For some years now, I've been saying that we are entering "the Post-Democratic Age":
As I put it to Tucker a while back re Trump, the elites are revolting against the masses.
Still, that's just some "niche Canadian" riffing into the ether. It's interesting that the elites themselves are ever more open about their post-democratic inclinations. Headline from the Associated Press:
Biden tells donors: 'If Trump wasn't running I'm not sure I'd be running. We cannot let him win'
"We cannot let him win" - because, says crazed uniparty warmonger Robert Kagan, Trump is a dictator who will destroy democracy. My view of Kagan? Over a decade ago, he wrote one of the most stupid books I have ever read:
Kagan hangs his thesis on the film It's a Wonderful Life, although he's not quite confident enough in the conceit to call the book It's a Wonderful World. Instead, he offers section headings like 'Meet George Bailey: What Is American about the American World Order?'
I'm not a big fan of the movie, but it would be the work of moments to riff off its metaphoric power. Like Jimmy Stewart, America is on the bridge about to jump, wondering what the point of it all was. And then kindly angelic Robert Kagan shows up to show us what the world would be like had Uncle Sam never lived: Why, there's Europe (Gloria Grahame)! She never recovered from the Second World War, and then she turned to drink, and got run over by the Soviet Union (Lionel Barrymore). There's Africa (H. B. Warner)! He poisoned all the children, because there was no Centers for Disease Control and no innovative American pharmaceutical industry. In the final heartwarming scene, Uncle Sam gets talked off the bridge, and goes home to face his creditors only to find that his salt-of-the-earth Bedford Falls neighbors (the Sultan of Brunei, Prince Alwaleed, Sinocom Savings & Loan, the Russian oligarch who owns the local vodka bar) have had a whip-round and his subprime-housing project can go ahead!
But what do I know? The great thing about American democracy is that, whoever you vote for, you get Mrs Robert Kagan (Victoria Nuland) running around the chancelleries of power: Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden... The only administration of the last thirty years she hasn't "served in" was - let's see now... oh, yeah: Trump's.
And that's how democracy is meant to work. Because, unlike the crude know-nothing dictator-in-waiting, Victoria Nuland offers subtle nuanced sophisticated geopolitical analysis such as:
That was in 2014, when Ms Nuland was arranging Ukrainian affairs more to her liking. Whether or not she's f**ked the EU, she's done a pretty good job of f**king the people of Ukraine: Since she got the war she's been gagging for for a decade, the country's population has shrunk by twenty per cent and its GDP by thirty per cent.
Still, at least she's not a threat to democracy, like that ghastly Trump, right?
On the other hand, from yesterday, the very latest poll:
Election 24: Trump Opens 10-Point Lead
Let us assume for the purposes of argument that that poll is correct, as are all but one of the others from this last month. What does it mean to say, as Biden tells his donors, that "we cannot let him win"? You mean he cannot be permitted to win? That, in order to save democracy, we have to subvert the will of the people?
Er, yes:
Expanding on a column he wrote for the Atlantic, former Naval College professor Tom Nichols issued an additional warning that Donald Trump cannot be allowed to win the 2024 election and put his people in place to run the military because, he says, the consequences could be devastating.
Golly. Once upon a time, it was generally understood, even by professors, that in self-governing societies civilian control of the military is a good thing. But that was before Trump started undermining democracy. Now, like Nasser in Egypt or General Galtieri's junta in Argentina or the guys who toppled that fellow in Niger back in the summer, the Pentagon is the true guardian of the democratic ethos:
Last week, Nichols wrote, "In 2020, the armed forces were a bulwark against Donald Trump's antidemocratic designs..."
As he explained, Trump in his one term tried to impose his will on the Pentagon but didn't know enough to be successful.
Outrageous: a constitutionally-elected head of government "trying to impose his will" on the generals!
Incidentally, is there any institution on earth that "doesn't know enough to be successful" more than the Pentagon? Professor Nichols says that, were Trump to impose his will on the rogue military, "the consequences could be devastating". For whom? The women of Afghanistan? The cannon fodder of Ukraine? The poor bloody infantry of America's endless unwon wars, come home to live on food stamps in Maine and Idaho?
Ah, but you gotta love the headline on this story:
Expert raises alarm over Trump's plan to co-opt the military
"Expert"? In what precisely is Tom Nichols an "expert"? What does he teach at the Naval Academy? How to blow through forty per cent of the planet's total military budget and lose one war after another for three-quarters of a century?
The western world is f**ked, to put it in sophisticated nuanced Victoria Nuland terms, because America's "expert" class has had the run of the planet. So who do the "experts" think can save us from Trump 2.0? With his usual unerring instinct, Robert Kagan knows best:
The first step is to consolidate all the anti-Trump forces in the Republican Party behind a single candidate, right now. It is obvious that candidate should be Nikki Haley and not because she's pro-Ukraine but because she is clearly the most capable politician among the remaining candidates and the performer with the best chance, however slim, of challenging Trump. All the money and the endorsements should shift to her as quickly as possible.
What exactly is so "obvious" and "capable" about Nikki Haley? She's not capable of cracking twenty per cent in her own state. She's "pro-Ukraine", but not capable of naming any of the territory that's apparently so vital to US national interests:
That's what it means to be an "expert" in the America of 2023. As I mused on this week's Q&A, Neville Chamberlain famously remarked of Czechoslovakia that it was "a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing" - but he knew a hell of a lot more about Czechoslovakia than Nikki Haley knows about Ukraine.
At the beginning of the year, Politico's "Morning Consult" poll showed Trump had the support of forty-two per cent of Republican primary voters. At the end of the year, the same poll has him at sixty-seven per cent, with the putative saviour of American democracy, Donbass Haley, at ten per cent.
What explains his grip on GOP affections? They like those vaccines he fast-tracked? They want Jared back in the West Wing? No. They get, in the most basic sense, that the not so subtle message of Ms Haley and Professor Nichols and the Kagans and the Democrats and the Republican establishment and the media is that no meaningful course correction is possible. The prosecution of Trump and Giuliani and Jenna Ellis et al is the criminalisation of all politics outside the permitted Nuland-Haley bounds. So the defenders of democracy are telling the American people that voting for anything but the uniparty cannot be tolerated.
Trump has responded to the dictator derangement by making a joke, telling Sean Hannity that he would be a dictator on Day One only and close the border. Like his 2016 shtick about asking Putin to release Hillary's emails, the gag will be used against him every day - and, indeed, Kagan and Nichols are already doing so.
But I hope he means it. Many years ago, Steve Sailer distilled the uniparty world view into the pithy phrase "Invade the world, invite the world". Blunder around the planet like tourists in the heart of darkness, with boots on the ground in every country on earth, except at your own borders. Through which flow incessantly all those bazillions of plucky American allies - like the seventy-three per cent of young Afghan males who served as "translators" for the US military but who upon arrival at Virginia and Texas welfare offices mysteriously require translators themselves. The choice in most western nations is between a left-of-centre party that is in favour of open borders and a right-of-centre party that pretends not to be. As more and more voters have indicated - in Italy, the Netherlands and elsewhere - that reductio of democracy is insufficient for them.
So now the chaps whose invincibly ignorant meddling worked out so swell for faraway countries of which we know nothing - Afghanistan, Syria, Libya - have been moving it closer to the "Free World". On Biden's watch, war without end has come to the EU's borders. Hey, why not the Bahamas? Or Canada? The dimestore Strangeloves are bringing the madness home.
And yet the likes of the Kagans wouldn't have prospered their entire adult lifetimes in Washington while getting every single thing wrong without a certain low survival instinct. When respectable "experts" from the Naval Academy start promoting banana-republic concepts such as ludicrously over-beribboned generals as the true guardians of democracy, they are planting seeds. Zelensky, the rapturously received darling of every parliament across the west, has just cancelled Ukrainian democracy in order to save it from Putin. Should we not do the same - and cancel American democracy in order to save it from Trump? After all, all the "experts" are on board:
Gotta give it to Klaus Schwab: no one else says the quiet part out loud, in the voice of a movie-level dystopian character, quite like him. He's visibly giddy about the idea of eliminating elections. Worth watching this clip, can't make this stuff up. https://t.co/IagLiXQkWl
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 15, 2023
This kind of talk says nothing good about the health of American self-government, or a decadent ruling class's willingness to respect it. Be alert to these portents of the Post-Democratic Era: They're serious about it.
~Speaking of the Netherlands, the "far right" Geert Wilders has just won the election there. We have a few copies left of a joint Steyn/Wilders literary endeavour: Geert's terrific book Marked for Death, complete with an introduction by Mark. It's available at the SteynOnline bookstore, and is the perfect Christmas gift for the far-right member of your family.
However, if you're nervous about last posting dates, etc, there's always a Mark Steyn Club Christmas gift membership, which can be digitally delivered.
