Assessing The Political Climate

May 05, 2022

I want to follow up a bit on the culture war post from yesterday.

Karl Denninger has a post today on the latest productivity stats, which plays into what I was saying about how the culture war is reflected in some out of the ordinary issues. Consider the beginning of KD’s post:

Here It Comes (I Tried To Warn You)
Oh boy..... so much for the various "ESG" and similar things...
Nonfarm business sector labor productivity decreased 7.5 percent in the first quarter of 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today, as output decreased 2.4 percent and hours worked increased 5.5 percent. This is the largest decline in quarterly productivity since the third quarter of 1947, when the measure decreased 11.7 percent.
That was coming off a war when we were converting back to peacetime industrial production.
This is coming off two years of worker abuse by employers and the government, both intentionally inflicted and both have served very well to destroy morale and willingness to produce, never mind catering to the crazy in people's minds and effectively paying them for their own personal insanities.

OK, KD is talking about two things, which he discusses at greater length.

The first form of abuse inflicted on workers can be boiled down to one word: Inflation. Workers may show up—although even that isn’t happening as much as it used to—but they’re not going to be productive when they’re mind is wandering to how little value their salaries are offering them when they go to the grocery store. For more discussion of that, and why official inflation stats don’t tell the real story, see this substack that commenter Forbes linked:

'That Doesn’t Feel Like $150 Worth of Groceries'—Why inflation is worse than you think.

The second form of abuse that takes a toll on productivity has taken a variety of forms, but KD groups it all under the heading “the crazy in people’s minds”. He’s talking about the empowerment in the workplace of leftists—crazy people. Instead of being productive at what the business in question purports to be about, workers are now busy either inflicting their personal craziness—be it masks, distancing, LGBTQWERTY, or whatever—on their coworkers, of fending off the crazies as best they can. That craziness has been empowered by the ruling class, both in government and in the ownership class. One example should suffice, drawn from schools but similar craziness is no doubt apparent in the workplace as well:

Oregon's 'Menstrual Dignity Act' requires schools to place feminine products in boys' bathrooms

This is what KD means about “the crazy in people’s minds,” and normals increasingly resent it.

That jaw dropping drop in productivity, unprecedented since the wake of WW2, is a measure of the unhappiness of relatively normal people at the way things are going. That’s KD’s argument, and it appears to be a hard statistical confirmation of the softer data we’re getting from polling. People are fed up with the direction the country is headed in. That unhappiness arises from quite a basket of deplorable causes, many of which don’t crop up in the workplace, but as a proxy the productivity numbers work pretty well.

Another measure that we discussed a bit yesterday is the way Trump is mopping the floor with establishment Republicans in terms of primary wins. Most recently and significantly we saw J. D. Vance winning easily in Ohio, in what we were told would be a close contest. Please note: I’m not arguing that all—or even most, when you get right down to it—of Trump’s endorsements are good. I’m arguing that Trump’s impressive winning streak is an indication that populism is still animating American voters, and that this, too, is an expression of their dissatisfaction with the way things are going. If these candidates win, will they stand up for the people who elected them? Trust but verify, those are the watchwords. As always. But the fact they have all been actively seeking Trump’s endorsement, no matter what they may have previously said or stood for (and that includes Vance), is an indication that they have heard the voice of the populace.

Christopher Bedford has a fine article on this topic today:

J.D. Vance And The New Right Are Racking Up Wins, While The Establishment Stabs At Their Backs

Bedford begins by contrasting NYT neocon write Bret Stephens’ idea of conservatism with real conservatism. Bedford maintains that, for Stephens, conservatism is about “process”. Now, you may argue that Bedford is being a bit unfair to Stephens, but he has a particular point in mind. Here are Stephens’ actual words as quoted by Bedford. Conservatism, he says, is

above all, the conviction that abrupt and profound changes to established laws and common expectations are utterly destructive to respect for the law and the institutions established to uphold it — especially when those changes are instigated from above, with neither democratic consent nor broad consensus.

Of course, there is a sense in which Stephens is correct, but this version of conservatism plays directly into the hands of radicals who claim that conservatism is about little, if anything, more than staying in a comfortable groove of privilege, maintained by a stranglehold on “process.”

For Bedford, conservatism is much deeper than that. He cites the examples of J. D. Vance, Blake Masters, and Tucker Carlson for the rise of the New Right that seeks deeper meaning for their politics. While he talks a fair amount about “tradition”, he also talks about truth and the truth of human nature. I would argue that what he means by “tradition” is, in effect, the wisdom handed down by our ancestors through the millennia, the hard won wisdom about reality and the reality of men and women and family. And also the wisdom about government, which recognizes that government is about protecting that wisdom and the reality of human nature—not about “transforming” it at the behest of monied prog radicals.

Stephens is wrong, of course. Conservatism isn’t remotely about process: It’s about traditional wisdom and values; it’s about conserving things of generational, transcendent value.
It means understanding that man is fallen, and society must protect families, workers, traditions, and, yes, the unborn from being wiped aside; oppressed from above.
It means conserving the truth — the truth about men and women, the truth about the unborn, the truth about human equality, and the necessary limits on government power.
That’s not to say there isn’t still an important place for process: In a civilization governed by prudent and benevolent institutions that buttress and strengthen traditional wisdom and values, process protects those cherished things from rapid change.
In a world governed by imprudent and vindictive institutions, however, that claw, gnash, and tear at traditional wisdom — that usurp traditional values — the “process” merely fools us into believing that what these institutions are doing is normal, when in reality it is profoundly abnormal.
In the September 1961 issue of Young Americans for Freedom’s New Guard magazine, a young M. Stanton Evans asked, “Can a conservative be a radical?” Yes, he concluded: “Confronted with an established revolution, the conservative must seek to change the status quo; he has no other means of affirming his tradition.”
Vance understands this. That is why, Axios’s Jonathan Swan and Lachlan Markay report, “The Republican establishment privately regards [him] with the same disgust many felt toward Donald Trump when he entered the White House on Jan. 20, 2017.”
...
It’s why one “senior Republican aide told The Hill 70 percent of Senate Republicans share that sentiment.”
The reality is, they should all fear Vance. He’s a man who doesn’t “care if Google is a private company, because they have too much power; and if you want to have a country where people can live their lives freely, you have to be concerned about power — whether it’s concentrated in the government or concentrated in big corporations.”
… This places him directly at odds with tired, established Republicanism … that work to undermine our national economy, our traditions, our families, and even our children’s sexuality.
Vance is also a man who doesn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” and thinks “it’s ridiculous that we are focused on” their border over our own.

This could be significant. Remember that Buchanan suggested that Ukraine and war could be sleeper issues. It’s true that the public appears to be solidly in favor of war on Russia, but I wonder whether that support isn’t a mile wide, but only an inch deep. Surely, if the polling truly reflected strong sentiments, Vance’s statements re Ukraine should have worked strongly against him. That could be another important takeaway from his win for other conservative candidates.

Vance is a man who thinks, “If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”
…
This once again places him directly at odds with Washington, which every years sends billions in federal aid to colleges and universities, with nary a whimper of a fight.
More broadly, “Vance,” Harpers editor James Pogue writes, “believes that a well-educated and culturally liberal American elite has greatly benefited from globalization, the financialization of our economy, and the growing power of big tech.”
“This,” he continues, “has led an Ivy League intellectual and management class… to adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly oppose those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up.”
In other words, Vance knows what time it is.

The usual suspects—WaPo, WSJ, CNN—are busily attempting to explain away Vance’s win as having nothing to do with Trump’s endorsement. I can’t say whether Vance will be the real deal, but as a measure of public sentiment Trump’s continued and impressive endorsement winning streak works for me.

I’ll close with some links that help explain why Covid and the injection regime may prove to be a wild card, yet. Right now there’s a steady drip of data and information: