run it.  The UN was already around, of course--a bit dowdy and having scandal problems--but there were all sorts of other Managed Global Entities which stepped up, such as the World Bank, the E.U., and various multi-national for-profits.

But the Managerial Class was not accountable to anyone except other (un-elected) Managers.

...This lack of accountability has been highlighted again and again over the last sixteen years. First 9/11 happened and no one was fired. Then Saddam turned out not to have had WMD and no one was fired. The economy came close to collapse—and the banks were bailed out. Government reform of health care only made the individual market worse. The depression of rural and working-class America was exacerbated by imperialistic environmental and financial regulations, liberal welfare and minimum wage policies, and further global economic integration. "The economic, foreign policy, and technological optimism of previous decades is gone," writes Krein. "Preserving the status quo has become the sole aspiration—and primarily for the purpose of preserving the class privilege of the current elite, which, even if not admitted, is becoming obvious to voters."...

Yes, those pesky "voters."  See, they could have kept the status quo by electing Hildebeeste--but they did not.  So that status quo-Managerial Class was the problem--as Steve Bannon has emphatically stated.

As for the kvetching press/Democrat/NeverTrump twits:

...nationalism means distinguishing between members of a political community and outsiders, and privileging the former over the latter. Such distinctions make many people profoundly uncomfortable. Look at the headlines surrounding the Trump administration's policies on refugees, travel from failed or terrorist-sponsoring states, and illegal immigration....

Got it?  Good.  STFU.

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