Havana on the Hudson - Part 3*

With the results of last Tuesday’s primary victories for the TikTok Jacobins and the enactment of a rent freeze on one million rent stabilized apartments, New York City drove a few more nails into its coffin. The congressional primary victories of DSA members Claire Valdez and Derializa Avila Chevalier along with the anti-Zionist Jew, Brad Lander, defeating Congressman Dan Goldman demonstrated the power of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s machine. To be sure he was pushing against a hollowed out Democratic Party. Put bluntly the socialist left in the Democratic Party is copying the Tea Party/Trumpian takeover of the Republican Party a decade ago.

 

Of particular note is that Chevalier is a stone-cold communist of the third world variety.  My guess is that she would take what I just wrote as a compliment. She doesn't beleive in prison terms for murderers. Her political support comes not from the Black and Latino populations of her district, but rather from the white intellectual leftists that seem to have found a home in New York City.

 

As expected, the Rent Guidelines Board froze rents on one million apartments under its authority. Because most of the rent stabilized housing stock is old, the likely outcome of a rent freeze would be speed up the deterioration of the buildings. Indeed, the not so hidden agenda of the Mamdani is to bankrupt the existing owners to enable the city to buy up the buildings.  Recall that the city is already the biggest slumlord through its housing authority.

 

While New York City seems to be prospering on the surface and benefitting from the Wall Street bull market, beneath the surface the socialist termites are eating away its foundation. So, just as the speed of the socialist takeover seemed to surprise, so too will the speed of the city’s demise. Havana here we come.

 

*-   See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2025/11/havana-on-hudson-part-2.html

The Redistricting Melee

Donald Trump started the redistricting melee by calling on Texas to undertake an unprecedented mid-census congressional redistricting to create five additional Republican seats. California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom responded in kind by calling a successful referendum to redistrict California to create an additional five Democratic seats and the partisan war was on. It came crashing down for the Democrats in Virginia this week when their Supreme Court ruled their redistricting referendum unconstitutional. That plan would have created four more Democratic seats. Along the way Trump unseated candidates in Indiana's Republican primary that opposed his redistricting plan for the state.

Then of a sudden the U.S. Supreme Court declared parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 unconstitutional paving the way to redistrict a host of Black (Democratic) seats across the South. Tennessee and Louisiana have already acted. Further, by 2028 elections there will be a raft of redistricting across Democratic and Republican states. I don't know who the ultimate winner will be, but I do know the American voter will be the loser. Simply put voters should choose their politicians, not the other way around.

Meantime after being down in the dumps all year, the Republican Party now has some spring in its steps. To me their optimism and the Democrats pessimism is premature. Why? In a wave election, and if there is to be a wave, it will be the Democrats that sweep and instead of helping, redistricting will hurt because it dilutes a party's strength where it was presumably strong.(See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2018/07/gerrymandering-wont-save-republicans-in.html ) Second, I would hope that the electorate gives a big F-You to both parties by voting Republican in California and Democratic in Texas. It maybe too much to hope for, but I fear that both parties are now circling the drain. We need something new.

There is a Method to Trump's Madness

 This week the politico/media world is abuzz with the suspension of late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel over blame shifting comments on the Charlie Kirk assassination. The suspension by ABC/Disney was exacerbated by FCC Brendan Carr’s mafia like threats to suspend the broadcast licenses of its affiliate stations. This time the pearl clutchers on the Left are legitimately concerned about the very real threat to free speech that Carr represents.

 

But there is more here than meets the eye. The move on Kimmel is part and parcel of Trump’s plan to attack the power centers and funding sources of the Left. Think about it; Trump Administration has moved against high level government bureaucrats with DOGE, NGO’s funded by A.I.D., elite universities, Big Law, alternative energy by removing its tax credits, and now the media. The Trumpistas understand that politics are downstream of culture and so it should not surprise anyone that the media is in their crosshairs.

 

Indeed, a sea change in late-night television is now underway. With Stephen Colbert soon to be gone and Kimmel apparently on the way out, late-night television will no longer be a monopoly of the Left where it functioned as both a cheer leader and a therapist for those who tuned in. Further with the Skydance takeover of Paramount, CBS News will no longer exhibit its Left bias and if Paramount moves to take over Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN will move in the same direction. As Bobby Dylan said, “the times, they are a changing.”  All you have to do is look at Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center.

 

With respect to funding, look at how hard Trump has hit the big funders of Democratic and leftwing causes. As stated above, look at the contributors from Big Law, government employees, academia, nonprofit organizations, the media, Hollywood, and the alternative energy producers. The next obvious step will be for Trump to use the IRS to intimidate tax exempt organizations that flow big bucks into the Democratic Party and progressive groups.  

 

Historically Silicon Valley has been a huge source of funds for the Democrats, but no more. Just watch the leaders of Big Tech suck up to Trump.

 

As a result, step-by-step the Trumpistas are seizing the organs of power that made the Democratic Party a viable, and many times, dominant political force. Trump is rapidly accumulating power, and the Democrats are cuddling up to the Socialist wing of the party that will bring with it electoral disaster. And it is my guess, that is part of Trump’s plan.

My Review of Sonia Purnell's "Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman's Astonishing Life ...."

 Sex, Money, and Power

Pamela Harriman was born in 1920 into minor nobility as a Digby. She later, through her marriage to Randolph became a Churchill and through her marriage to Averell she became a Harriman. In the middle she married Hayward Leland a Broadway producer of “Sound of Music” fame. However, the real story as journalist/biographer Sonia Purnell tells it in her hagiographic biography is about how a once chubby girl uses are innate smarts and her sexual powers of seduction to have access to great wealth and be influential in the corridors of power in England, France, and the United States. 

Her marriage to the alcoholic and womanizing Randolph was destined to fail. Nevertheless, she so charmed his father Winston, that she was able to sit on many high-level meetings of state at his Chequers country estate. She also had his full permission to seduce Averell Harriman who was in charge of lend-lease aid to Britain. She was 21 and Harriman was 50. It was said that her high diplomacy took place between the sheets of the Dorchester Hotel, where Harriman put her up. After Harriman was reassigned to Moscow, she seduced Edward R. Murrow, the leading radio journalist in London at the time. Murrow almost divorced his wife for Pamela. Her affair with Murrow did not stop her from sleeping with Bill Paley, Murrow’s boss at CBS radio.

These affairs took place after Pamela gave birth to young Winston. She was far from the best of mothers and young Winston was shuttled between relatives and nannies. Her sexual liaisons and the affairs of state took precedence over her son.

The end of the war was a letdown for her, but soon she took up with Prince Aly Khan. Khan teaches her the Arabian arts of lovemaking which she will soon use with great affect. According to Purnell she became quite expert at oral sex.

After her affair with Khan, she started a long lasting on and off affair with Giorgio Agnelli of Italy’s Fiat automobile company. He along with Khan rained substantial gifts upon her including apartments and artwork. She later had an affair with Eli Rothschild of the Paris branch of the eponymous bank.

She moved to the United States upon her marriage to Hayward Leland. The marriage was not a happy one but it last until Leland’s death in 1971. After his death and the death of Harriman’s wife, the two are reunited after thirty years. Remember at this time Harriman was 80 and she was 50. Harriman, a scion of the Union Pacific fortune was a power broker in the Democratic Party. He introduced her to the Washington D.C. movers and shakers and their Georgetown mansion becomes the locus of high-level socio/political events.

By 1980 she was the doyenne of the Democratic Party. After Bill Clinton’s defeat in his reelection race for the Arkansas governorship, she took him under her wing and introduced him to the D.C. establishment. By the mid-1980’s she had a political action committee and was funding Democratic Senate races throughout the country. She became close to Sandy Berger and Richard Holbrooke who would become key figures in the Clinton Administration. She also went with Averell to Moscow to meet with the then Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and sensed that times were changing in Moscow.

As a reward for all of her efforts, Bill Clinton appointed her ambassador to France in 1993. There she became very close to French president Jacques Chirac. He spoke at her memorial. While in Paris she played a behind the scenes role in settling the Bosnian Wars.

All wasn’t sex and parties. She had an abortion, and her finances were totally mismanaged by Washington power broker Clark Clifford causing the Harriman family to sue her, as she was the executor of the Harriman estate. 

All I have to say is that her seductive powers jump right off the pages of this wonderful book. Purnell gives great credit to this remarkable woman.

After Action Report on the 2024 Election

Shulmaven did not cover itself with glory this year. We thought Harris would win because she would be successful in casting Trump as the incumbent. (See: Shulmaven: The Turning Point in the Election and Shulmaven: A Realigning Anti-Incumbent Election)       She obviously failed in that task. We also thought that the Democrats would retake the House, which is still possible, but unlikely. Our Senate call had the Republicans ending up with 52 seats: they ended up with 53.   

What we did get right was that the election would signal a major realignment in American politics. We wrote “Simply put, the Republican Party, by eating into the Democrats hold on Black and Latino voters, has put together a broad multi-racial working-class party with a strong populist bent. This is a far cry from the business and country club-oriented party of two decades ago. Lurking behind all of this is an ever-widening gender gap.” 

 

We also wrote: “At least to me, if Harris loses Pennsylvania, her biggest mistake would be not picking Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate (See: Shulmaven: Kamala Harris Fails Her First Test with VP Pick)  and her failure to counter Trump’s attack on her position supporting federally paid for gender reassignment surgeries.” Both of these points were spot on. Finally, we noted: “I also have a hunch that the election might not be as close as the polls suggest. It is equally likely that either candidate will receive more than 300 electoral votes.”

Harris lost because her one-billion-dollar campaign and the near full support of the propaganda arms of the state, were insufficient to overcome the underlying fundamentals of the race which were:

1. Inflation is the graveyard of administrations.

2. 70% of voters thought we were on the wrong track.

3. The Biden-Harris Administration had a 40% approval ranting.

4. She failed to counter Trumps ads attacking her support for federal funding for gender assignment surgery for prisoners and immigrants held in custody.

5. Her much-vaunted ground game was over-rated.

Further she made two unforced errors. She failed to appear at the Al Smith Dinner and didn’t accept Joe Rogan’s invitation to appear on his podcast.

Perhaps most interesting the election, contrary to earlier thinking, where women fearful of losing their reproductive rights would drive turnout, instead turnout was driven by a wave of noncollege educated men of all races. It is this group that is driving the realignment towards the Republican Party. Also, of note in the deep blue states of New York, New Jersey and Virginia, Trump’s share of the vote surged. The blue governing philosophy is failing. Net Net. The Democratic Party is in a world of hurt relegating itself to be the voice of a cloistered college educated elite led around by its nose by the mainstream media and the boorish snobs of the faculty lounge.

 

A Realigning Anti-Incumbent Election

I normally write my election outlook on the weekend before the election. (See my earlier commentary: Shulmaven: The State of the Presidential Race) However, this year, because of my travel schedule I am hesitantly putting it out now. When historians 20 years from now look back at the 2024 election they would note that a major political realignment between the two parties took place. (See: Shulmaven: Political Realignment is Here) Simply put, the Republican Party, by eating into the Democrats hold on Black and Latino voters, has put together a broad multi-racial working class party with a strong populist bent. This is a far cry from the business and country-oriented party of two decades ago. Lurking behind all of this is an ever-widening gender gap.

On the other hand, the Democrats have picked up voters from hitherto high-income business oriented suburban Republican voters, especially women. The Democrats are now firmly the party of the elites buttressed by Black and single women voters. The union-oriented lunch pail Democrat is a relic of the past. The Democrats are the party of women, and the Republicans are the party of men.

Part and parcel with the realignment is that the county is moving towards Trump on many issues, specifically on trade, immigration, and crime. Witness Democratic Senator Bob Casey praising Trump on trade. In contrast the country is moving towards Harris on the potent issue of abortion. It remains to be seen which dominates. What is really surprising is that the race is so close given that nearly all of the propaganda arms of the state are firmly in the Harris camp.

Further the global electorate including ours is in anti-incumbent rage. (See: Shulmaven: Incumbents Beware) This is crucial for both Trump and Harris. Whomever the electorate perceives to be the incumbent will lose. That is why Biden had to drop out. To be sure Harris is the incumbent vice president, but we have been living in the age of Trump for nine years. My guess is that the electorate will not want to witness another four years. The problem for Harris is that she is too tied to Biden, and she has yet to articulate a clear vision of the future. Her closing argument is that Trump’s narcissistic criminality has to be stopped.

The electoral college arithmetic for both candidates is challenging. For example, if Harris holds the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and picks up the one electoral vote coming out of Omaha, Nebraska she will hit the 270 electoral vote magic number. However, if she loses one of those states, she going to have to make it up in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. Given today’s polls, which is doable, but difficult. At the end of the day the key to a Harris victory is her ground game. She has paid staff and volunteers everywhere, while Trump’s campaign is sorely lacking in this regard. At least to me, if Harris loses Pennsylvania, her biggest mistake would be not picking Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate (See: Shulmaven: Kamala Harris Fails Her First Test with VP Pick)  and her failure to counter Trump’s attack on her position supporting federally paid for gender reassignment surgeries.

I also have a hunch that the election might not be as close as the polls suggest. It is equally likely that either candidate will receive more than 300 electoral votes. Stranger things have happened in the last two weeks of the election and if there is going to be a wave, I would give the edge to Harris. Recall that the polls were wrong in 2016, 2020 and 2022.

In keeping with my anti-incumbent thesis, I think the Democrats will retake the very dysfunctional House and end up with a majority of around 10-12 seats. On the other hand, the Democrats will lose the Senate with the Republicans ending up with 52 seats. Although most Senate Democrats are leading in the polls there are too many targets of opportunity for the Republicans.

Most disappointing about the election is that two particularly critical issues, the elephants in the room, are not being discussed. The first is the out-of-control deficit spending of both parties that putting the U.S. on the path of have highest debt/GDP ratio in history and the underspending on defense that will put our country at grave risk in the years ahead.

 

The State of the Presidential Race

 Over the past two months the Democrats have risen from their severely depressed state of being in mourning over Joe Biden to an exalted manic state hailing Vice President Kamala Harris as their new savior. Last week’s very successful convention cemented Harris’ leadership in the party, and she is now a small favorite to win the election in November.  However, I would caution that the current manic phase can quickly turn once again to a depressive state.

 

The most important thing that happened at the convention was what did not happen. As many feared, including myself, the convention did not turn out to be a rerun of 1968. It went off flawlessly and Harris came out of the convention as a forward-looking optimist as opposed to Donald Trump’s backward-looking pessimism. Indeed, somehow the sitting vice president became the candidate of change and Donald Trump became the de facto incumbent. As I wrote in July, this will be the year of the anti-incumbent and if Harris can maintain her image as challenger she will win. ( See: Shulmaven: Incumbents Beware )

 

Further buttressing her position is that the propaganda organs  of the state (ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, Facebook, and TikTok)  gushed over her acceptance speech. (See: Shulmaven: America's Party Line )  So craven have the mass media been is that their unqualified support for Harris has yet to pass the test of a single interview. In fact, Time magazine did a hagiographic cover story on her without an interview, truly unprecedented.

 

Meantime Harris’ economic proposals have drawn criticism from even normally left-of-center quarters. Her proposals for price caps on groceries, rent control and a $25,000 tax credit for new home buyers make little sense. Of course, Trump’s proposals calling for mass deportations, tariffs on all imports and executive branch control over the Federal Reserve are zanier than what Harris has proposed.

 

The critical tests for Harris will come when she actually has to do real interviews and the September 10^th debate with Trump where she is the presumptive favorite. If Harris is to maintain the mantle of change, she will have to successfully answer the following question: On, what policies do you differ with President Biden? My guess is that she will be hard pressed to answer that question which will leave a big opening for Trump.

Kamala Harris Fails Her First Test with VP Pick

Kamala Harris picking Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her VP cemented her identity as a San Francisco Bay liberal. She also demonstrated that she will have no backbone when it comes to standing up to the noisy and sometimes antisemitic Left of her party. By not picking Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania she lost all credibility in her election year conversion in support of fracking and by not picking Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona she lost her credibility on securing our southern border.

In picking Walz she got a big spending liberal who dawdled while Minneapolis was burning during the George Floyd riots of 2020 and his signing of an executive order in support of gender affirming care for minors she got a candidate who is to the left of Europe's social democrats on this issue. Oh, and one more thing, Walz only received 52% of the vote in his reelection in heavily Democratic Minnesota in 2022.

Harris had a real opportunity to move to the center with her VP pick. She failed miserably in this task and gave Donald Trump and the Republicans the best news they have had since Joe Biden left the race. If the Democrats had hopes of attracting Nikki Haley voters to there cause, those hope were dashed today.  

Political Realignment is Here

In 2016 and 2018 I authored two blogs on the coming realignment of American Politics ( Shulmaven: The Coming Political Realignment and  Shulmaven: The Coming Political Realignment: Part II ) I believe the realignment I spoke of then and in subsequent related blogs is now here. The recent Republican convention once and for all buried the Right Hamiltonian* roots of the party and firmly made it over into a rightwing populist party combining the 19^th century Jacksonians and Know Nothings into one 21^st century coalition. Consistent with that, the party renominated Doanld Trump for president and JD Vance for vice-president. The party is now firmly isolationist, anti-free trade, anti-immigrant, pro-entitlements, and in many respects anti-Wall Street and above all “anti-woke.”

 

Prior to his withdrawal from the race, Joe Biden was veering sharply to the left with calls for national rent control, more student debt relief, medical bill relief and restructuring the Supreme Court. No longer a Left Hamiltonian, Biden was moving in the direction of a new social democratic party with policies along the lines of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. My guess is that Vice-President Kamala Harris who as of today seems the likely Democratic nominee, will pull the party in same direction Biden was headed with an even greater emphasis on identity politics.  Afterall, she grew up in the hot house of far-left San Francisco Bay Democratic politics.

 

Now, where does that leave the Right Hamiltonians of the Republican Party and the Left Hamiltonians of the Democratic Party. For the time being they are without a home. Furthermore, the mood of the electorate seems to be very anti-establishment which will make it very difficult for the Hamiltonians of both parties to gain traction. However, it is likely that either political party will unfortunately drive our country into a ditch, making it likely that in 2028 a merged Hamiltonian Party will come to the fore. That will either be within the Democratic Party sans its social democrats or as a centrist third party.

 

*- I broadly define Right Hamiltonians as those who would use the power of government to support business and Left Hamiltonians who would use government to support labor. Both wings are internationalists.

Incumbents Beware

The tide of elections around the world are sending an ominous signal for incumbents everywhere. In India Prime Minister Nerendra Modi failed to achieve the widely expected super majority in parliament, the Conservatives in the UK got wiped out with their vote total dropping from 44% to 24% in the prior election, and while Labour won a huge majority in Parliament sending Keir Starmer to 10 Downing Street, it did so with only 34% of the vote. The spoiler was Nigel Farage's fringe Reform Party which took 14% of the vote. In France the votes are still being counted with the French Left winning a surprising plurality of the votes, while Marine Le Pen's rightwing party disappointed, but the real loser was French President Emanuel Macron

What all this means for the United States is that President Joe Biden. with all of his age related troubles. is in a world of hurt. Even if Vice President Kamala Harris succeeds Biden as the nominee, she will be viewed as an incumbent and hence a loser. The only choice the Democrats have would be to nominate a new candidate in an open convention. That candidate would certainly not be an incumbent. Indeed, in the minds of the voters Trump would then be the incumbent and headed for a loss. I know it is high risk, but that is the only path for a Democratic victory. 

Before the past few weeks was my view was that we would see a reversal of fortune in American politics with the Republicans retaking the White House and the Senate and losing the House to the Democrats. However, if things don't turn around soon, we could be headed for a Republican sweep.

Debacle in Atlanta

 President Joe Biden looked like a doddering old man and Donald Trump lied through his teeth at their debate last night. Neither one was edifying and most important neither one talked about the future further confirming the public's suspicion of both candidates. The Democratic Party talking heads are in full blown melt down calling for Biden to withdraw from the race leaving the way open for a new nominee. This will not happen unless leading Democratic office holders follow the lead of the pundit class.

However even if Biden steps down,  there is a fly in the ointment. Because the Democratic Convention occurs on Aug 19-22 two weeks after the Ohio filing deadline of August 7th, the plan was for the convention to electronically nominate Biden prior to the deadline. Now if Biden steps down and the Democrats have an open convention to select a new nominee, that nominee will not be on the Ohio ballot, thereby conceding the state to Trump. Further, without a presidential race in Ohio, it is likely that the veteran Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown would go down to defeat. Thus the Dems would be between a rock and a hard place.

My Amazon Review of Christopher Rufo's "America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything"

Racial Marxism

Christopher Rufo, a leading agent provocateur of the Right, has written a deeply researched intellectual history of how the political culture of the 1960’s Left became dominant in 21^st century America. Rufo traces today’s diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) and antiracism training back to the ideas of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell. Thus, there is a straight line from the cultural revolution of 1968 to the “wokism” of 2015 and beyond.

 

To me Rufo’s ideas ring true because as a young leftist of that era I first heard the terms “the long march through the institutions” and “white skin privilege” in the early 1970’s. According to Rufo the Left’s long march first succeeded in establishing university ethnic studies programs, then on to the education schools and soon enough the entire liberal arts were largely controlled by far-left ideologues. After the universities, came the newsrooms, the media and corporate HR departments.

 

Frankfurt school philosopher Herbert Marcuse is the founding father of racial Marxism. Marcuse gave up on the working class as the motive force for revolution and substituted militant minorities.  If you want to know why the Democratic Party lost the working class, you can do no worse than reading Marcuse. Instead having the white revolutionaries of the 1960’s we now have the limousine liberals and middle-class feminists linking us with urban minorities to form the guts of the Democratic coalition.

 

Rufo then goes on to Marcuse student Angela Davis who became the paragon of Black liberation. Her support of the Black Panthers was legendary and according to Rufo there is a straight line from the Panthers to Black Lives Matter. Her “kill the pigs” would become “defund the police” fifty years later.

 

Indeed, in the early 1970’s the white left was so enthralled with the Panthers that is took political direction from them. Further Davis was a stone-cold communist who followed the Soviet party line to the bitter end. Part of Davis’s politics was to destroy such icons of American history as Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln to make white’s feel ashamed of their country.

 

I never heard of Paulo Friere before reading this book. His contribution was to emphasize education as a way to revolution. His “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is one of most widely cited books in academia. We see his ideas in school curricula designed to make white children uncomfortable about their heritage. This is not about teaching real history, but rather bending it to a leftist ideology.

 

His last ideologist of the Left is Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell who started to develop critical race theory in the early 1970’s. Bell is a racial pessimist because white people are inherently oppressors because of their “privilege.” Although not stated, it seems that under critical race theory the entire white population has to go through Maoist-style re-education camps. Don’t laugh, there are all kinds of institutional programs that are doing modified versions of this.

 

Rufo ends his book on an upbeat note. He is, after all, a counter revolutionary. As a trustee at Florida’s New College, he is working do away with a host of sham departments that cover for leftist organizing and doing away with its DEI programs. Eliminating DEI is essential to Rufo. His program can be summarized as “equality over equity, dignity over inclusion, and order over chaos.” As a personal note I stopped giving money to UCLA because, like many universities, the school required a personal statement in support of DEI in order to be hired or promoted. Simply put, a 21^st century loyalty oath.

 

Although polemical, Rufo has written a serious book that should be read by policy makers and the public alike. In order to make the needed changes we have to know how we got here.

 For the full Amazon URL see: Racial Marxism (amazon.com) 

My Amazon Review of Matthew Continetti's : The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism"

 

Triumph and Tragedy

 

As I write this Liz Cheney, the scion of Reagan Republicanism and what used to be the heartbeat of American conservatism, lost her primary battle to a Trump acolyte in Wyoming. Simply out, the Republican Party is no longer a conservative party, but rather a cult of personality populist party. This is the end point of Matthew Continetti’s hundred-year history of American conservatism. Continetti, now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has been a writer/activist on the conservative scene for two decades and is the son-in-law of William Kristol, a leading neoconservative and one of the foremost anti-Trumpers on the Right.

 

Continetti begins his history in the 1920’s when the conservative Republican Party stood for protectionism, anti-immigration and more or less and isolationist foreign policy. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. However, there is a major difference from today that Continetti doesn’t mention. That is in the 1920’s conservatives were an optimistic bunch believing in the new technologies of automobiles, electrification, radio, aircraft, and talking pictures that was underpinning an economic boom. Thus, when the Great Depression came, it was truly a shock turning optimism into pessimism about the future of the country under the New Deal.  

 

As a result, conservatives stayed in the political wilderness for years as the Democratic Party and liberal Republicans dominated the scene. However, beneath the surface a disparate group of conservatives rallied around anticommunism and the leadership of William Buckley and his National Review. Elitist to the core Buckley and crew became the backbone of conservative revival, but beneath the surface their remained vestiges of racism, antisemitism, and authoritarianism. Those would resurface many years later.

 

When liberalism cracked up under the strains of the Vietnam War and the stagflation of the 1970’s, conservatives were ready to seize the mantle of power. Instead of the dour conservatism of say, 1940’s Bob Taft, conservatives were led by the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan who offered economic growth at home and the defeat of communism abroad. Reagan united social, economic, and foreign policy conservatives under one banner. However, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and with that the unity of the conservative movement fell.

 

In fact, one year later, in a forerunner to Trump, Pat Buchanan mounted a populist challenge to President George H.W. Bush and soon Ruch Limbaugh would dominate the airwaves of talk radio.  For a time, the conservative establishment held these forces in check, but failures in the Iraq War and the Great Financial Crisis destroyed its legitimacy. All the while a populist revolt was brewing against trade, immigration, and foreign wars that Continetti and his intellectual buddies in the think tanks and K-Street were oblivious to. They were too busy talking to each other rather than going out into the country to visit the dive bars and fast-food joints of the Midwest and the South. They soon would have discovered that there was a revolt brewing against the know-it-all coastal elites of both parties who in the words of Hillary Clinton, called them “deplorables.”  I hate to break it to Continetti, but all too many conservatives felt the same way.

 

Continetti’s goal is to blend historical conservatism to the new populism. My guess is that train has passed the station, at least for now. When CPAC features Hungarian autocrat Victor Orban as a speaker, you know the world has changed. Thus, it looks like that conservatives will once again be spending long years in the wilderness. If it is to recover it will have to come with an optimistic vision similar to what happened in the 1920’s and the 1980’s.

For the full Amazon URL see: Triumph and Tragedy (amazon.com)

 

My Amazon Review of Mark Leibovich's "Thank you for Your Servitude"

 It’s a Miracle we Survived

 

Former New York Times reporter and current Atlantic writer Mark Leibovich has offered up a readable, humorous, and a downright scary account of the Trump years, which are unfortunately still with us. He spends most of his time not on Trump, but rather on his bootlicking lackeys in the Republican Party and a coterie of sycophantic hangers on in search of lucre. It is a miracle the country survived Trump’s four years in office.

 

What becomes very clear is that the Republican Party has become a party of moral eunuchs. With the few honorable exceptions of the late John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Liz Cheney the party luminaries cowered before the great orange one. It makes you want to puke just to think about all of these grifters at the seat of power living large and paying tribute at the Trump International Hotel.

 

I met Donald Trump at a business breakfast at the Plaza Hotel in 1992. It was obvious to me that he was a complete slime and what boggles the mind is how he conned the Republican electorate which then forced his acceptance on the grand poohbahs of the party, who were in on the joke all along. Yet, they did nothing. It was all about power.

 

What is most troubling is thus far from there has been no real explanation how this spoiled child of privilege has such a hold a large chunk of low-income white Americans. Trump doesn’t have a clue about the lives they live, and he really can’t stand them. The standard explanation on the Left is racism, but that does not account for Trump’s and the Republican Party’s growing support in the Latino community.

 

My explanation is that Trump channels their disgust with America’s cultural elite who constantly look down on their folkways by thinking of them as, using Hilary Clinton’s word, “deplorables.”  Afterall it is hard to support a Democratic Party that foists pronouns and the ill-conceived term Latinx down the throats of the general public. Thus, it pains me to say it, a Trumpy Republican can win again.

For the full Amazon URL see: It's a Miracle we Survived (amazon.com)

 

 

The Republican Party Implodes

The Republican Party founded in 1854 by anti-slavery Whigs is in the process of imploding. In just two days the party lost two Senate seats in Georgia, witnessed the sacking of the Capitol by insurrectionist vandals incited by President Trump and then two-thirds of Republican House members including their leader Kevin McCarthy and eight senators voted to overturn the lawful election of Joe Biden. Particularly repugnant was the behavior of the faux populist Senators and former Supreme Court clerks Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard) and Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale).  These two made their beds with Trump and they will now have to lie sleepless in those beds of thorns.

It is beyond me how Senators Romney, Thune, Toomey and Saase and Congressmembers Liz Cheney and Kinzinger can remain in a party where the Trump-Cruz-Hawley retain the backing of a majority of the membership, even after the attack on the Capitol. Thus my guess is that the Republican Party is about to split along the lines of my November 2018 blogpost (See: Shulmaven: The Coming Political Realignment: Part II ) where the establishment Republicans, the right-Hamiltonians join up with the Democratic Party, the left-Hamiltonians. They have more in common with the Democrats than what remains of the Republican Party which will become a modern version of the 1840's Know Nothing Party. 

The split will be exacerbated by what I expect to be a Trump Pardonpalooza late next week (See: Shulmaven: Trump's Pardonpalooza Coming Christmas Eve ) when he pardons himself, his family and all of his co-conspirators. And if that won't be enough the Trumpistas will be wallowing their "They stole it slogan" a version of Weimar Germany's "stab in the back" and "November criminals" memes of the fascists of that era. (See: Shulmaven: Trump's Big Lie and the Legacy of 1918 Germany)

Make no mistake the Democratic Party with its cancel culture left, defund the police mobs, high tax mentality and its elite haughtiness is no bed of roses, but at least for the most part, it respects our constitutional processes. Moreover if enough Republicans join, the Democrats just might be moved ever so gently to the Right. As that happens with or without this movement the Democratic Party will likely split with the Left forming a social democratic party, a la Eugene Debs in the early 1900's.

After Action Report on the 2020 Elections

While Shulmaven got Joe Biden winning right, I largely blew it everywhere else. Like too many, I got sucked into believing that the pollsters corrected for their mistakes in the 2016 election. Never again will I make that mistake.

 

I had Biden winning the popular vote by 7 points when it now looks like he will win it by 3 points. I had Biden winning Florida and North Carolina; wrong! I had him winning Arizona and Nevada, likely. And I had him winning Georgia, still too close to call.

 

With respect to the Senate I had the Democrats gaining a net of 5 seats. As of today, the Democrats are up one seat with two seats to be determined in a January runoff in Georgia. Shulmaven would sure like to own a TV station in Atlanta. It is my guess today that the Republicans are likely to hold both seats.

 

In the House I had the Democrats picking up 8-10 seats; it now looks like they will lose 8-10 seats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will soon find out what it was like for her Republican predecessors Ryan and Boehner to run an unruly caucus. It will not be pretty for her. 

To me the big takeaways from the election are:

1.     The Trump tactic of tagging the Democrats as radical leftists worked. Defunding the police and talking about socialism might work in New York, but not too many places elsewhere. Instead of being a plus, “the Squad” turned out to be a huge negative.

 

2.     The notion of a monolithic bloc of “people of color” crashed and burned. There are more differences than commonalities among African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asians. For example, it certainly did not help when Black Lives Matter protestors in Miami carried a flag with Che Guevara’s picture on it. To them it may have been a symbol of liberation, but to Miami’s Cuban and Venezuelan populations it was a symbol of totalitarian oppression.  Outside of Florida Hispanics in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas shifted markedly towards Trump.

 

3.     Biden’s position on fracking cost the Democrats two rising stars in the House, Kendra Horn from Oklahoma and Xochitl Torres-Small from New Mexico. *

 

4.     California, a state which voted for Biden by a 2-1 majority rallied against liberalism in three key ballot propositions and likely a fourth one. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2020/10/some-thoughts-on-four-controversial.html) Specifically the voters opposed a measure allowing for racial preferences in university admissions and state employment, opposed a measure that would allow for stricter rent control, supported a measure that treats gig workers as contractors rather than employees and thus far the opposition to amending Proposition 13 to allow for much higher taxes on commercial property is heading for defeat.

 

What the election seems to represent is that 2016 was not a fluke. America remains a very divided country and with Donald Trump acting like the world’s worst sore loser is certainly not helping things. We are  a country in a great need of spiritual healing. We must listen to one another, and I pray that Joe Biden will find the strength in him to lead us in that task.

 

*I financially supported her re-election efforts.

2020 Elections: A Good Night for Biden and the Democrats, a Bad Night for Trump

 

At last the election is just two days away. The way it looks to me, consistent with the recent polling data, is that Joe Biden will win the popular vote by a margin of 52-45-3 percent and it now looks like he will decisively win the battle for the electoral college by a margin of 350-188. I have Biden winning all the Clinton states of 2016 and adding Arizona, Florida, Georgia (yes), North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nebraska’s 2^nd congressional district. His majority will be based on the votes of suburban women with the biggest gender gap ever, Blacks, seniors and the young. In House races, the Democrats are likely to pick up a net of between 8-10 seats. This will largely replicate the strength in the suburbs that occurred 2018 with a few seats coming from North Carolina’s redistricting.

 

The call for the Senate is much trickier. Put bluntly there are way too many extremely close races that can go either way. My best guess is that will pick up a net gain of five seats bringing their majority to 52-47 with one seat awaiting a Georgia runoff in January. I have the Democrats losing the Jones seat in Alabama while picking up Cunningham in North Carolina, Kelly in Arizona, Ossoff in Georgia, Bullock in Montana (an upset), Hickenlooper in Colorado and Gideon in Maine. In case of Gideon we probably will not know until next week to allow for Maine’s ranked choice voting tabulation.

 

HEALTH WARNING: The Senate races will be really close and as result there will be a high margin of error. If I am roughly right on the presidential race and if the Republicans do much better than I have predicted my explanation would be that enough Republican crossover voters and independents voted Republican fearing that a Democratic Senate would lead to packing the Supreme Court and runaway liberal legislation.

My Amazon Review of Rick Pearlstein's "Reaganland: America Turns Right, 1976-1980"

 

Reagan Ascendant

 

Rick Pearlstein, a man of the Left, has written a very long (1120 pages in the print edition) and very important history of American politics from 1976-1980 through the twin lenses of the flowering of the American Right and Reagan’s successful campaign for the presidency. This is his fourth volume on the history of the modern American Right that starts in the 1950’s. (See my earlier review of his “The Invisible Bridge…” https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2014/08/my-amazon-review-of-rick-pearlsteins.html) As with his prior volumes he is very good at discussing the day-to-day politics of the era. The liberals were literally out of gas and there was a thunder on the Right led by the evangelical community, the revival of business lobbying and the new ideas coming from the neoconservatives. Standing athwart all of this was the hapless Jimmy Carter who found a way to upset the liberals on his left and the moderates on his right which leads to a challenge by Senator Edward Kennedy.

 

Pearlstein delivers terrific portraits of John Connally, Nixon’s Treasury Secretary and presumed Republican front runner in 1979, and anti-Equal Rights Amendment firebrand Phyllis Schlafly who successfully organizes the Right to defeat the amendment. We see the young Paul Manafort and Roger Stone practicing their dark arts that would become the basis of a powerful political consulting firm in the 1980s whose lives would turn into ignominy with the election of Donald Trump. We also see the rise of the direct mail wizard Richard Vigueri and his cohorts on the Right, Howard Phillips and Paul Weyrich.

 

The religious Right draws its strength from its opposition to abortion and gay rights. In its opposition to abortion American Protestants linkup with Catholics for the first time to form a powerful urban-rural coalition which undermines Democratic dominance of the eastern and Midwestern urban centers. In their opposition to gay rights, the Right finds a spokesperson in singer Anita Bryant who leads the charge to repeal a Miami gay rights ordinance.

 

Through it all we see Ronald Reagan methodically plodding along his path to the presidency with the ups and downs of his campaign culminating with his debate win over Jimmy Carter. To be sure he fires his first campaign manager, the egotistical John Sears and there are many gaffes along the way, but Reagan is opportunistic enough make a major issue out of the Panama Canal Treaty as sign of American retreat. Of course he and the Republican Party is helped along when everything falls off the tracks in 1979. We have the Iranian Revolution, the tripling of the price of gasoline, gas lines, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and the Iranian hostage crisis.

 

What Pearlstein misses is the sociological earthquake that was happening the 1970’s that gave rise to the religious Right. For example the birthrate collapsed from a peak of 4.3 million births in 1957 to a low of 3.1 million in 1975 with a modest increase to 3.6 million by 1980. The number of divorces more than doubled from 500,000 in 1970 to 1,200,000 in 1980 and the number of legal abortions increased from 500,000 in 1971 to 1,300,000 in 1980. There was good reason for Americans to be worried about the traditional family.

 

And if you overlay that on an increase in the female labor force participation rate from 43% in 1970 to 51% in 1980 which meant that the traditional one breadwinner household was falling further and further behind you can add an economic reason for the growing disenchantment of evangelical Christians. Now overlay that with a double-digit inflation you have a formula for deep resentment. To quote Karl Marx, “all that is solid melts into air.” That was the America of 1980.

 

To focus more on the economic side of things the roaring inflation was forcing the average worker into higher and tax brackets, a product of a tightly bracketed tax code. Further, if a second family member entered the labor force the marginal tax rate could very well be as high as 40%. Then of a sudden, the California tax revolt leads to the passage of Proposition 13 which cut property taxes by 60%. Pearlstein is very good with his discussion of this. I was in the middle of it and was quoted in the Howard Jarvis Time magazine cover story that he cites. Its passage gives succor to the Republicans in Congress supporting the Kemp-Roth 30% across the board income tax cut. That will pass later under Reagan.

 

However Pearlstein leaves out three critical factors as to the cause of Proposition 13. First the tax revenue coming in from rising property values was spent by government, not rebated in the form of lower rates. Second, the Crawford vs. L.A. Board of Education decision calling for crosstown busing made the local school less important to the typical suburban voter. Similarly the Serrano vs. Priest decision equalizing school finance detached local property taxes from support of local schools. Both those decisions took place in the early 1970’s which rendered ineffective the anti-Prop 13 message that the schools would be destroyed if the measure passed.

 

One thing that really bothers me about the book is Pearlstein’s reference to corporate lobbyists as “boardroom Jacobins.” He fails to understand that the real Jacobins were in the regulatory agencies who running a regulatory reign of terror against the business community. To be sure much regulation was needed, but the way they went about with little attention paid to cost/benefit analysis created a tough adversarial environment. Further effective business taxation was on the rise because the great inflation was rendering depreciation allowances woefully inadequate and stock prices measured in real terms collapsed. Even Senator Kennedy was supportive of increasing depreciation allowances and he said so in response to me at a rally in Los Angeles.

 

As far as the average industrial worker was concerned the Democratic Party was nowhere to be found. On September 16, 1977 the Youngstown Sheet and Tube factory closed firing 5,000 workers in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley. Within a few years 50,000 steel jobs were lost. The Democrats controlled the White House and had huge majorities in both houses of Congress. They did nothing and it is no wonder that Reagan got the bulk of their votes in 1980. Pearlstein does not mention this.

 

The Reagan we see in Pearlstein’s book is sunny optimist. He is pro-immigration, pro-trade and was way ahead of his time with respect to NAFTA and he had live and let live with respect to gay rights. He opposed the Briggs Amendment, a California anti-gay measure on the ballot in 1978. Thus the Reagan of 1980 is a far cry from the Republican Party of today. Simply put there is no way the wackos in today’s Republican Party would nominate him.

 

Rick Pearlstein gives us great history. It very detailed and well sourced. Despite my quibble above it is a must read for serious students of America’s political culture.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/RTGEJNHPIBVNP/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

The Democrats Put on a Good Show

The Democratic Party’s virtual convention worked in both form and substance. If you will it was a very successful infomercial highlighting the diversity and the policy positions of the party. Joe Biden came off as a deeply caring person and contrary to the Trump campaign’s attacks on him, he delivered a very presidential acceptance speech. He also made clear that he was not a captive of the party’s loony Left. Thus the way is open for him and his running mate Kamala Harris to attract a broad swath of the electorate.

 

My two qualms are that way too much time was spent on attacking Donald Trump rather than discussing the mass unemployment crisis our country faces and the near complete absence of any discussion on foreign policy. Ohio senator Sherrod Brown acted as an off-screen narrator in one of the few pieces on the economy; instead he should have had an on camera role. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 because she largely ignored white working class voters. Biden has the ability to speak to their pain and hopefully he will. As to foreign policy most Americans are not interested in foreign policy, but soon foreign policy will be interested in us.

 

My sense is as of today, the Democrats are on their way to a substantial victory in November that will lead to a conclusive Biden win along with gaining control of the Senate and adding seats in the House. Of course the Democrats sometimes have the habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, but that looks less likely as Trump continues to implode with each passing day.

My Amazon Review of A.J.Baime's "Dewey Defeats Truman: The 1948 Election and the Battle for America's Soul"

Never Give Up, Never Sit on a Lead

Political journalist A.J. Baime tells the often told story of Truman’s come from behind victory over Dewey with great insight and drama, no easy feat. Simply put President Harry Truman never gave up and New York Governor Thomas Dewey sat on a lead. Further Truman was handicapped by having Progressive Henry Wallace run to his left and Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond run well to the right thereby splitting the Democratic Party.

Of interest is that contrary to the title the election was not about America’s soul. Dewey and Truman agreed on international affairs, expanding social security, supporting a federal role in housing and on civil rights. As governor of New York Dewey pushed through the first major civil rights legislation in country. To be sure during the campaign Truman was far more full-throated in his support for civil rights. Dewey along with his running mate California Governor Earl Warren were perhaps the two best governors in America at the time. Had they won, my guess is that it would have been a successful administration.

What Truman understood is that there was a fundamental split between liberal Dewey and the largely conservative congress. Truman was not running against Dewey, per se, but rather on cross country whistle stop tour he lambasted the do nothing Republican Congress while begging for cash to keep the campaign going. While Truman was outlining specific programs, Dewey was mouthing the platitude of “unity.”

Truman had more on his mind than winning re-election. He was running the Berlin Airlift, negotiating with the Russians in Paris and dealing with the Arab-Israel War. He also found the time to order the integration of the armed forces.

Baime is especially good on his discussion of the Wallace campaign, a campaign largely run by a Communist Party cell. Wallace praised Stalin and attacked the Marshall Plan with great vehemence. Along the way he attracted a coterie of celebrities who objectively acted as, in Lenin’s term, “useful idiots.”

Then why did Truman win against all odds and with 90% of the newspapers against him including The New York Times. Baime suggests it was a combination of broad prosperity, strong labor union support, the Black vote in the great urban centers, technical changes in farm legislation that made it hard for farmers to profitably store their 1948 bumper crop and perhaps most important, the American people admired Truman’s spunk. It makes for a great read.

For the full Amazon URL see:https://www.amazon.com/review/R1J52ZAO05J9HG/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv