Enjoying the view from Limbo
This past weekend, Donald Trump made what our minute-by-minute age calls “history” by becoming the first U.S. president to attend a Super Bowl game. In other words, true to form, Trump was the first president in American history crass enough to think it appropriate to turn even his country’s most popular annual apolitical entertainment event into a divisive and hyper-political photo opportunity for...
2024 U.S. Election / America Descending
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 15, 2024 · Last modified July 16, 2024
The fatal shooting at Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania — the state to which Barack Obama was referring when he spoke of the uneducated underclass “clinging to their Bibles and their guns,” interestingly — is the kind of moment in American politics that tends to crystallize divisions, blur rational judgment, and send the media (all forms) into seizures of exploitation mania. I...
2024 U.S. Election / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 19, 2024 · Last modified January 20, 2024
The danger of the Republican Party’s fateful decision, back in 2016, to hold onto its traditional voter base by playing along with Donald Trump, was never primarily that he would promote or embark upon explicitly anti-republican policies (although he has certainly done that), or that he would convert the GOP into a populist apologist faction for tyranny on the global stage (although he...
There is a sense of everything closing in or coming to a head. It is palpable. But this sense does not answer to simplistic and tribally convenient conspiracy theories. It belongs to the more complex realm of historical inevitabilities….
Donald Trump was the leader of a very large, deeply devoted cult. He won the cult by stoking fear and anger in people already feeling dispossessed and rejected by their society, and then hardened it by consistently promising his followers, in mantra-like fashion, to stand athwart history as the only man willing and able to serve as their protector and avenger. (“The Wall,”...
Modern politicians smile for the cameras because they want to look normal and like “one of the people.” When they smile — at nothing, as a pose, to present themselves as smilers — they look like idiots who do not take life or politics seriously. Hence, they achieve their end perfectly: They look eminently normal. They look exactly like “the people.” Today’s political...
Here in Korea, the middle of the afternoon is the wee hours of the morning back in North American time zones, which means I had the dubious pleasure of watching a bunch of Democratic spokesmen on the U.S. news networks interviewing other Democratic spokesmen, as they all pretended to be objective observers of an election in which they have been actively campaigning against...
Patterico has this very amusing screen shot at his website, dating from 2014: Trump is everything Washington is and has long been, only dumber. He is a parody of the democratic political disease of tribal hypocrisy, and what we might call the morality of convenience. Oh, I know, all the best conservative pundits are out there hammering home the point that there is...
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