Tag: 2020 election

Populism Wins

The Portly Politico2 Comments

A major lesson of the 2016 election was that the neoliberal consensus of the prior thirty years was not the panacea its advocates claimed.  Trump’s candidacy was premised on the notion that the national government should work for the interests of the nation’s people, not on behalf of globalist concerns and aloof cosmopolitan elites.  Government could be reformed to strengthen the nation, rather than operating as the piggy bank for and protector of internationalists.

It’s interesting to reflect how entrenched the assumptions of neoliberalism were prior to 2015-2016.  When Trump began his historic campaign, virtually no one on the Right was talking about tariffs, other than Pat Buchanan (and a long essay on the necessity of a trade war with China that Oren Cass wrote for National Review in 2014).  The outsourcing of jobs overseas was assumed to be a short-term sacrifice that would result in more efficiency (ergo, lower prices on consumer goods) and more skilled jobs here.  We were a “nation of immigrants,” so we’d better throw the doors wide open.

With Trump’s election, a long-dormant populist wing reemerged, consisting both of conservative Republicans and disgruntled Democrats.  Tariffs became an important foreign and domestic policy tool.  A trade war with China soon began, and the United States renegotiated the NAFTA agreement with Mexico and Canada.  Manufacturing jobs began returning to the United States, and immigration laws began to be enforced (so long as those Hawaiian judges didn’t get in the way).  The economy, rather than contracting as the free trade hardliners warned, grew exponentially, and even now is recovering at a remarkable clip after The Age of The Virus temporarily sidelined it.

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#MAGAWeek2020: The Tuck

The Portly Politico3 Comments

This week is #MAGAWeek2020, my celebration of the men, women, and ideas that MADE AMERICA GREAT!  Running through this Friday, 10 July 2020, this year’s #MAGAWeek2020 posts will be SubscribeStar exclusives.  If you want to read the full posts, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for as little as $1 a month.  You’ll also get access to exclusive content every Saturday.

Read my two-part biography of Theodore Roosevelt (with your $1 a month subscription!) here and here.

I dedicated the first two days of #MAGAWeek2020 discussing America’s manliest president, Theodore Roosevelt (Part I, Part II).  TR’s influence on the nation and the office of the presidency reverberate to the present, both for good and ill, but his impact is substantial.  One of his most vocal modern apologists—and a man with immense public influence—is the Uncuckable One:  Tucker Carlson.

There are a number of influential figures on the Right that surely have contributed to the greatness of the United States—Milo, Gavin McInnes, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, etc.—through their reporting and commentary.  All have done real yeoman’s work, at great personal and professional risk, to advance conservatism, specifically America First nationalism.  Tucker Carlson, however, is able to reach an audience—and present America First ideas to that audience—so large, his influence scuttles congressional bills.

Even more importantly, it seems GEOTUS Donaldus Magnus himself listens to The Tuck.  More significant still, Carlson never backs down and never apologizes for his positions, instead defending his views with sharpness and tact—and a charmingly boyish laugh.

To read the rest of today’s #MAGAWeek2020 post, head to my SubscribeStar page and subscribe for $1 a month or more!

Lazy Sunday LXI: The Tuck

The Portly Politico14 Comments

You can’t cuck him—Tucker Carlson, that is, the pie-faced Fox News host with an infectiously boyish laugh and a gift for destroying Leftist shibboleths.

Tucker Carlson says that he’s not a populist—he’s an elitist—but that our current elites aren’t up to the job.  Further, they’re not even doing the job correctly; that is, our elites aren’t looking out for the interests of the people they govern, which is pretty much their only job.  Instead, they’re working for their own interests at our expense.

Well, that’s good enough for me.  An elitist on the outs with our current crop of “elites” is a populist in my book.  Carlson’s commentary certainly suggests as such.  This look back at my posts about his ideas will demonstrate that:

  • “Tucker Carlson’s Diagnosis” (and “TBT: Tucker Carlson’s Diagnosis“) – This post was about a monologue Tucker gave in early 2019 (I think the monologue was actually delivered on my birthday).  That monologue really opened my eyes to the folly of pursuing economic efficiency at all costs.  A key quote from The Tuck:  “We are ruled by mercenaries, who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule.”
  • “You Can’t Cuck the Tuck” – This short piece was about “some cheeky remarks” Tucker made on a raunchy radio show over a decade ago—true but politically-incorrect statements not to be uttered in polite company (or where the social justice commissars can hear).  Rather than issuing a whimpering apology, The Tuck demonstrated his uncuckability and refused to apologize.  He’s still pulling in three million eyeballs a night.
  • “You Can’t Cuck the Tuck: Immigration” – Another short post; in this one, Tucker calls out the folly of unlimited immigration of people who hate the United States, and points to Somalian immigrant Ilhan Omar as a “living fire alarm” to the American people.  Let’s wake up and ban immigration from places and cultures that hate everything we love.
  • “Tucker Carlson’s Platform for Victory in 2020” – A sobering bit here from Tucker:  in order to win in 2020, Trump and Republicans need to improve people’s lives.  Tucker’s key insight is that whichever candidate and/or party makes it easier for a thirty-year old to get married and own a home is the candidate that is going to win in 2020.  Get on it, Republicans!
  • “You Can’t Cuck the Tuck III: Liberty in The Age of The Virus” – I was worked up when I wrote this post, as was Tucker.  We keep watching our liberty die in exchange for the illusion of safety.  Tucker, in true fashion, offers a full-throated defense of liberty, and denounces the incompetent “experts” who keep insisting that we cower in fear.

That’s it for this weekend!  It’s Mother’s Day, so be sure to give Mom a call.

Happy Mother’s Day!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Lazy Sunday LIII: Democratic Candidates, Part II

The Portly Politico21 Comments

Last Sunday I began this two-part retrospective of the Democratic primaries.  The lengthy preamble to that post serves as an introduction, so read it first if you want to get caught up.

Here’s Part II:

  • “New Hampshire Results & Analysis” – In this post, I looked at the results from New Hampshire.  Bernie Sanders doing pretty well at this point, even with the results of the Iowa caucuses still unclear.  At that time, I wrote that “South Carolina’s is Biden’s to lose,” and I was right (see below).  One thing that caught my eye:  Tom Steyer suspended his campaign after NH, but still took third in SC.  How much better would he have fared had he not announced the suspension and hung in there through SC?  The outcome likely wouldn’t have been too different, but imagine if Steyer had seized second instead of third?  The complexion of the last few weeks could have been quite different.
  • “Nevada Feels the Bern” – The Nevada caucuses really marked Bernie’s rise to dominance, albeit short-lived.  Most of this post I spend analyzing the danger of a Sanders nomination and potential presidency.  But then….
  • “Biden Blowout in South Carolina” – Biden destroyed his competition in South Carolina.  As I had predicted, black Americans were not going to vote for Buttigieg, and seemed skeptical of The Bern.  And Joe Biden is Obama’s heir-apparent, so he was bound to do well with Obama’s biggest supporters.
  • “Super Tuesday Results” – If South Carolina weren’t enough, Biden decisively dominated the Super Tuesday primaries, as he did this past Tuesday.  Bernie is hanging in there, but his path to victory is narrowing.  I’m still holding out hope for a brokered convention, but just as South Carolina was “Biden’s to lose,” at this point, I think the same could be said of the Democratic nomination.

Of course, if Biden gets the nomination, we have to pull out all the stops to defeat him.  Bernie is dangerous because of his ideology.  Biden is dangerous because he’s an empty husk of a man in a rapidly deteriorating mental condition, who will do whatever his Democratic masters demand of him.  The erosion of freedoms may be more subtle under a Biden presidency, but they will be there, nonetheless.  Don’t succumb to the siren song of “moderation!”

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Post-Trump America

The Portly Politico7 Comments

Well, the craziness of yesterday has subsided, and I’m almost finished with report cards.  Student-musicians apparently did quite well at their Music Festival, and life is (hopefully) about to calm down a bit before getting insane all over again in about five or six weeks.

All that said, I’m still pretty worn-out today.  Fortunately, my good blogger buddy photog, proprietor of Orion’s Cold Fire, wrote a post yesterday, “Building on Trump’s Revolt,” which raises some interesting questions.  Foremost at the back of every Trumpist’s mind:  who takes over after Trump?

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Super Tuesday Results

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Whoa!  The Super Tuesday results are (mostly) in, and it looks like my prediction was right:  Biden gobbled up the South, including Virginia, while Sanders held strong on the Left Coast, including Colorado (and, most significantly, California).  Politico has a nifty rundown of the results.

Biden is being propped up by the establishment wing of the Democratic Party.  Amy “The Teacher’s Pet” Klobuchar and “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg both suspended their campaigns after Biden’s big win in South Carolina.  Based on his performance in South Carolina, I figured that black voters were behind him thanks to his role as Obama’s VP.  Sanders has struggled with black voters (who, in addition to not liking homosexuals, also don’t seem to care for elderly Jewish socialists).

Now Bloomberg has dropped out, too, and thrown his support to Biden.  I called this one right as well:  he was a red herring all along.  Elizabeth Warren, who seems to reevaluating her pledge to “take it to the convention,” effectively destroyed him in the Nevada debates.  It also puts to bed the notion that the presidency can be bought (at least at this point).  Maybe if Biden had stumbled in SC (and Bloomberg had stayed out of the Nevada debate), Bloomy could have filled the vacuum of the Democratic “center,” but I doubt it.

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Biden Blowout in South Carolina

The Portly Politico7 Comments

A note to SubscribeStar subscribers:  I will post an account of my recent trip to Universal Studios tomorrow, to make up for Saturday’s missed post.  I will try to have Sunday Doodles posted for $5 subscribers later today, probably this evening.  Thank you for your patience, and your support.  —TPP

The Democratic primaries continue to get more interesting.  First, Buttigieg surprised analysts with a near-victory in Iowa (in fact, I’m still unclear who actually “won” the caucuses there).  Elizabeth Warren took down Bloomberg on the eve of the Nevada caucuses, herself going down in flames in South Carolina.

There’s an echo there of former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie taking down a robotic Marco Rubio in the debate just before the 2016 New Hampshire primaries.  Christie had no chance of winning after New Hampshire, but he took Rubio down with him, exposing the would-be poster boy of the Republican Party as an overly-polished puppet.  Similarly, Warren’s aggressive attacks on Bloomberg was the screeching harpies way of clawing Bloomberg down with her.

Of course, unlike Rubio, Bloomberg has billions of dollars at his disposal, and has pledged to keep spending big.  That adds an interesting wrinkle, but I’ve held that Bloomberg is a very flashy red herring, and I’m not convinced he can buy primary victories.  Super Tuesday will tell us a great deal, but I think the only winner from Bloomberg’s campaign will be television networks and social media outlets making a bundle from ad sales.  I would love to get the commission on a Bloomberg ad buy.

Now, former Vice President Joe Biden has come back with a yuge win in South Carolina.  Like every armchair commentator with even a passing knowledge of the South and black people, I knew that Buttigieg would struggle here.  Black voters dominate the Democratic primaries in Southern States, and black people do not like gays.  But I didn’t expect that ButtiBoy would drop out after SC.

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Nevada Feels the Bern

The Portly Politico1 Comment

Well, the Commies and “natural conservatives” in Nevada have spoken, and it looks like Bernie Sanders is going to sweep the state’s caucuses.  That means he’s currently leading in Democratic delegates heading into South Carolina’s primaries this Saturday.

Joe Biden appears to be in second place, somewhat surprisingly, with l’il Pete Buttigieg in third.  That’s going to make South Carolina a big showdown between Sanders and Biden.  Biden is banking on blacks in South Carolina to buoy his flailing campaign.  Buttigieg will likely flame out (no pun intended) in SC, and the rest of the South, because of those same voters—blacks do not like homosexuality.

All that said, Bernie appears to be in the driver’s seat.  While folks are predicting Trump will mop the floor with the ancient socialist, a Sanders nomination is a very dangerous development.

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Populists and Elites

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This past weekend gave Americans two studies in contrasts, between President Trump and Democratic hopeful Michael Bloomberg.  Contrasting these two men and their attitudes highlights the wide divide between populists and elites.

On the one hand, President Trump made a grand entrance to the Daytona 500, where he served as the iconic race’s grand marshal.  NASCAR is a hugely popular sport among President Trump’s core supporters, so that move was good politics.  But it was also an acknowledgment of the humanity of his supporters, and an endorsement of a key event in their lives.

I’ve never understood the appeal of NASCAR personally (other than the crashes… and then you realize that a real person is inside that hunk of steel, and the thrill quickly vanishes).  But that doesn’t matter.  Millions of Americans love the sport, and my inability or unwillingness to understand or appreciate it doesn’t detract from their enjoyment.  Nor does it mean they’re wrong to enjoy the sport.

That’s the trap most elitists fall into—“if I don’t like something, then it’s the height of philistinism!”  I confess I get this way about rap music, but I can at least articulate an objective case against rap (it lacks melody, its subject matter is often foul and dehumanizing, it is often unsophisticated in its musical structure, etc.).  Nor do I seek to destroy it, even if I believe—sincerely—that it is detrimental to the health of our society.

There’s also a haughty arrogance to most elitists:  they presume that they what they like is nuanced and complex, whereas everything else is simplistic rubbish for rubes.

Such was the case of former New York City Mayor Bloomberg, who ostentatiously proclaimed that farming is a job any moron could do, while information technology work is difficult and requires more “gray matter.”  Here is the quotation from the linked Fox News article:

“You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that,” Bloomberg said during a 2016 appearance at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School. “At one point, 98 percent of the world worked in agriculture, now it’s 2 percent in the United States,” he continued.

Ask any gardener how easy it is to grow even the simplest of plants.  How many of us have killed a potted plant due to lack of watering, or overwatering?

Now, apply that to hundreds of acres of crops, many of which are complex, genetically-engineered supercrops that depend on a deep understanding of agronomy, horticulture, biology, and chemistry.  There’s a reason people go to school for four years to become farmers.

And farming is hard work.  That’s nothing against all the code monkeys out there slaving over a hot C++ compressor (that reference probably dates me, and illustrates my ignorance of coding).  But both professions require focus, attention to detail, and a degree of erudition.

If anything, coding is probably easier.  Lest I indulge in the same arrogance as Bloomberg, just consider how we’re importing Third Worlders (mostly from India) to write code for us (undercutting the ability of native-born Americans to make a good salary in tech).  Indians are bright, hardworking people, but their ability to code well is more the result of relentless focus and intense family and social pressures.  Anyone willing to apply the effort could figure it out.

And it’s not slaving away in a field, sweating every weather forecast, wondering if it will rain too much this winter, or if the late frost does or does not come.  Will a hurricane hit and wipe out an entire crop?  Will hail destroy my barn?  The code monkey’s biggest worry is when his next shipment of Mountain Dew Code Red is coming in, and if he’ll have it in time to help him meet his next deadline.

Regardless, President Trump is the model of respect for Middle America:  he respects the people that work hard, and he respects their interests and traditions.  Michael Bloomberg is an out-of-touch elitist who disdains everyone who doesn’t have enough money to buy the Democratic nomination.

When NeverTrumpers ring their hands over “decorum” and “character,” they should understand that President Trump has shown his character through his actions:  he cares about his voters, and about Americans generally.  Michael Bloomberg only cares about Michael Bloomberg.

TBT: Election Results 2019

The Portly Politico1 Comment

We’re in the midst of primary season—the most wonderful time of the year, until you realize that one of these jokers could become president—so I thought I’d look back to the results from the 2019 elections.  That’s an off-year election, but there are some important lessons from then.

The post below, “Election Results 2019,” largely focused on the Lamar Town Council elections.  My strategy was to vote for the two challengers, because the town government really dropped the ball on doing routine DHEC water tests (although our mayor—bless her heart—has been trying to resolve the issue).  I also intuited that one of the challengers would likely be a Republican/conservative, for reasons too politically incorrect to write here.

The big takeaway from the 2019 election is that if you let Democrats gain a monopoly on power, they will abuse it immediately.  That’s been the story of Virginia, a once-deep-red State that has gone quite blue, due to the preponderance of progressive population poured into Northern Virginia.

The legislature wasted little time in promising to ban and confiscate guns en masse.  That act of totalitarian pique may very well turn the State red in November, as the Trumpian masses have been jolted from their slumber.

We shall see.  But the moral is clear:  don’t give progressives power.  And we have to assume that every Democrat is a progressive.  A conservative Democrat is a unicorn in 2020.  This message is for those squishy suburban moms and “decorum” obsessed NeverTrumpers who think they’ll enjoy political moderation under a Democratic regime.

Don’t make the same mistake twice.  Vote Republican/Trumpian/populist/nationalist/conservative/immigration patriotic this November.  Your country is counting on you!

Yesterday Lamar, South Carolina held elections for Town Council.  Since our local paper doesn’t seem to be putting the results online, I thought I would post them here.

I drove by Town Hall last night to check the results, but they were still working on finalizing the results when I drove by, and I lacked the will to drag myself out of the house again.  But I swung by this morning and photographed the official receipt from the machine, as well as the handwritten results (akin to a student council election), which were posted to the front door:

My strategy of voting for the challengers in a “Jacksonian spirit of rotation in office” failed, as the two incumbents sailed to reelection.  As such, Town Council is unchanged.

Nationally, Republicans dominated races in Mississippi and Kentucky, except for the Kentucky governor’s race, which the Democrats won in a squeaker.  They won in part due to the incumbent governor’s unpopularity, but also because of the Libertarian spoiler, who siphoned enough votes away from the Republican to cost conservatives the election by about 5000 votes.  Thanks a lot, Libertarians—you cost conservatism a gubernatorial election (which the Dems will hold up as proof that Trump is losing support) for… what?  Getting John Hick’s name in the papers?  We’re at war with progressives, and all you care about is smoking weed naked.

Unfortunately, Virginia has fallen completely to the Democrats.  That’s not too surprising, given the swamp creatures in northern Virginia, but it’s sad to see the ancient bastion of Southern liberty fall to big government apparatchiks.

That’s it for today—a quick public service post.  Hopefully the good folks of Lamar can get the results without having to drive downtown now.