Category: Uncategorized

Partisan purchases

In a Forbes post I outline how the emerging Trump resistance seems to dovetail with another force I described over a year ago on GOPLifer: the dawn of a possible 4th Era of Capitalism. Old assumptions about the essentially non-political nature of economic decisions may be falling apart in ways that will extend beyond the Trump Era. A group of people who are politically under-represented, even perhaps disenfranchised in a counter-intuitive sense, have found their power. It has been sitting in their wallets all along.

Resistance on the right

A haunting realization looms over the remnant of the principled right. Perhaps the GOP was never a conservative party, and the movement behind Reagan was never animated by conservative values. As the entire project is boiled down to its essence, we are left not with smaller government, or judicial restraint, or constitutional principles, but with a nasty broth of racist rhetoric wielded by an aspiring petty tyrant. Watching the Reagan wave quietly release its last energy on the beach, conservatives have to consider this ugly possibility: Maybe this song was never about us.

Writing about public policy in Trumpistan

Whatever policy emerges from the federal government in this climate, it will be guided by delusions, written by morons, and crafted to solve problems that don’t exist using mechanisms that don’t work. We are going to live for an extended time under a grand national experiment in Idiocracy. The tough, interesting, intellectually challenging work of crafting useful policy has lost any immediate relevance. Policy only matters to some potential future that looms out beyond the horizon.

A couple of thoughts from Fukuyama

Fukuyama’s End of History did a pretty good job of anticipating Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. It did a pretty good job of anticipating the anomie and aimlessness that might drive people toward self-destructive political choices. Almost thirty years after his original thesis, he still seems to have a better read on our political situation than either the Marxist theorists he was skewering or the emerging culture-warriors like Huntington who most fiercely opposed him. It may be a mistake to dismiss Fukuyama out of hand.