Monthly Archives: August 2020

A Dystopian Bellwether

31 Monday Aug 2020

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California, which possesses the fifth-largest economy in the world and has assumed many attributes of a nation-state, is widely viewed as the nation’s principal bellwether state.

To return to an earlier theme: I still marvel at some the folks back home in my native Northwest Alabama – diehard Southern Baptists and other conservative Christians – who still affirm their “yellee-dawg” Democratic loyalties. One of them quickly comes to mind: a high school teacher who dressed me up and down for summoning the temerity to wear a “Gerald Ford for President” button to her class room way back in the fall of 1976. (Yes, I’m notorious for holding grudges, even across decades.)

And this brings me to another one of my perennial themes, the troubled, if not imperilled, state of the Golden State – California.

In the view of many, this bellwether state is assuming contours that strike many of us as disturbingly portentous – possible signs of dystopian future perhaps not too far removed from a few of the iconic science fiction movies such as “Mad Max” and “Escape from New York” that left such searing impressions on those of us who reached maturity the 70’s and 80’s.

California has for at least the past half century been regarded as this nation’s social, cultural and political bellwether. And within the last 20 years, this increasingly midnight-blue state has been regarded as the Democratic Party’s crown electoral jewel as well as its policymaking bellwether. Moreover, to an increasing degree, Democratic policymakers establish policy benchmarks for other blue states, if not the rest of the nation as a whole.

And this brings me back to the folks back home who still doggedly cling to the political identity to which they still apparently regard as tribal. What are they thinking? How do they manage to rationalize the dysfunction of California? Why do they assume that this pathology somewhow will remain contained – that it will not be carried East, ultimately into the ruby-red states of Arkansas, Alabama and West Virginia? 

What assures them that the rest of the country will somehow remain cordoned off from the megastate to which our cultural and political elites have looked for inspiration for much of the past century?

Why do they still assume that life will go on as it always has?

For many of us who were raised around this doggedly tribal cultural identity, even marveling at it on occasion, these remain million-dollar questions.

Negotiating the American “Gorbachev Moment.”

31 Monday Aug 2020

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Thousands rallying sound the Russian “White House” in Moscow in defense of Russian sovereignty during the post-Soviet “August Coup” in 1991.

A perversely interesting read, and, frankly, I find it fascinating that this scholar made no mention of Mikhail Gorbachev’s furious efforts to negotiate a new union treaty that would have transformed the post-communist Soviet Union into a union of sovereign states.

The fact is, the United States is also fast approaching a similar inflection point – its own Gorbachev moment – the point at which it dawns on most everyone that existing constitutional arrangements simply are not equipped to handle the stressors playing out around the country. This partly stems from the fact that the hard left is banking on full-blown hegemony and has little use for the Madisonian protects that once safeguarded American liberties.


Meanwhile, the right, for it’s part, is so invested in flag waving and nationalist rhetoric that it can’t summon the courage to admit that everything is falling apart and that the most viable solution lies in the radical decentralization of federal power that would better address all of the cultural rifts playing out in this country. So what we face, as a result, is an impasse, a dangerous impasse, that resembles in some respects the late Soviet Union. Either we find some constitutional means of dealing with these cleavages, namely by returning power to regions of the country with strong cultural and historical affinities, or we face something even more horrendous: authoritarian leftist political and cultural hegemony or civil war or outright dissolution, with all the domestic and geopolitical upheaval this entails.


Yet, I would venture to day that most of us on this group are roundly convinced that the feds will never acceded to this, so the ultimately solution will be states, clusters of states, acting unilaterally, much as they did in 1776,

Donald Trump: Political Architect

31 Monday Aug 2020

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In a recent interview commentator and UC-Berkely Emeritus Prof. Victor Davis Hanson raised an important point: Trump, despite his being rejected as a political thinker/theorist, by virtually all pundits, left and right, has achieved a truly singular feat. He is only one of a paltry handful of presidents – namely, Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson and FDR – who have successfully achieved lasting ideological transformation of their political parties.

Trump has distinguished himself in his first term as a political architect.

For better or for worse, depending on one’s political orientation, the GOP is now a worker-populist party, far removed from the technocratic, Establishment Republicanism of the Bushes.

It’s worth pointing out that such transformations are damnably difficult and have eluded quite a number of other presidents, even a few whom are remembered today as great or near-great. Eisenhower’s Modern Republicanism was effectively swept away with the advent of Reagan in ’80, though the 40th president owes Goldwater a significant debt for this change. Richard Nixon, arguably one of the most brilliant political strategists and Machiavellians of history, tried to build a sort of Disraeli-style anti-Establishment party, which even portended a break with the GOP, but ultimately was brought down by Watergate.

Carter attempted a sort of moderate-liberal populist model but ended up disenfranchising his Establishment wing, leading to a progressive insurgency via Ted Kennedy that seriously weakened his prospects.

Clinton, however reluctantly, constructed a moderate alternative to McGovernism, but that legacy now appears to have been swamped by the party’s progressive wing.

Even if he is defeated in November, Trump arguably has conceived and breathed life into a populist insurgency that will likely function as a potent force in U.S. politics for years, perhaps even decades, to come.