The first real lesson of the election is that whales don’t get cancer because the cancers get cancer before they get big enough to kill the whale1.
Put another way, the ideals of the modern left are very bad for society, because they obstruct effective organisation by encouraging disruptive behaviour, allow corruption by removing personal responsibility, and assign people to functions based on identity rather than ability.
However, a political movement also is a society, and those ideals are not only destructive to society, they are destructive to the political movement that advances them.
Trump could easily have been beaten by a good candidate. A below-average career democrat like Biden was able to beat him (OK, maybe that was fraud. I don’t know. The fact that there was a somewhat even national swing towards Trump compared with 2020 suggests possibly not, to me)
Trump talked about running for president for decades, but he didn’t do it until 2016 because he couldn’t win. He beat Clinton in 2016 and Harris now, because they were bad candidates who got the nomination through a combination of corruption and diversity ideology.
If you can’t say that a bad candidate is bad, if she is a woman or a minority or both, then you will necessarily get bad candidates. If you are corrupt, then you will get bad candidates through corruption rather than good candidates on their merits. If you do not hold people responsible, your staff will spend campaign money on meeting their favourite pop stars rather than on getting votes.
The Democratic Party has poisoned itself with the same poisons that it poisons the country with.
The catch, of course, is that the Republican Party is not much better. It wasn’t only the Democratic opposition that was so unusually weak in 2016 that Trump could beat it. Perhaps the Republican party is less captured by its own bureaucracy, and their third-rate candidates were not so vulnerable to maverick outsiders appealing to the primary electorate against the party machine? Sanders had his own popularity, but he was more effectively nobbled than Trump was, although at least as much effort was devoted to nobbling Trump. On top of their corruption and diversity ideology, the Democratic Party’s bureaucracy and authoritarinism undermined its ability to select an electable candidate.
I think this is also a big part of the mechanism of one of the big questions of our age, “Why did politics go insane?”
As mass media became more appealing — newspapers to radio to television to social media — what Americans call the “ground game” of politics became less important. The parties of the 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries were really serious organisations, with millions of members, regular meetings, publications, social events, and fully organised and directed for campaigning. People who were heavily into politics lived and breathed this organisation. Today you can be important in politics by making memes on social media, and have no idea of what goes into creating and maintaining an organisation the size of a 1950s political party. Thousands of people can evolve ideologies on Twitter or Tumblr and never notice that those ideologies are a complete barrier to getting anything done in the outside world.
However, the organisations are still important to the process of selecting candidates, even with America’s primary system. And what just happened was that an organisation made disfunctional by anti-organisation ideology picked a terrible candidate.
I find that I have already stated my opinion regarding the Trump victory, under the post headed “The horror of foreign policy”:
The election of a Trump, though a disaster for decorum and good taste, will come with the silver lining of a sensible policy vis-à-vis Russia.
Some commentators are already quoting H.L. Mencken:-
As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts’ desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
The horror of four more years of this buffoonery is not that the United States will be mal-administered: the system will step in to ensure this does not happen: but that the latest antics of the orange-faced shit-gibbon will again be headline news. It’s like being told that there will henceforth be no television programmes apart from endless repeats of Sgt Bilko and I Love Lucy. If only there were some party with the power to shut down his twitter/X account: but no, the Master of X is the slave of Trump and he will covfefe his way through as many of the remaining years as he can.
Trump managed to persuade the electors that he was the candidate for White men and those born within the jurisdiction, while Harris was the candidate for Black women. This gave him an overwhelming majority of white male votes, and a healthy portion of white female votes (because they were white) and even a significant number of black male votes (because they were male.) With Harris, the proportions are reversed, even millionaires like Oprah Winfrey endorsing her.
This enables the Trump side to win, as there are more white people than Black. It is just not in the interests of reproductive white people to have a Black, feminist, transvestite etc friendly faction in charge of hiring and border control. The white male working and small business class perceive this as a movement to tax them to finance equal opportunities hirings performing roles of dubious to non-existent value.
So what I hope will happen is as follows.
Trump keeps his promise and makes peace with Russia, averting World War Three. After all, he did terminate outside involvement in Afghanistan so I have every hope that this intention is sincere. Europe resumes use of cheap Russian gas, reducing the cost of living but moving the continent more into a neutral, Russia friendly position.
The appointment of Gaetz to Attorney General will be followed by decriminalisation of marijuana usage (already one of his pet issues) and a nationwide reduction of the age of sexual consent to something more in keeping with actual contemporary mores: sixteen for example. This will let Gaetz off the hook with regard to trafficking accusations.
What I assume will then happen, without necessarily wanting it to, is that Trump will plough ahead with tax cuts which will be greatly to the benefit of Elon Musk but not at all to Trump’s ordinary voters. For the first two years of his presidency he will be taken up by struggles with the Republican Party. I have found many quotes predicting this:
“Such a slim majority means that the legislation most prized on the right and feared by the left—a national abortion ban, dramatic cuts to federal spending, the repeal of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and Joe Biden’s largest domestic-policy achievements—is unlikely to pass Congress.”
“If Trump wants to smoke out the Senate Republicans who aren’t fully behind him, he has easier ways of doing so than putting an entire Star Wars cantina of idiots up for Senate confirmation.” (Robert Reich)
With regards to his other professed policies, it will be interesting to see how they pan out. The proposals to deport illegal immigrants and build a tariff wall are populist measures. They are designed to attract the vote of ordinary Joes from rust belt areas. It may be that they were not genuinely intended. They could go the way of the proposed wall excluding Mexicans, vetoed by unco-operative Republicans and Democrats. As Trump has only one term to serve he has no need to worry that the voters will punish him at the next election.
The deportations will take place amid great fanfares. Only after Trump’s term comes to an end will it be apparent that Trump has deported fewer than Joe Biden did. Then there will be mid-term elections, and a lot of his 2024 voters, without actually admitting that they were wrong in 2024, just won’t be motivated to come out again, not having been benefited in any discernable way, and so the country will revert to the usual Republican/Democrat impasse, meaning Trump won’t actually be able to do anything disastrous. There is also the fact that a person of his age and waist-line does not have much of an active life expectancy, and the presidency of the United States is a fatally stressful position.
I see this period as possibly a repeat of the Watergate period. He will probably take so many liberties during the period of his unchallenged power that he will be vulnerable to impeachment once the Democrats have the ability to proceed.
He beat Clinton in 2016 and Harris now, because they were bad candidates who got the nomination through a combination of corruption and diversity ideology.
This assertion is partially meaningless—to me, at least—because you have failed to define corruption—and probably wholly untrue. I can work out what diversity ideology is, but with corruption it is uncertain whether you mean something criminal that involves the improper use of bribes or rather just something that you don’t like.
It may be that the fact that the Swiss political system lacks the cult of personality which disfigures the American one and the belief that it is a nice place to live are unrelated. Indeed, as America is felt by many to be a good place to live despite defects in its political system, this appears to be so.
I have already stated that it is the American Presidential Elections that I particularly object to. The thing about presidential elections is the electorate is enormous—whale sized in fact—and includes a large number of fatuous and ill-informed persons. For this reason, product recognition gives a particular advantage. Interestingly, this is an important part of the working of monarchy as well, so pay attention. A country has a monarch: he rules effectively, so his (son and) successor is given the same name. A considerable number of peasants in the backlands will not notice the substitution and extend the same goodwill to the second of that name. With the name Henry in England that extended up to the eighth of that name: in Britain we have been through six Georges already and have another lined up for future use.
The same principle can be found with the name Louis in France and Christian in Denmark. Interestingly enough it seems that Tibetan Rinpoches (the Karmapa, the Dalai Lama, etc) started reincarnating at exactly the same time when monarchs in Europe started recycling their names.
Equally, in politics, there is a tendency for political office to be handed down to family members. In Ireland this is particularly common: father to son, but quite often from husband to wife. People who were satisfied with the original incumbent will vote for his namesake: it saves time reading the resumé of the proposed alternatives.
So obviously, a Hilary was an obvious act to follow a Bill. On sound monarchical principles, when the Emperor Bill is (due to constitutional impediments in the COTUS) unable to continue ruling, then it follows that Queen Hilary should step in as regent until the Princess Chelsea comes of age.) If there is something wrong with Hilary, there is something wrong with the principle of monarchy, which means that your entire political philosophy is fallacious.
Moving from the ‘corruption’ charge to the ‘diversity ideology’ one, it is a notorious fact that the vote is extended to women and persons of the diversity pigmentation. This means that eventually these people will start to ask why so few of their number are occupying positions of power, and parties will respond accordingly, because they do not want to lose their votes.
Plus we have to take note that he did not beat Hilary Clinton. She won more votes than he did. He got more votes in the Electoral College, meaning he got to move into the White House and was duly recorded as President, but as he did not control the House of Representatives, he did not exercise as much power as he would wish to.
Money, it is alleged by some, will not buy you happiness, but it may get you the American Presidency. Being elected POTUS is, and always has been, a notoriously expensive process.
The presidency has always been a rich man’s toy: it is designed to resemble monarchy, while being subject to variation and the possibility of impeachment. The reason why Donald Trump was selected as the Republican Party’s candidate and not some ‘influencer’ with millions of followers is that he has millions and millions of dollars of inherited wealth.
At a guess, I would say that this was sufficient to pay for his election first time round, but not quite enough for his second go. On this, the third attempt, he was aided by having the richest man in the world working for his cause.
So did Kamala lose? There are remarkable anomalies in the vote. There are an awful number of states where Trump contrived to win by just 1%. I think if you start to multiply these you find an improbable result.
Democrats may have lost the White House and their U.S. Senate majority, but one silver lining is that in nearly every battleground state, Republicans lost close Senate races. According to USA TODAY, almost all of the Senate races in the states that decided the Electoral College majority — like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — broke for Democrats.
I don’t have to allege bribery and electoral fraud. There are sufficient ways that the enthusiastic registration of persons thought to be favourable to the party’s cause can swing the vote.
What makes a bad candidate? The amount of money that the other side has to throw into the match.
Money is indeed very important, but it is difficult to talk about it without some level of numeracy. A million is a thousand thousand, and a billion is a thousand million. (When you and I were young we were taught that a billion was a million million, but that old British definition is never used today; a million million is now called a trillion).
Trump does indeed have “millions and millions of dollars of inherited wealth”: he inherited $314 million in 1999 (though he was probably worth ten times that amount by then). Obviously he benefited from family money earlier in life. His finances are notably obscure, but as the profitability of the property business depends massively on how much it costs to borrow money, and that depends greatly on what the value of your assets are, they are more likely exaggerated than understated. Indeed, he was ordered by a New York court to pay $355 million at the beginning of this year for “fradulently inflating the value of his assets”. (I assume that is still in some kind of appeals process). His net worth is probably in low single digit billions, but could be less or even negative. Michael Bloomberg, who ran unsuccessfully against Biden for the 2020 Democratic nomination, is worth $100 billion, for comparison, and spent about $700 million of his own money on his primary campaign. (For another comparison, Elon Musk funded his “America PAC” with $118 million to support Trump for the 2024 campaign).
Trump is often accused (very plausibly, in my view) of profiting personally from his political campaign: his campaign funds paid over $50 million in legal costs relating to the many cases brought against him. Against a few hundred million here and there, the Trump 2024 campaign spent in total in the region of $1 billion, while the Harris campaign spent $2 billion. It does not appear that Trump has put a lot of his own money into becoming president, at least in 2020 or 2024.
From reporting of the New York fraud case:
‘Trump repeatedly attacked [Judge] Engoron and the case throughout the 11-week trial on social media, outside the courtroom – and even to the judge’s face while he testified. On Friday, Engoron got the last word, painting Trump as a “pathological” fraudster who would not stop unless forced.’
Again, his “fraud” is to claim to be richer than he is.
A final point: if elections are good and important, these sums are disgracefully tiny. That the candidates for the presidency of the country between them raised and spent about $10 per eligible voter in campaigning suggests that the whole thing is in reality a small sideshow. An Athenian would sneer at these pikeys.
This reminds me of a situation I once witnessed in corporate governance. Two rich and ambitious men, both major shareholders, were at each other’s throats: there was a third party who held the balance of power. I held some nebulous position with regard to the third party: shall we say Groom of Canine Micturation. One of the rich men felt himself wrongly over-ruled: his solution was to seek out an even richer man, to a stellar degree, and persuade him to invest in the enterprise, leaving Mr Over-ruled to be in charge of his investment.
A similar arrangement was found with Harrods Ltd. Mohammed Fayed managed to take over this enterprise with the aid of a massive concealed investment which came from the Khashoggi family, to whom he was related by marriage. This enabled him to occupy the position of owner of Harrods and exercise, some would say miss-exercise the attendant privileges, details of which are coming out even today, but the true owners were the Khashoggis, who did not mind what he did as long as it remained profitable.
With Donald Trump I would say that he won his first presidential election with his own money. By this I mean, with the momentum from his own fortune: he would have been compensated by millions of party donors. For his second presidential election, this was not enough: by now sufficient of the electorate were aware that they had derived no benefit from his presidency and did not turn out to support him. Consequently, for the third election he sought out the help of an even richer man, Elon Musk, whose wealth won the election for him.
Your complaint that the amount at issue is disgracefully tiny misses the point. When you are rich—obscenely, unbelievably rich—ordinary expenditure does not apply to you. Donald Trump, by becoming president, can get out of the huge fines levelled against him. He can persuade substantial sections of the electorate that they are acting in their own interest by donating to his campaign. Officials will give him breaks and overlook his dubious business methods because he is, after all, the President: he will not need to bribe or even ask them.
This is the man who said he would build a wall against Mexico and get the Mexicans to pay for it. This is of course his business method and the business method of anyone in the income bracket of the United States: purchases will, when the final account is reckoned, be found to have been paid for by the vendor.
The expense of Elon Musk’s participation in the electoral campaign is offset by the rise in the share-price of his companies that has been occasioned by this process. His fortune is so substantial that it generates a momentum, ensuring the success of whatever he wishes. He does not have to do anything so vulgar as spend his money.
The problem is that Elon Musk now owns Donald Trump and does not appear to be prepared to forget this. He lacks the indifference of the Khashoggis. How the reign of Proxy-elect Trump and President Musk will play out I do not know.
News Item from my feed:-
In the weeks since the 2024 election ended, Democrats have been soul-searching about how Donald Trump was re-elected under a cloud of scandal and court cases. Was it the economy that did it? A weak Harris campaign?
For former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, the answer is pretty simple. The main difference maker was Elon Musk.
“Elon and I disagree on some things, but Elon deserves his place at the table,” Bannon recently told Puck. “He stroked a $150 million check for the ground game, which is not sexy, at the exact moment we needed it. He came in with the money and the professionals. To be brutally frank, it’s the reason we won.”