Rats; Clefts; Gouging; and BoJo.
Rats; Clefts; Gouging; and BoJo.
Enemies of the People: Hillary Clinton
In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh considers his own generation, the Boomers, and the repugnant spectacle of them continuing to govern our country through the next few election cycles.
'They Only Eat Rat'
When we Baby Boomers entered first grade back in the early/middle 1950s, it was not unusual for us to encounter forty or fifty other children competing for classroom space while a single harried nun or teacher herded us little darlings into some semblance of alphabetical order, made us take our seats, and began instruction. Crammed into newly built classrooms to accommodate our unprecedented numbers, cheek to jowl with a bunch of strangers, and constantly skirmishing with others for the teacher's attention, a place at the drinking fountain, or just a spot in the lunchroom, we hated each other on sight—and, like too many rats trapped in too small an area with not enough food, we've been fighting with each other ever since.
Now here we are, in our seventies, and we're still strapped together in this ghastly generational pas des millions. Some of us have died off, of course, but the remnants of the legendary pig in a python generation are still wending our way through the snake's entrails, tussling with each other as we pass through the intestines of the body politic. Our country currently has a 79-year-old president, a 75-year-old principal GOP contender, an 82-year-old speaker of the House, an 80-year-old Senate minority leader, an 88-year-old senior senator from California, an 88-year-old senior senator from Iowa, and an 80-year old junior senator from Vermont who has his eye on the White House. Meanwhile, waiting in wings like a sodden, road-company Lady Macbeth, is 2016's loser, Hillary Clinton, 74, ready to step over the bodies if and when they ever drop.
There's no love lost among them, but like the Struldbrugs of Luggnagg in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, they can neither quit nor, seemingly, die—only keep aging in perpetuity, at each other's throats forever.
There is a certain amount of truth in the old saw that with age comes wisdom. And it's also true that our word "senate"—a body of elder statesmen—has the same root as "senility." But at this point in our nation's history, we have gone beyond mature age and into the realm of the Grim Reaper, with Washington, D.C., having replaced Florida as God's Waiting Room. A nation that was founded by young, vigorous men, most of them in their prime (in 1776, Washington was 44; Jefferson, 33; Hamilton, 21; James Monroe, 18) and with their lives on the line, has been co-opted by snarling, barely articulate, grudge-ridden rent-seekers desperately hanging onto their livelihoods, and to hell with everybody else.
Hence the cage match now being played out in the runups to the fall congressional elections. Thanks to the manifest malignancy that is the Biden administration, everyone is looking past this November and focusing on 2024, when our rancid political system could possibly stage a presidential election featuring an 81-year-old Joe Biden vs. a 77-year-old Donald Trump, both of them at that point beyond the average American male life expectancy. What to do?
Could there possibly be a spectacle more unedifying than a (literally) terminally senile Biden scratching and clawing at a bitter, revanchist Trump, the pair of them wrestling over not the future of the country—why would they care? They won't live to see it—but over the 2016 and 2020 elections. Russian collusion! Dominion voting machines! Hunter's laptop from hell! January 6th! Get off my lawn! It would make us all remember what fun the past eight years were, and recall how little desire we should have to relive them.
Our Founding Editor, John O’Sullivan, offered some thoughts on the attempt to oust Boris Johnson as Tory Leader and Prime Minister.
Boris in the Last Chance Saloon Again
Boris Johnson survived a vote of no confidence among Tory MPs by 211 to 148 votes earlier tonight and thus remains Leader of the Conservative party and Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. His share of the total vote amounts to fifty-nine per cent of the Tory Party in Parliament—a decisive victory in most circumstances—and the circumstances in this case are quite favorable to Boris. Under the party’s leadership rules, no further vote of no confidence can be lodged against him for another year.
On paper, therefore, Johnson is safe from a challenge until the middle of 2023, which will be eighteen months before Britain’s next general election has to be held. And the nearer the election, the more nervous MPs become about changing their party leader—or, worse, trying to change him and failing….
the main threat to Johnson in last night’s vote is that the 148 dissidents who voted against him came from all wings of the Tory party, including some he thought he could rely on—Brexiteers, Tory traditionalists, free-market supporters, small business people, and the rest. They see a drift to statist and costly government programs, a failure to effectively oppose the take-over of important British institutions such as the British Museum and the National Trust by woke left-wing radicals, a taste for grandiose utopian enterprises such as Net-Zero which will impose huge energy costs on ordinary citizens until they have a fatal crash with reality, neither an ability nor an interest in controlling government spending, the breaking of explicit promises to control immigration, and the imposition of higher taxes in contravention of manifesto pledges.
It's a serious indictment. A former senior colleague, Lord (David) Frost, who had earlier resigned from Johnson’s cabinet because of the government’s “direction of travel,” tweeted in response to last night’s vote:
If the PM is to save his premiership and his government he should now take a different course - bring taxes down straightaway to tackle the cost of living crisis, take on public service reform, and establish an affordable and reliable energy policy for the long term.
Moreover, Johnson needs to embark on this conservative turn more or less immediately. His opponents are hoping that the Tories will lose two special by-elections coming up in a few weeks. Those elections are in safe Tory seats, and if the current opinion polls are correct, they will fall to the Opposition—and undoubtely set off a new round of demands for Boris’s departure by the media and internal Tory dissidents.
The smart money says he’ll go. So he will he probably stay.
Joan Sammon wrote about the outrageous anti-price gouging bill which was recently passed by Congress. As we’ve written previously, such measures have been tried and found wanting. They will only succeed in adding shortages to the scourge of high prices.
Weaponizing the Government Against the People
To assert that Washington D.C. is a political place is as obvious as asserting Twitter opposes free speech. It’s empirical. However, in the case of a bill the House recently passed, there is no doubt that legislators have reached a desperately new level of political gamesmanship. Whether rooted in blind ignorance, willful oblivion, or good old fashion partisan jackassery is not entirely clear. What is clear, however, is that there are specific tactics being integrated into many pieces of legislation introduced by House Democrats. Since taking office the Biden administration is keen to stitch investigatory powers into the authority of many agencies, even in defiance of political or constitutional reality.
Known as The Consumer Price Gouging Prevention Act of 2022,this bill passed largely and unsurprisingly along party lines, with the exception of four Democrats who joined their Republican colleagues and voted against it. The bill gives the president the power to issue an emergency declaration that would make it unlawful to hike gasoline and home energy prices, “...in an excessive or exploitative manner." It would also give the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) more tools to crack down on (punish) alleged price gouging, allowing the FTC to prioritize enforcement action on big oil and gas companies.
There are, however, a couple notable problems with this legislation and the corresponding vote on the House floor. Responding to price gouging doesn’t work if the people allegedly gouging don’t actually control the price of the products for which gouging is being alleged.
The oil and gas industry is divided into well-delineated sub-sectors. They include "upstream," focused on drilling and extracting oil and gas from out of the ground; "midstream," which broadly constitutes processing, storing, transporting and marketing the oil and gas extracted by the upstream companies; and "downstream," which represents the refining, distribution and retail sale of petroleum products.
Setting aside the lack of a definition in the bill of what "excessive or exploitative” might mean in the context of free markets, the more disconcerting element is that the legislation was specifically written to impugn the upstream oil and gas sector instead of to actually bring relief to consumers. These legislators know the upstream sector doesn’t control the prices consumers pay at the pump or for home heating oil. That wasn’t the point of introducing the legislation. Intentionally misleading their constituents while doing nothing to mitigate the market conditions was the point.
After having called for hearings last month about the causes of increasing fuel prices, the Democrat sponsors of the bill and those who voted for it, desire to conflate the activities of the oil and gas industry with the Biden administration’s failed energy policies and objectives, which these legislators support. It is a feckless effort that wastes time and resources, and diminishes the confidence of the electorate in their elected representatives. Their constituents, after all, are experiencing real economic hardship because of high consumer prices for fuel. Engaging in political stunts that achieve no tangible end is disrespectful and lazy.
Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, (D-TX) is one of the four Democrats who voted against the bill. "The Consumer Fuel Price Gouging Prevention Act would not fix high gasoline prices at the pump, and has the potential to exacerbate the supply shortage our country is facing, leading to even worse outcomes," Fletcher said in a statement. "For these reasons, I voted no on this legislation today."
Jack Dunphy contributed a piece on the recent school shooting in Uvalde, evaluating the situation from his perspective as a former cop:
To Protect and Serve?
Eighty minutes. That’s the amount of time that elapsed on May 24 between the first report of trouble at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., and the moment the gunman was shot and killed. We are understandably dismayed by this. How, we ask, when there were so many police officers at the school within minutes of the first 911 call, can it have taken so long to confront the gunman?
Two weeks on, the Uvalde massacre has largely receded from the news, the attention span of the typical American being roughly equal to that of a mosquito. But despite the fact that the horrors of that day are no longer on the front page, a reckoning awaits. Sad to say, but that reckoning will leave nearly everyone disappointed.
You may assume, having seen video of the prolonged inaction by the police that day, that civil suits will follow and juries will hold the responsible parties accountable. But no matter what malfeasance is revealed by the investigations now ongoing, it is unlikely that anyone will be held civilly liable for his failures.
As nonsensical as it may seem, police officers are immune from civil liability for failing to protect any individual from harm, even when that failure is as egregious as it appears to have been in Uvalde. In the U.S. Supreme Court cases of Castle Rock v. Gonzales and DeShaney v. Winnebago, and the D.C. Court of Appeals case of Warren v. District of Columbia, the courts held that police and other government entities could not be held liable for their various lapses that resulted in harm to the plaintiffs….
But there is a higher standard that police officers should be expected to observe than the legal one. No matter what laws are passed in Uvalde’s aftermath, no matter which police policies are changed, no matter how great our professed commitment to preventing more school shootings may be, similar incidents will follow. And cops responding to the next one may find themselves in a situation similar to that faced by the ones in Uvalde. They may stand idly by and ponder what their legal obligations are, but in that moment they must realize their moral obligation is clear: They must act to the very limits of their abilities to protect innocent life. Anything less is a dereliction, whether the courts hold them to account or not.
David Solway wrote about our deep civilizational divides.
Somewhere Near Davos, Hanging from a Cleft
The direction of the future can never be predicted or plotted with certainty; as the saying goes, man plans and God laughs. The turmoil that characterizes political affairs at the present time is a practical illustration of this proverbial truth. The array of contending variables on the contemporary national stage seems a veritable rat’s nest of identity crises and transition paradigms: civil disintegration, conservative revivalism, populist uprisings, autocratic leadership, and Globalist systematization. Which of these factors will prevail is an open question—a question which can be reformulated in terms of the distinction, lately widely discussed, between core countries and cleft countries.
A core country enjoys a stable central government, strong institutions, and a reasonable sense of unity, bound by ties of custom, economy, and heritage that allow for relative cultural harmony and political accord. One thinks of Japan. A cleft country, by contrast, is defined as a nation with cultural groupings sufficiently large and separate from one another in origin, faith, language and/or political convictions as to create profound or insoluble tensions. One thinks of worst-case scenarios like India or Yugoslavia splitting into territorial belligerents, or currently of Ukraine. Ivan Katchanovski’s Cleft Countries, written mainly for regional specialists, treats of the concept with specific reference to Ukraine and Moldova.
Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order deals with the subject on a larger, if controversial scale. According to Huntington, cultural tensions inevitably arise in “cleft countries… when a majority group belonging to one civilization attempts to define the state as its political instrument and to make its language, religion, and symbols those of the state.” The Clash of Civilizations proposed that a new kind of conflict, one centred on cultural identity, would become the focal point in the field of international relations. At the same time, cultural disparities and politically charged loyalties can and have become the focus of high-stress domestic relations as well.
The phenomenon is treated from a somewhat different scholarly perspective in Immanuel Wallerstein’s compendious World-Systems Analysis. (See also his premonitory 2003 The Decline of American Power.) Writing from a Leftist orientation, Wallerstein provides a detailed if somewhat clotted overview of the complex mechanics of what is now called "globalization" spread across diverse fields of knowledge and practice, including professional disciplines, economic arrangements, “race, sexuality, geopolitical structures and relatively open frontiers.”
Referring to the “spirit of Davos,” Wallerstein maps and effectively endorses the globalist-inspired replacement of the nation-state in a vast, interlocking system encompassing a new kind of social and political reality. But his account of the fraught maneuverings in the international realm as it “reconfigures the world economy”—or, in the words of a WEF panelist, “recalibrates” the structures of governance, trade, finance and permitted discourse—may also be applied to the intrinsic sphere of the nation-state. As Wallerstein writes, “The moral constraints traditionally enforced both by states and by religious institutions are finding their efficacity considerably diminished.”….
In the light of these considerations, I am particularly concerned with developments in my own country, which, to quote Michael Walsh, “is now completing its post-Covid descent into a fascist tyranny.” Canada is no longer the proximately coherent nation it once was, despite its origin in two founding peoples and occasional secessionist rancor. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may have been correct when he claimed that Canada has “no core identity,” that it is a “post-national state” (to which he is accessory), which is to say that it is no longer even recognizably intelligible as an integral country, ruined by failed leadership like Trudeau’s own, digital surveillance of citizens, cowcatcher immigration policies, class divisions, ruinous economic policies, tensions between eastern and western provinces, and competing cultural, tribal and political internal groups. It has become a textbook cleft country, provoked and embittered by the sidelining of the Constitution and a derecho of draconian measures, such as vaccine mandates, travel restrictions, information censorship, punitive carbon taxes and the like.
The U.S. has also devolved into a cleft country marked by an open border, millions of illegal refugees, ethnic voting blocs, artificially stoked racial hostilities, irregular elections, media censorship, administrative incompetence, political dystrophy, and domestic terrorists setting cities aflame. The Financial Times foresees the possibility of civil war. National tensions are at their highest level since the 1860s. The country’s motto might as well be E Pluribus, Multi Plures.
Obviously, with only few exceptions major nations with large populations are almost inevitably to some extent cleft, divided by hierarchical levels of political and economic structures. The danger is that social and cultural fissures—“fault lines” in Huntington’s terms—are always in danger of widening. When the “core,” the common set of beliefs and customs, begins to dissolve, the constituent groups that make up the nation’s census, regardless of power differentials, then become not partners in a common project but antagonists in a culture war no one can win—except, perhaps, the cleftocrats.
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Clarice Feldman, Peter Smith, and Tom Finnerty. All this and more this week at The Pipeline!