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~ Thoughts on Red States and "Deplorables."

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Monthly Archives: November 2016

Our Spoiled, Benighted Ruling Class

30 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by Jim Langcuster in American Education, Patriotism, U.S. Politics

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American Higher Education, Culture Wars, Donald Trump, flag burning, Jim Langcuster, Stephen Bannon

burning-flagDespite repeated attempts by the left to depict Trump’s new domestic policy adviser, Stephen Bannon, as a witting agent of the alt-right and white nationalism, I see a different picture emerging.

I perceive an Irish-American patriot from the working class who, in the course of acquiring a Harvard MBA and a large measure of material success as a Goldman Sachs employee, gained intimate exposure to many among this nation’s ruling class and ended up detesting what he saw.

Following the 2008 crash, he saw his octogenarian father, Marty Bannon, a retiree,  struggle financially after he was forced to cash out his AT&T stocks – the bulk of his net worth – to tide himself over the hard times.  The elder Bannon was a self-made man who started out as a telephone lineman and worked his way up  his company’s corporate ladder. For Bannon, his father’s late-life financial crisis drove home a searing lesson in what he had come to regard as the “socialism of the wealthy.”   As the 2008 crisis demonstrated, many among the wealthy class are often insulated from deleterious market effects, while little people like has father are forced to bear the risks.

Other lessons were driven home.  One of Bannon’s proudest moments was when his oldest daughter, Maureen, qualified for West Point.  Yet, he soon discovered that among his daughter’s fellow West Point cadets, not was one supplied from the upper reaches of the country’s wealthiest citizens.

I was reminded of all of this last night watching reports of the desecration of the U.S. flag by snowflakes at many of the nation’s elite colleges and universities.

Virtually none of these kids will ever be forced out of a sense of economic necessity to darken the door of a military recruiter’s office. They will go immediately to a leading graduate school, to an elite investment firm, or to an premiere nonprofit or media entity as a writer or researcher . A few of them will go into national politics, feigning regret over their youthful indiscretion,  even as they formulate the policies that send the next generation of patriotic, working-class kids into the world’s danger zones. Ironic, isn’t it?

Many among the Left are still beating their chests over how an intellectual lightweight, corporate real estate brawler and TV showman who affected sympathy for the beleaguered working-class Americans prevailed over one of the nation’s best and brightest, one who had garnered the support of virtually everyone in this country who really counted.

It think a simple appraisal of what is unfolding among the self-indulgent, self-pitying snowflakes on many of this nation’s elite campuses would supply one compelling explanation for this electoral upset.

Wanted: A Thorough Ellison Vetting

29 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by Jim Langcuster in U.S. Politics

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Democratic National Committee, Islamism, Keith Ellison, Nation of Islam, Stephen Bannon

keith-ellison

Congressman Keith Ellison, Dem.-Minnesota, front runner for the DNC chairmanship.

Somebody help me with this. For the past few weeks, Stephen Bannon, Trump’s new domestic policy adviser has been characterized as a white nationalist and even a white supremacist, even though front-page coverage by several mainstream media appears to have turned up only tenuous ties to radical racialist groups.

Yet, Congressman Keith Ellison, the front runner for the position of chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who has garnered the support of several prominent Democratic leaders, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren and and erstwhile Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, has drawn scarcely a mention lately regarding his past ties with radical Islam and black nationalism.

A former practicing Catholic, Ellison  apparently  was drawn as a college student to Islam through his association with the Nation of Islam, though he claims that he never formally joined the NOI.  Even so, while a college student, he wrote at least two articles in support of NOI – a fact reported by the July 6, 2006 edition Bay State Banner. Yet, I have scoured news.google.com and can can find little reporting of this fact within the mainstream media, though, to be fair, The Washington Post cited Ellison’s alleged ties to the Nation of Islam in an article that ran Sept. 11, 2006.

Recently, The Daily Caller, a partisan news site founded by libertarian-conservative Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, reports that it possesses a couple of columns obtained from the Minnesota Daily indicating that Ellison “was once a proponent of a blacks-only nation carved out of America and cash reparations paid from whites to blacks.” The Daily Caller maintains that “Ellison also called the U.S. Constitution the ‘best evidence of a white racist conspiracy to subjugate other peoples.'”

Yes, simply being a Muslim or associating with an organization like CAIR arguably is not sufficient cause for concern.  But this involvement must be considered within the larger context of Ellison’s previous Nation of Islam ties.

Contrast that to the current media focus on Bannon’s alleged racialist ties. Based on my rather extensive review of mainstream media coverage of  Stephen Bannon, I find his association with white nationalist and supremacist ties difficult to prove. The allegations are connected only to a few single, rather than multiple, sources.  The charges of Bannon’s connection with white nationalism are further complicated by the fact that he worked closely with and acquired Breitbart News from a Jewish conservative and that he employs an African-American executive assistant, which, according to the New York Times, he considers family.

By contrast, Ellison’s past connections with black nationalism and radical Islamism appear to be far more extensive.  And while the DNC chairmanship is arguably not as prominent a position as the as the domestic policy adviser to the president, it is still a position of enormous symbolic influence.  It seems to me that in terms of subjecting Congressman Ellison to the a thorough-going vetting, the mainstream media have failed.

While undertaking a thorough and entirely legitimate investigation of the racists ties of a prominent figure of the American Right, they have largely ignored what once appeared to be the very palpable racist ties of a prominent member of the American Left.

Finally, an End to the Culture Wars?

26 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by Jim Langcuster in U.S. Politics, Uncategorized

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Culture Wars, Donald Trump, Federalism, Jim Langcuster, State Sovereignty, States Rights

black-lives-matterI’ve speculated more than once on this forum that at least part of the interminable anger and chest beating among Hillary supporters in the election’s aftermath stems from the realization that they were so close to closing the ring on  all of us dumb, reactionary red-state yokels.

The cultural war had ended, our national overlords assured us. History would remember Hillary’s resounding  victory as a confirmation of that fact.  All of us Deplorables would finally be brought to heel.  Figuratively speaking, the dog collars would be attached and all of us would be marched down from the mountains onto the broad, enlightened urban coastal plains.

Of course, an unexpected thing happened on the way to oblivion:  Trump’s remarkable electoral upset.

Some cultural skirmishing apparently remains.  A few pundits even speculate that the Trump upset could mark a turning away and perhaps even an abandonment of the culture war.  Some think that Trump may turn out to be a political realist, concluding that it’s time to put an end to all this disharmony.

Perhaps Trump may even end up affirming an insight that our Founders conceived almost a quarter millennium ago: namely that we are simply too diverse a nation for a culture war to have been started in the first place. Cultural issues are best resolved at the state and local levels. Perhaps he will even conclude that we are all better governed by 50 different social policies rather than by a cookie-cutter policy imposed from Washington.

Simply put, maybe the end of the Culture War will require a looser American Union.

Granted, ending the culture war will not make all Americans happy, particularly those among our ruling class who are deeply invested either professionally or financially in this protracted struggle. It will not be an attractive option at all for many deep-dyed blue Americans who live in red states and, conversely, for ruby-red Americans who live in blue states. Moreover, returning genuine sovereignty to the states ultimately  may lead to a much looser federal union – perhaps even one from which New York, New England and “Cascadian” America may leave to federate (or, at least, work out forms of post-sovereignty arrangements) with parts of Canada.

 As I said, none of these options come anywhere close to a panacea.  But maybe Americans in time may conclude that to live and let live is preferable to a country in which tens of millions of Americans are, rhetorically, at least, at each other’s throats.

John C. Calhoun: Blue State Icon?

18 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by Jim Langcuster in U.S. Politics, Uncategorized

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Blue Stats, Calexit, California Independence, Devolution, Federalism, Jim Langcuster, John C. Calhoun, Red States, secession, Shervin Pishevar

john-calhoun2

John C. Calhoun, architect of Southern exceptionalism.

It’s often said that politics produces strange bedfellows.  And it appears that two weeks after the election of Donald Trump, a growing number of left-leaning blue-staters are embracing, however unwittingly, the political legacy of one of one of red state America’s most incendiary firebrands.

For 180 or so years, elites in the blue states – or what became blue states – have been wagging their fingers at Southerners and other red state Americans, decrying our appalling lack of patriotism and commitment to national unity and, even worse, our recalcitrance in the face of federal power and all that is deemed good, noble and decent in nation and the world. And, rest assured, if, after a year or so following a Hillary victory these fissiparous tendencies had surfaced once again in the South or any of the red states, the outcry would have been unremittingly harsh, with the left screaming about the dangerous rise of secessionist sentiment and the ugly racist, reactionary, conspiratorial and paramilitary-related impulses driving all of it.

Now that the proverbial shoe is on the other foot – now that red state rather than blue state America is in a position to tighten the federal screws – a growing number of Californians and other coastal blue states almost seem disposed toward the ideology of one of the greatest red state recalcitrants of them all: John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina firebrand who helped refine the nullification doctrine and even drew his native state and much of the rest of the South to the precipice of secession in the 1830’s.  And this embrace is occurring with hardly the batting of an eye.

And make no mistake: The people calling for secession or, at the very least, genuine devolution, are not simply ordinary people but also businessmen with real influence. One prominent Silicon Valley investor, Shervin Pishevar, walked back his earlier assertions of California secession, though affirming “a new Federalism where state and local governments are empowered to determine their destinies while bonded together in a United States of America.”

Think about this for a moment. A red state billionaire or political leader wouldn’t have conceived of raising such views following a Hillary victory without the inevitable verbal upbraiding by elites and the mainstream media. Yet, in the weeks following Trump’s unexpected victory, these sentiments are being espoused by the very people who otherwise would have regarded such opinions as dangerous, divisive, if not traitorous, talk only a short time ago.

But there is a silver lining to all of this rising fissiparous blue-state sentiment: It will likely pave the way for some genuine attempts at returning power to states and localities. States were envisioned by the Founding Fathers as entities with the attributes of nationhood but that were compelled, out of necessity, to pool a share of their sovereignty, namely, defense, foreign policy and economic policy,  to a general government – an approach considered far more efficient than each of these states exercising this sovereignty separately.

Honestly, despite all the hypocrisy that newfound blue state affinity for states rights and localism conveys, I wish California lots of luck.  I’ve got no problem with the idea of blue state America preempting Calhoun.  California and the other blue coastal states have every right to reacquire the accoutrements of nationhood that once characterized all of the states of the American Union.

I just hope that these states understand that red states are as much entitled to these attributes of nationhood as they are.

A Techless Revolution?

16 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by Jim Langcuster in Conservatism, U.S. Politics

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Donald Trump, Identity Politics, Jim Langcuster, Middle American Radicals, Ruy Teixeira, Samuel Francis, social media, Talk Radio

samuel-francis

Samuel T. Francis, the paleocon intellectual who anticipated the MARs revolution a generation ago. 

I was with a close friend last night watching a Fox New interview with James Webb, who discussed the Democratic Party’s embrace of  identity politics and the role it has played in sapping the party’s historic support from the white working class.

At one point, my friend turned to me and observed, “Can you believe that it’s finally possible to watch these sorts of anti-PC discussions on television?”

He’s right, of course, and it reflects the fact that identity politics is a double-edged sword. Sooner or later, working-class whites inevitably would wise up to its unpalatable, if not frightening, implications and embrace a  version of their own identity politics – or so went conventional thinking.  Indeed the late paleoconservative intellectual and Washington Times columnist Sam Francis, who coined the term Middle American Radicals (MARs), foresaw this trend emerging a generation ago.  It emerged briefly around columnists Pat Buchanan’s short-lived celebrity candidacy in 1992.

Yet, I wonder:  Was Middle American Radicalism, which finally succeeded with Donald Trump, really an inevitable outcome?  A quarter century ago, this radicalism gained only a tenuous and brief hold under Pat Buchanan. But should we be surprised?  Unlike other other groups – African-Americans, feminists and LGBTs, for example – MARs lacked any discernible support among media, higher education, etc.

Only with the advent of alternative news outlets – Talk Radio, Fox News and, more recently and perhaps most notably, social media – has Middle American Radical sentiment managed to coalesce and to become self-aware.

Despite the entirely unexpected and unprecedented Trump victory, MARs face an unusually steep uphill climb over the next few years, certainly in demographic terms.

Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira accurately observes that the Trump/MARs realignment will likely turn out to be a short-lived political resurgence that is increasingly supplanted by the shift of college-educated Millennials to the Democratic base, one that already is augmented by the all but unwavering support of Asian, African-American and Latino voters.

Emerging tech supplied the means through which the MARs insurgency coalesced around the unprecedented candidacy of Donald Trump.  Now a soon-to-be President Trump must supply the vision to ensure that this insurgency is not remembered a century from now merely as a flash in the political pan.

Just What Is The Alt-Right?

15 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by Jim Langcuster in Conservatism, U.S. Politics

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alt-right, Breitbart, Donald Trump, Election 2016, Jim Langcuster, Paul Gottfried, Stephen Bannon

stephen-bannonPresident-elect Trump’s appointment of Stephen Bannon as his domestic security adviser has ignited a firestorm of criticism within the predictable quarters, namely mainstream media.

In the interests of providing a broad context for consideration and discussion, I’ve posted the Mother Jones article on Bannon. The whole subject of Breitbart and the alt-right is a complicated one, as most political movements are. The founder of Breitbart, the late Andrew Breitbart, was a Jew, a liberal Democrat who gravitated to conservatism while watching the Clarence Thomas hearings.

I’ll have more to say about this in future posts.  For now, suffice it to say that the alt-right label remains a fuzzy one, reflecting a loose association of many deeply disaffected conservatives of various ideological convictions. And to add an extra layer of complication to all of this, one of the conservative intellectuals singled out as a founder of the movement is Paul Gottfried, a Yeshiva University graduate and an unusually well-published university professor. In fact, Gottfried is acknowledged as having coined the term “alternative right” – or alt-right.

Adding an extra wrinkle to this story, Gottfried appears ambivalent about the role he played in the formation of this loose movement.

Troubling Statements

13 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by Jim Langcuster in U.S. Politics

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authoritarian language, Donald Trump, Election 2016, Gulag

​I have heard quite a few recriminative statements from some in the aftermath of the election.  One of the most disturbing goes something like this: “All of you Trump supporters are going to have own up to the racist, misogynist and homophobe you have elected.” 

Frankly, statements like this are the reason why millions voted for Trump, because this sort of hectoring language is not very far from “To the Gulag with you!”  Some Trump supporters may lack undergraduate and graduate degrees, but they do recognize authoritarian language when they hear it.

We Need Systemic Federal Reform

13 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by Jim Langcuster in U.S. Politics

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Democratic Party, Donald Trump, Federalism, secession

Well, let’s see: rioting in the streets,  the possible breakup of our two-party system  into a multiple party system and growing calls for secession in major U.S states. When are we going to come to terms with the fact that we are two and possibly even three or more nations shoehorned into one?

When are we going to realize that a one-size-fits-all governing strategy simply can’t be imposed on us any longer? When are we going to embrace systemic federal reform?

The Democrats’ Federalist Redux

10 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by Jim Langcuster in U.S. Politics

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2016 Presidential Elections, Bi-Coastal Party, Democratic Party, Donald Trump, Federalists, Hillary Clinton, Jim Langcuster, National Republicans, Whigs

federalism

A depiction of Federalist support (Federalist States depicted in blue) in post-colonial America.

As my beloved 8th grade history teacher liked to say, history repeats itself.

One of the remarkable outcomes of Tuesday’s election is how the Democratic party seems to be transforming into a predominantly bi-coastal and urban party – a sort of 21st century updating of the Federalists and their successors, the National Republicans and Whigs.

Upscale, Gentrified and Urban

Much like them, the Democratic Party has become an upscale, gentrified  and urban party pitted against a country party, the GOP, which resembles in many respects Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, though, to be sure, it still maintains a significant urban presence throughout the American heartland.

Earlier this year, a number of astute pundits pointed out that the Democrats would be in exceedingly dire straits if they lost, which,at the time, of course, was considered a far-flung possibility.

A Democratic Reckoning?

Last Tuesday’s upset does portend a reckoning for the Democrats.  The bi-coastal and urban makeup of the Democrats was not so much a pressing concern while they were in power.  But without the patronage associated with the presidency and a sufficient foothold within the vast American heartland, they face acute competitive disadvantages for the foreseeable future.
I was reminded of the Democrats’ hard reality viewing the splendid interactive post-election map posted by the New York Times, depicting presidential voting patterns on a county-by-county basis. Running my cursor across a wide swath of “Flyover Country” from the Shenandoah Valley region of northern Virginia to the upper northwest corner of Nevada I crossed many counties with Trump support as high or even higher than 70 percent.

From Yellow Dog to Ruby-Red Pachyderm

Incidentally, in my native northwest Alabama, which used to be one of the most solidly and assertively Democratic enclaves in America, those margins ran even higher.  Seventy-nine percent of voters supported Trump in my native county of Franklin.  In neighboring Colbert County, once a heavily unionized and arguably the state’s most consistently Yellow Dog Democratic county, Trump support exceeded 69 percent.

The Democrats dominated local politics when I attended high school in the region in the late 70’s, though large percentages of people supported GOP nominees in presidential elections, notably in 1964, 1972 and 1980.

Now even that has changed.  The GOP in northwest Alabama and in most of the rest of the state dominates politics at all levels, municipal to the federal.

What remains of the Democratic presence Alabama Alabama is in the predominantly African-American sections of Black Belt Alabama and Jefferson County, of which Birmingham serves as the county seat. Most of the rest of the state is deep-dyed red. And that holds true for virtually all of the South – deep red heartlands, punctuated by large urban, predominately African-American areas, though, to be sure, cultural creatives with strong Democratic sympathies are evident in many of these areas.

This steep demographic decline isn’t limited to the South. Throughout much of Red State America, state Democratic parties are coming to resemble the GOP patronage parties that soldiered on in the South from the end of Reconstruction until the Reagan Revolution in 1980.

It is even possible to travel thousands of miles across the breadth of the American heartland without even passing through a blue county. And this brings me back to my original premise:  The present-day American political party system bears a remarkable resemblance to the emerging political system of post-colonial America. We are increasingly divided between blue cities comprised of highly educated cultural creatives and the deep-dyed red rural heartland.

Federalist Redux?

The short-term problem for them, at least, as I see it, is that they are currently shut out of some states in the South, parts of the Midwest and large parts of the Far West. To be sure, the GOP faces its own demographic challenges: the decline of its main base, whites,  its reputation among millions of millennials as an obscurantist know-nothing party and its comparative failure to make inroads into emerging demographic groups.

Even so, the Democratic party seems to face the biggest challenge – at least, in the short term: It’s separation from much of the American heartland and it’s all but total reliance on a coalition of affluent, highly educated urban elites and minorities.

For now, it seems, the Democratic party’s great Federalist redux doesn’t bode well for it’s future – it’s immediate future, at least.

The End of Clintonism

10 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by Jim Langcuster in U.S. Politics

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Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Jim Langcuster, Richard Nixon

nixon-and-clinton

Former President Nixon conferring with President Bill Clinton in the White House in 1993.

The Clintons arrived at her headquarters Tuesday night with high hopes of victory, possibly  even a resounding one that would shape the American political landscape for decades to come.

They left facing the bitter reality that Trump’s electoral upset had likely rendered the Clinton dynasty, if not Clintonism in general, extinct.

In many ways, the Clinton legacy bears remarkable parallels to  that of Richard Nixon – and in this case, I’m focusing entirely on Bill’s presidential legacy.  Both Nixon and Clinton were gifted intellectuals, though Clinton was able to indulge his intellectual gifts publicly in a way that Nixon wasn’t, largely  due to his rather impeccable elite educational credentials and the fact that he had been largely adopted into the U.S. political Establishment. Nixon, largely because of his nonelite educational and provincial Republican pedigree, was denied acceptance – a factor that fed his deep-seated and self-destructive bitterness and paranoia, but that’s another story.

Along with keen intellects, both men also possessed razor sharp, incisive political minds able to perceive and quickly seize on fleeting political opportunities.  Indeed it was out of a sense of deep political necessity that both undertook moderate transformations of their respective political parties.

Both strategies were alike in the sense that they focused on winning voters in what is now known as Red State America, and the South played a particularly significant role in both efforts. In fact, both men will be remembered as architects of Southern political strategies.  Likewise, both Nixon and Clinton were political moderates who reluctantly tacked their parties to the right to capitalize on the South, though Nixon was at heart far more of a centrist than Clinton, a Baby Boomer who possessed the soul of a maverick New South liberal.

In time, historians may discern interesting parallel.

Both men were unusually perceptive and astute political gamesmen and improvizers. They knew how to exploit political opportunities when they arose, even in those instances when these ran against their political temperaments.

In Nixon’s case, Sen. Barry Goldwater’s disastrous 1964 presidential campaign nevertheless opened up a major opportunity for Republican prospects in the South.  And this provided Nixon, a pragmatic centrist like his predecessor and political patron, Dwight Eisenhower, with a strong incentive to capitalize on this opening by moving his party to the right.  The Red State populism of George C. Wallace as well as the need for Nixon’s need to protect his right flank from an internal insurgency provided additional impetus.

In the end, though, Nixon’s pragmatic centrist vision of the GOP, leavened a bit by hardcore-sounding conservative rhetoric to appease the post-Civil Rights Southern voters, was ultimately supplanted by Reagan’s modified Goldwater model.

Likewise, Clinton’s brilliant re-tooling of the Democratic Party in the early 90’s ultimately may be superseded by a considerably more left-leaning model inspired to one degree or another by the Bernie Sanders insurgency against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries.

That is why in the end, both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton may be as brilliant strategists whose visions for their respective parties supplied valuable but only temporary solutions for their parties’ political fortunes.

To put it another way, they may be remembered as two of American history’s most gifted political strategists, though not  as the architects of enduring political traditions as Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan were.

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