Economics and investment gurus abandoning the GOP... and John Roberts's agenda... and again with this "Fourth Turning" voodoo?

Starting with economics: How are my investment-pundit friends reacting to these insane times? Here's one denouncing a second round of ripoffs.

"$1,000,000,000,000. Or a TRILLION dollars. That's enough to give all 1,000 Billionaires in the World another Billion. Wait, we did that already. Well it's enough to give a Million Millionaires another Million. We did that too? Well it's enough to buy 3,000 masks for each American so we wouldn't need to spend Trillions propping up the economy or to accelerate money velocity by giving $600 to 30M people for a year."

"ROFL!!! Who are we kidding, this is America, we're going to give it to the rich people again!" ---

-- And that from a stock investment guru... one of those who love markets, but who get that driving average folks toward revolution may not be good for values.

"The funny thing is the rich people are pissed that they are only getting $1Tn this time (got $6.7Tn last time) ...The biggest stimulus issue will hit us on Friday, it's the end of the $600 weekly unemployment bonus and the Democrats in the House wanted to extend it through Christmas while the Scrooges in the Senate said not only do they want it dropped to $200 now but they want all unemployment capped at 70% of wages AFTER it's combined with any State Benefits people are receiving."

There's more. But you get it. The rich are swiftly dividing into two camps: the unsapient and insatiably greedy that I depicted in Existence... versus those who understand what ol' Joe Kennedy did, when that SOB mogul shocked his peers and backed Roosevelt: 

"I'd rather have half my wealth taken to foster a happy middle class than lose it all to revolution."

And again, I know a dozen ways that some sub-billionaire could make a huge difference, the next two months. And go down in history.

Meanwhile... continuing with economics...

The FCC has approved a petition from Cumulus Media to permit more than 25% foreign ownership of US media, up to and including 100%. Yep. Part of the steady effort to give puppetmasters all the strings.

The best online zine about economics in the modern context – and the top venue that discusses the deeply compassionate and moral ways that Adam Smith first broached the stunning advantages of flat-fair-open-transparent competitiveness – is the EVONOMICS site.  Highly recommended.  And yes, I have one of the channels there, talking about Smith… and why advertising can no longer carry the weight of supporting the Web. 

And see their piece on the economic effects of the pandemic.

== Roberts the "moderate" or "liberal"? ==

Again and again. The top oligarchs don't care about race or gender or abortion, except as dog whistles to rile up red-heads and confeds. John Roberts will side with the Court's liberals on those topics, in order to get balance cred. But he will never side with the people or precedent, or the Constitution, or honesty, when it comes to power. 

And now someone else is pointing at the emperor's nakedness:

"Conservatives really aren't paying good attention to [chief justice] Roberts. He knows what is important and what is not. He knows that LGBTQ rights and religion get lots of media coverage, but what really matters to him is keeping Republicans in power via gerrymandering, voter suppression etc. On the latter kind of cases, he is an unwavering supporter of the Republican Party. 

"To mask that, he votes with the four liberals from time to time in the hopes that everyone is distracted by bright shiny objects and fails to notice that what he really cares about is keeping Republicans in power. With this mix of rulings, he can claim he is just calling balls and strikes (even if baseball itself is in trouble, as described below). Conservatives seem to be unable to comprehend that he is on their side on the stuff that really matters long term."

At last. A pundit who isn't denser than lead.

== Again with this garbage? ==

One of the most-absurd pieces of pattern-seeking nonsense is "The Fourth Turning" by Strauss & Howe, a fable about American "generations" that both ignores the rest of the world and all the rest of human history... plus biology, evolution and almost any inconvenient facts... but has become a touchstone catechism for the US right, feeding into a conservative proclivity toward CYCLICAL HISTORY.

As some kind of cause-effect predictor, it is nonsense... though as a metaphor for what we are going through, the fable does have some charms. It does seem as if millennials will be forced into "hero generation" status akin to the World War II clade. Not because of some teleological 'cycles,' but because imbecile believers in such nonsense, like Steve Bannon, have circled the globe hell bent on helping the enemies of our Great Experiment to provoke such a crisis, where none had been necessary at all. Ironically, they are doing it for evil reasons that the millennials themselves utterly reject. And those millennials will hunt them down, if this gets really dark.

I go into these cycles & such in an earlier posting as well as here and here.

==  The mumbo gets more Jumbo... ==

This interesting piece surveys the notions of William Strauss and Neil Howe that led to their famous prediction of a Great Crisis around the year 2020. I am much less impressed… in fact I have a chapter in Polemical Judo about "patterns of history" - or "teleology" - dissecting how mystical-minded folks on the left view such patterns quite differently from the way folks on the right generally adore "cyclical" incantations about nations going "decadent" and "falling" in rhythmic fatal sequences. (The Nazis believed in cyclical-history crap, proving decisively that they were a phenomenon of the right.)

Ironically, Strauss and Howe... authors of Generations and The Fourth Turning were actually quite upset over how fervently their thesis -- that US history obeys prim 80 year cycles -- was embraced by the radical right. Excuse some repetition, but Howe repeatedly stressed that the asses gleefully calling for a 2020 era crisis - many of whom, like Steve Bannon, helped artificially to cause it -- are exactly the sort of boomer dogmatists whom the new, millennial "hero generation" utterly despise!

  If millennials swing any way politically, it will be to emulate the previous "hero clade," the so-called Greatest Generation who adored one living human above all others... Franklin Roosevelt.

Oh, but now comes a "paper" that takes this nonsense to the nth degree, using Sciencey-jabber and impressive looking "charts" and inapropos 'citations.' There's hardy a sentence in this scroll of dreck that isn't easily disproved babble and confabulation with tables and graphs that are outright LSD fantasies... but wow what an incantation!

Again. In this link I point out the both leftists and rightists tend to desperately seek patterns of teleological ordained history. The left often sees this as heading inexorably in a particular direction, while the right nearly always plunges into "cycles." They draw comfort from the notion that all efforts will fail.

Oh, by the way... Did you know that private banks have police - and can arrest you? Without any Congressional hearings on the matter, the USA Patriot Act in 2001 bestowed on the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks domestic policing powers. While the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. is deemed an “independent federal agency,” with its Chair and Governors appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, the 12 regional Fed banks are private corporations owned by the member banks in their region. … The Fed’s police officers are technically known as FRLEO, short for Federal Reserve Law Enforcement Officer. The system has its own police academies for training, their own patch and badges, uniforms, pistols, rifles, police cars and the power to arrest coast to coast without a warrant.”

And finally...

See this: The most surprising revelations from Mary Trump's just-released tell-all book about the president: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man - which joins the shelves along with Bolton's The Room Where it Happened.

Inside the luxury nuclear bunker protecting the mega-rich from the apocalypse. “While humanity is still dealing with an ongoing pandemic of disastrous proportions, some Americans are preparing for a very different doomsday scenario: waiting out a nuclear winter inside a condo complex of luxurious underground bunkers.” 

First, these jerks think they are so modernist and even science fictional, and they haven’t a hair’s breadth of logic or imagination among them… like remembering that we nerds know where every single one of these hidey holes are, including those in Patagonia, the Urals and under the sea. And in the event of a calamity, if we feel betrayed or even just abandoned by oligarchs whose actions or negligence contributed to that fall, then we who know nuclear physics, cyber, bio and genetics will seek out those holes, pry out the soft nuts and turn them into peasants in the new order that they made.

Looking for destiny ... in false historical parallels

Teleology is a quality of humans -- the pattern-seeking animals -- to ascribe foregone destiny to both history and the future.

Yes, I admit there are some undeniable historical patterns, like the tendency for groups of males who have an advantage -- muscles, swords, money  or persuasive voices -- to take advantage... using it to cheat, crushing fair competition by giving their sons overwhelming, inherited advantages.  Inheritance-hierarchies dominated across 99% of history. The truest "attractor state," feudalism (in its general sense) is what Adam Smith and the American Founders successfully (at last) rebelled against. 

Much of U.S. history has been about efforts by cheaters to restore feudal hierarchy  under a vaiety of excuses (including some lefto-Marxist ones), ending our brief experiment in flat-fair-open-Smithian systems. The Greatest Generation did a fantastic job of staving off that failure mode, resisting extremist temptations in all directions, establishing the most creative, productive, and progressively-improving nation ever seen. 

Alas, these things tend to be temporary. One of the worst oligarchy putsches is happening right now, but that’s not today’s topic, which is teleology.

Is history ordained or cyclical? I’ve been talking a lot about this human obsession. Religions fixate on it, almost everywhere. Mystics sought to predict using auguries and oracles and prophets. Recently I laid out a fascinating overlap -- how romantics of the left are remarkably similar those on the right. Both groups believe in a compulsory future. Leftists tend to see it as an often-violent upward climb toward zero-coercion utopia.  (In this end goal, they are amazingly like libertarians.)

The right is enamored of a different forecast of gloomy futility -- Cyclical History -- the notion that societies go through life cycles of youthful vigor, senescence and decay. Take Oswald Spengler's The Decline Of The West, for example. Or the Nazis’ notion of rhythmic collapse via plunging ice-moons, followed by a resurrected reich. 

Or the insipid Tytler Calumny.

As far back as Toynbee, historians have debunked this jibbering nonsense, yet pattern seekers keep rushing to embrace it, finding solace in a sense of "historical inevitability."  The latest version, beloved across the American right, is The Fourth Turning, by Neil Howe and William Strauss.  (Not related to the University of Chicago's Leo Strauss, who trained a generation of neoconservatives to undermine every American strength.)  I critique this just-so story in detail, elsewhere. But we need reminding that it has become a cult bible to many of our neighbors.

Yes, in this case, Strauss and Howe provide a lovely, symmetrical tale fitting the dyspeptic narrative. According to their story, it seems that, despite their near-total victory at demolishing the Greatest Generation's Rooseveltean social contract, every value held by today's U.S. majority is destructively self-indulgent. Hence (oligarchs and flacks tell themselves), cheating is justified to prevent that benighted majority from having any say.  Moreover, despite Republican dominance for 30 years, things have reached a pass where only a horrific cleansing will bring a new, vigorous generation out of the ashes.

There are countless problems with this narrative of hand-rubbing glee over looming catastrophe:

1)  Very few metrics suggest such a crisis is a foregone conclusion. Yes, there is a rising wealth and influence disparity, reversing the Greatest Generation's (GG) finest accomplishment: the flattest and most dynamic free market society the world ever saw.  And - oh, yes - there is a looming ecological crisis. But other than those two dangers, most indicators are rather positive. And those two could be fixed with some GG pragmatism. In other words, by not repressing all the creative castes.

2) Not satisfied with inevitability, the most vigorous Fourth Turning believers, like Steve Bannon, have openly declared their intent to provoke the crisis.  To thwart (as the Fox-GOP has done for 25 years) any processes of negotiation by which adults might resolve issues without crisis. They proclaim that they’ll be satisfied with nothing less than violent Civil War. 

3)  It is assumed, because Fox succeeded at riling up proto-fascist populism among the more ill-educated white males, that this trend can be maintained forever, under tight control by the Murdochians. But history reminds us:

   a) The oligarchs in 1930s Germany lived to regret riling up a similar, Know-Nothing hate movement, that served its initial purpose against the left, but then turned on them, as we are now seeing Trumpist fascism start to turn on the Kochs and other oligarchs.

   b) In America, 1930s populism instead veered leftward, but not to communism. Rather, to Rooseveltean reforms and that flat-dynamic free market success story. The most successful – by all measures - social contract the world ever saw, and the very one that Republicans have proudly dismantled since 1981.

4) None of the scenarios promulgated by Bannon and others realistically assess whom the millennials – who are presumably the next "hero generation" according to Fourth Turning theory -- will blame for the crisis, and which direction they will veer.  Think about this irony: Bannon, Alex Jones and the Murdochs and Putin all utterly depend on riling-up unwise, precipitative wrath out of aging American white male Baby Boomers, exactly the "dupe Generation" disparaged by Howe and Strauss! So… why would Bannon assume that the subsequent hero generation will march in lockstep down the same path?

Um, doesn’t  the Fourth Turning theory suggest that millennials will reject everything crisis-making boomers like Steve Bannon have done? (Raising an intriguing deep-conspiracy notion, that’s probably occurring to you, right now.)

Millennials are already swinging soft-left, emulating the Greatest Generation and rejecting their grandparents' raving, boomer inanities.  (Like the insipidly self-indulgent "I'm as mad as hell" meme.) Millennials can clearly see what every single "reform" made by the GOP since 1981 has wrought -- steadily declining growth, except in skyrocketing debt, disdain of the science that delivered a myriad miracles, and a new gilded age of neo-feudalism. The works of Karl Marx – moribund in the 1990s – are now flying off the shelves.

Exactly where do the Murdochs, Kochs, Mercers and Bannons think this is likely to end?  Especially when the well-educated whites (and others) in the fact-professions feel warred upon every day, by every reflex of a mad right?

Sensible men and women conservatives need to try actually parsing this out. 

Even if Howe and Strauss are correct, the crisis scenario does not bode well for any aspect of a moderate, free-market American right. And every day that passes without U.S. conservatism awakening to its duty, we come closer to a climax that will make even Vladimir Putin writhe with regret over what he and Murdoch and the other rich fools awakened...

...either a Rooseveltean outcome of overwhelming, resurgent strength... or a Huey Long... or a Hitler.

== Prepare for a “U” to turn sideways ==

As Samuel Johnson wisely observed, scoundrels run to “patriotism” when they feel cornered and have no other recourse. And abandon patriotism when anything is asked of them, like keeping their word. In particular, confederates are always the most fervent wavers of the red, white and blue, swearing oaths to America… until it becomes even slightly inconvenient.  Like when a Lincoln wins an election.

Then just watch as the “U” in their shouted “U S A!” turns sideways, into a “C,” and the confederacy drops all pretense. Signs are already erupting. See this anecdotal preview: Neo-Confederates reach out to their ‘Russian friends’ in new project : "Once again, racist secessionists are looking to Moscow for succor.” Then the League of The South, an organization described by analysts as a neo-confederate hate group, has launched a Russian language page on their website to explore shared ideas on "Southern nationalism."

Yeah, yeah, one can find anecdotes for almost anything. Indeed, the #1 Fox trick is to show anecdotes of absurd-pathetic “social justice warrior” flakes and then declare that “all liberals and democrats are like this!”  I hope I’ll prove just as wrong about the trend toward a deeply violent phase of the American Civil War.

Still, you need to be thinking ahead. And there's still time to order that Halloween costume I’ve been urging on all loyal Americans for two years.  A blue, union Kepi hat.  It will speak volumes this fall, one week before the mid-terms.

== Another hat idea ==

I still prefer the kepi. But one of you chimed in with an alternative:

“I want to have a hat made with the letters moved around: AWGA. ‘America Was Great Already!’"

Indeed, recall the trap I suggested for your mad, confederate uncle. Demand of him: “Okay then, when do you think America was great?”

Spring the trap! If they say “the 1950s,” you can both show that we got way-better, still… and that the “Greatest Generation” of that era were mostly liberals, who adored Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

(See my earlier posting: Was 1957 America better than today? 

Gloom and doom scenarios

We've entered a new phase... Generally, I prepare these things in spurts, as much as a few weeks in advance. But events are moving so fast that I must use a new style. These postings will henceforth be in two parts. The well-written and deeply pondered stuff is below...

...but we'll lead with something from the latest news.

And no, I cannot even catch up on the firing of Steve Bannon! I'll link you to my earlier attempts to decrypt this bizarre figure... and the dangerous "triumph of the will" ethos he embodies.  Though in fact, his fall may have come more because he wanted the U.S. to finally stand up for itself in international trade. His one sensible policy may have got him fired.

== Everyone's raving about end games ==

Oh calm down already! All right, you desperately want to envision a way out of this torment. Then ponder four scenarios: 

(1) Impeachment is extremely unlikely, unless Robert Mueller finds smoking guns, big ones. In which case idiot Democrats will call a mob and Ryan will rub his hands with glee, letting them clean up the GOP's mess while riling the confeds to volcanic fury. He'll become VP and we'll tumble into hot civil war. Don't fall for it.

(2): The 25th Amendment.  Trump and Pence would send "letters" back and forth at an ever-accelerating rate until the email servers melt. Congressional Republicans will dither, covering their ears to the blatant psychological melt-down of the man-with-nukes.  Till the Supreme Court has to step in with some kind of non-Constitutional arbiter. Insane amounts of damage.  

Yes, Congress could appoint a commission of sages that could have real power for good, under the 25th. I comment on this, below. If the right people were on it, our nation could ease out of civil war.  And the chances McConnell and Ryan would do this are nil.

(3) Donald Trump is pressured to resign. Um right. That would require something on the order of the Pee Tape. Nothing less and probably much more. You got hopes.

A hybrid seems possible.  DT takes a 'stress break.' A vacation with no electronics of any kind. Dems should insist they get to see him, daily.

(4) Status quo. The circus goes on and on. We depend utterly on the sane adults of the civil service, intel community, law professionals and the U.S. military officer corps to keep us safe, while Donald Trump adds fuel to phase 8 of the Civil War, destroying the Republican brand and riling up the Union to truly take up the fight.... ideally winning overwhelming victory at the ballot box. (Though that will also require dems wising up on tactics.)

#4 doesn't mean passivity! Congress must rescind the 2001 War Powers Act now!  And set up a commission of sages that can (if unanimous) allow the military to pause a presidential command. That commission could be explicitly granted 25th Amendment powers giving it real muscle. (If it is partisan, then we're entering Venezuela territory.  So start with all the ex-presidents, ex-Vice Presidents and ex Supreme Court Justices. Throw in every U.S. Nobel laureate?) 

The fact that DT has made such thoughts necessary - and forced the Joint Chiefs to (just yesterday) issue statements contradicting a presidential statement - is the worst symptom of this disease.  Though remember. Fox is the disease. Donald Trump is only a symptom.

Any "fifth option" I can think of is too horrific for words and I denounce it, in advance.

My advice, especially to Democratic politicians, remains not to fall for traps laid by Paul Ryan and Rupert Murdoch, as I put it here. Though yes!  I still pray for a dem smart and courageous enough to do this.

Above all, you guys need to calm down. Ponder that DT's White House leaks like a sieve, rendering it somewhat harmless... but  Mike Pence - if he gets in - would fill the place with tightly-disciplined Dominionists who will sincerely strive every day to bring about the Book of Revelation's end-of-days. 

We're supposed to be the smart people. We have all of the fact-user professions, right? Use that. Think.

And if that wasn't cheery enough for you...

== Dire Warnings ==

David Wallace-Wells has stirred angst galore, via an article in New York Magazine crying out “Alas, Babylon!” – that all hope is lost. In “The Uninhabitable Earth Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think,” Wallace-Wells cites doomsday scenarios of exintinction level events, such as heat death, drought, food shortages, and climate plagues.

Among the many responses out there, one that is brief cogent, well-written – by Jim O’Donnell – first summarizes the reactions, then gets on to important points. Jim doesn’t weigh how wrong or right Wallace-Well’s assertions might be (I found many of them to be exaggerated, if pointing in needful directions), but focuses instead on the fire and brimstone pulpit slamming preachiness of Wallace-Wells, whose ethos is clearly “we’re all doomed, so get up off your butts! Because, did I mention that we’re all doomed, no matter what anyone does?”

I have long inveighed that reflexive gloom is being pounded into citizens for a variety of reasons:

1. Would be oligarchs, pushing for a return to 6000 years of feudalism, know that fear was always feudalism's foundation and fearful personalities are more likely to seek what George Lakoff calls the "strong father."

2. Reformers at the other end of the (lobotomizing/simplistic) "left-right spectrum" push gloom for reasons of puritan righteousness.  They believe you can get folks to invest heavily in planet-saving or tolerance-spreading endeavors by screaming jeremiads. Hence, it is on the left that immense rage boiled against Stephen Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined," and against Peter Diamandis's "Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think" -- books that laid down long lists of things that have gone very well and portend more good things, to come.

The underlying reason for hatred of Pinker and Diamandis and others is not based on their actual positions and recommendations -- both of them urge vigorous action and doubling-down on liberal efforts to save the world -- but on their message that these efforts will go better if pursued by a confident people, whose can-do spirit is grounded in past accomplishments. 

Their sales pitch -- that modernist, scientific, liberal society has achieved miracles and hence should feel encouraged and propelled to do more -- is anathema to those stoked on indignat joys of denunciation. (See this counter-productive - and often deeply sick - sanctimony addiction explicated in my article on self-righteousness.)

3. Another driver has been our shared mythologies -- especially Hollywood films, but also my own realm of novels and stories.  Fiction often conveys positive values: e.g. Suspicion of Authority (SoA), tolerance, diversity, and appreciation of eccentricity. (Almost all protagonists exhibit some eccentric trait, which helps bond with the audience.) But two other messages are almost always purveyed, out of a laziness that makes plotting easier, but that spreads a poison:

-  No institution is ever to be trusted.

-  Your neighbors are all useless, clueless, cowardly sheep.

These are blatantly untrue, yet purveyed in a firehose of myths and memes. I explain the basic reason in my article The Idiot Plot. 

Now add in a distrust of smartypants know-it-alls, which the right has exploited and converted into all-out memic war against science, journalism, teaching, universities, medical doctors and every other clade of fact-users, now including even the FBI, Intel communities and military officer corps. (All of the latter are now "deep state" conspirators.)

Jim speaks of how "societies which fared best are those able and willing to adapt."  This reiterates the conclusion reached by one of the world's greatest historians, Arnold Toynbee, who found that societies collapsed when they failed to invest in a liberal diversity of "creative minorities" who could respond to challenges with fresh solutions.  (Jared Diamond's more recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, made the same point, but focused narrowly on environmental (often man-made) challenges.)

The long and short of it is that liberals and leftists are allies, for now, but psychologically very different.  While the latter are steeped in radical, angry, sanctimonious and zero-sum thinking - you either follow the party line or the world dies! - the former tend toward positive sum belief in a balance between dire warnings and willingness to at least glance at how far we've come, perhaps even accepting that progress has happened. Indeed, that is the best reason to believe that we can accomplish more.

= Coda: Papa Heinlein would want you to use him right now. Use him! =

I will keep going back to The Master. 

You out there who make excuses for today's madness on the right? You badly need to look again at Robert Heinlein, who tore into the potential for an alliance of oligarchs and pulpit pounders taking over America... a cabal that would --

"promise a material heaven here on earth, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negrosim, and a good large dose of anti-“furriners” in general and anti-intellectuals here at home, and the result might be something quite frightening – particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington."

Read more of Heinlein's spectacular insights into our problem. In this linked blog I gave the podium over to RAH, from his afterword to REVOLT IN 2100. And he offers no comfort, no shelter, no justification to those who called him a member of the crazy right. Oh, sure, he hated commies too! But there's no ambiguity which side he'd be on in this phase -- in any phase -- of the American Civil War.

Oh, you Catholics? Don't imagine you'll be exempt. Not when it hits the fan. Or Methodists or Mormons or Israelis etc, either. Listen to Papa Heinlein. Snap out of it.

Learn the true meaning of the political “F-Word”

Put aside distractions: Spicer, Priebus, the Mooch.... It's Steve Bannon who has drawn concerned attention lately from those seeking signs and portents. For example, Donald Trump’s Chief Strategist reads a lot and styles himself a supreme intellect. In this exploration of Bannon’s favorite books, you’ll find plenty to worry about, such as his cult-obsession with a coming apocalypse-like crisis foretold by inevitable “cycles of history.” (I'll append more about his favorite authors, below.)

Elsewhere, I’ve written about this fellow’s obsession to give Trump, Putin, the Ayatollahs and Saudis the one thing that they most want in common, a U.S. war against Iran. (And in today's news, ever-more risky encounters between US Navy ships and Republican Guard vessels in a waterway we no longer need to defend or care much about. Can anyone spell T-O-N-K-I-N?)

Oh, but folks will clutch at hope. Might the crazy be limited? For example, people ask if I am shocked (shocked!) that Dark Lord of the West Wing floated a trial balloon proposal to raise taxes on the rich, to a 44% top rate on incomes above $5 million.

Shocked? Um, not. Let me remind you that Steve Bannon is not a member of the plutocracy that has long owned the Republican Party, controlling its policies through lickspittle politicians, pulpit pounders and mouthpiece shills like George F. Will.

Yes, for decades that oligarchy had its way, feeding lip service to social conservatives on issues like racism, xenophobia, abortion, religious litmus tests and so on, without ever delivering on any of those hot-air promises, least of all doing anything for lower middle class (LOMIC) whites, economically. GOP Congresses have been by far the laziest in the republic's history, concentrating only on legislation that benefits the oligarchy.

That hasn't mattered, till recently. By Fox-steering populism into a confederate know-nothing cult, those cynical manipulators were able to turn LOMICs against other elites — the smartypants know-it-alls and fact-using professions like scientists, teachers, journalists and now FBI, Intel and military officers …  much as 1860s plantation lords got poor, white Southerners to march against their own best interests. 

Distraction-distraction; they thought it would work forever. Alas, those lords are ignoramuses, when it comes to history. Take what eventually happened to those slave-owning plantation lords. Or French aristocrats, when the populist masses got fed up. 

A more frighteningly germane example is the Junkers-caste 1930s Prussian nobles, who thought they could control a populist beast they helped stir into hydrophobic frenzy. They subsidized and riled up Nazi fever as a weapon against communists, only to see gifted Robspierres leap into the saddle of their frothing horse, sending it charging in directions that brought their own ruin.

Enough context; how does Steve Bannon fit into all this? Despite his stint at Goldman-Sachs — a job requirement in the Trump Administration — Bannon has never been a plutocrat. He is a fascist. 

The genuine article. Not any of the ersatz things that silly-cursing-ignorant lefties call by that name, but in the dictionary sense of the word — romantic-nostalgic, utterly dedicated to symbolic and ritualistic purity, terrified of complexity and even the thought of positive-sum, hostile to expertise, obsessed with fore-ordained destiny and cyclical “history,” thrilled by regimentation of a sacred, uniform, race-centered 'nation' and convinced of the sub-humanity of any opponent. That is what the political F-word actually means.  

Bannon's heroes, like Julius Evola and Mussolini and Vladimir Putin, have been icons of this pattern. And, while fascists go easier on plutocrats than communists do (witness Putin’s oligarch mafiosi), the rich had better toe the line, and surrender however much lucre the populist movement demands. Only those Junkers and German industrialists who clicked heels to the swastika got to keep their estates - and heads - under the Nazis.

Now, the key question: how much is our time like 1934? Short of a Reichstag Fire, I don’t see Bannon’s LOMIC white populists and fundie-dominionists and true-fascists being able to overwhelm the plutocrat GOP-owners quite yet. Yes, the firing of Reince Priebus certainly is a step in that direction. But mainline, old-money pols like Lindsey Graham have already drawn lines in the sand. This is our party, say the plutos and their shills, we paid good money for it.

No, the brown-shirted GOP wing daren’t stage their Reichstag fire, their Gleiwitz or Tonkin Incident, until first they’ve purged the FBI, intel agencies and officer corps of brave adults.  Till then, lobotomized lords — like the Kochs and Murdochs — will remain ‘in control’ of the Republican Party.  And till then, Bannon’s tax hike trial balloons will be made of lead.

But he’s biding his time. And unlike the Kochs and Murdochs, Steve Bannon actually knows some history. He has studied what errors were made by his heroes — Robspierre, Rasputin, Lenin, Evola, Mussolini, Röhm, Goebbels, Borman, Stalin and the rest.  This time, meticulously, he intends to get it right.

==  What's on his book shelf? ==

See Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency, by Joshua Green. For those of you who have the stomach to dive into this noxiously recurring world view - Guénon’s The Crisis of the Modern World (1927) and Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World (1934) are what drew Bannon’s interest to Traditionalism, both of whom were certainly influenced by Oswald Spengler’s 1922 The Decline of the West. All eagerly forecast the imminent shattering of a western enlightenment that - disappointingly - never collapsed. Instead, our pragmatic-scientific-mongrel renaissance proved rather more resilient, dynamic and creative than they expected, skyrocketing into a Golden Age. 

But addicts will get their fix. Continuing this baleful-gleeful gloomcasting in the 1950s was émigré philosopher Leo Strauss, who taught the Bush era neocons like Wolfowitz and Kristol how to get absolutely every single thing completely wrong, often with pinpoint precision. Strauss is on Bannon's shelf, along with Allan Bloom, whose 1987 The Closing of The American Mind made him guru of those pouring hate at American universities, our one zone of overwhelming superiority in a fast-changing world. Also glimpsed there are the stunningly delusional works of David Gelernter, who would have been Donald Trump's 'Science Advisor,' if the confederate leader ever appointed one. (He hasn't, and for good reason: even Gelernter would occasionally have uttered the forbidden words "that's not exactly true, sir.") 

Sure, all these mesmerizing tomes on Steve's shelf proved not only wrong, but diametrically wrong in every way. But that never-true contradiction of all fact raises no qualms. Nor does relentless scholarly disproof of Bannon's favorite modern tome, Strauss & Howe's absurd but captivating exercise in pattern-seeking The Fourth Turning. But that's how cults work. It's not fact that matters, it is how the incantation makes you feel! If facts inconveniently contradict feeling, then that only makes fact-users the enemy.

== Scandals?  We got scandals. ==

Connect the dots to see what all the parties to the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Donald Junior have in common. Scan who was there and what they’ve been up to, for decades, and your blood will run cold.  Oh, they all say they were there (and had other meetings) to discuss “adoptions.” And POTUS said that was the content of his long, unannounced meeting with Putin – without any U.S. government officials present. “Adoptions.” Read here what the word “adoptions” is code for.

But the thing I find most shocking is how utterly amateur their spycraft was. Seriously? This is how you arrange secret meetings? Either these are morons… or their putsch to undermine the West is so far along that they feel confident enough to get sloppy.  (ASIDE: An experienced former 30 year US counter-intelligence expert asserts that “the clearest evidence that this was a Russian influence operation is the trail of bread crumbs the Kremlin seemed to have deliberately left leading from Trump Tower to the Kremlin. This operation was meant to be discovered.”)

Oh, but now Fox is shrilly calling the Clintons “Russian Stooges” for having done some paid speeches. Um, it ain’t the pay, guys, it’s the favors. Trump just ended U.S. support for the moderate rebels against Putin’s pal Assad.  “Adoptions” is code for ending U.S. sanctions against Russia’s elites for annexation of Crimea and the Donbass.

As for Hillary and Barack?  They were Enemies Number One and Two to Putin, who openly raged against them.  Clinton and Obama gave Russian hegemonism its worst setback since the fall of the USSR, when we supported the people of Ukraine chasing out their KGB-puppet president and turning to the west.  Putin and the Moscow press directly credit HC and BHO with that. Directly, and they declared vengeance.

Tell us, oh, Fox. How do you explain away that? Oh, you don’t have to. Your viewers do not care about verifiable “facts.”

== Halloween will be political!  And Snippets ==

Wardrobe decisions for Halloween: It’s not too soon to use your contacts to affect what we'll all be wearing, October 31. Let some novelty company know to produce millions of blue, civil war Union kepi hats. All right, I was premature, earlier years, but now? Wanna bet you’ll want one, in just 3 months?  Get those orders in.  Or find me an order site and I’ll publicize!

And just in time… a new parallel world sci fi show called “Confederate” seems a timely, provocative riff on our re-ignited American Civil War.  “The series takes place in an alternate timeline, where the Southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution. The story follows a broad swath of characters on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone — freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, the executives of a slave-holding conglomerate and the families of people in their thrall.”  I'll comment more on this, later.

Jim Wright's Stonekettle Station blog is always entertaining, on-target, lively and interesting. This born-rural military vet eviscerates the hijackers of American conservatism, especially those hand wringers who claim to be shocked by Donald Trump's antics. Drop in now and then! But today's missive is especially biting.

Trump marginalizes experts, debases expertise -- from The Washington Post.

To any Ayn Rand literates here, was there any significance that the lately lamented White House communications director - a veteran of Goldman Sachs - was named "Mooch"?

Oooog.  Enough, already.  Can I wake up now? I swear off whatever hooch I drank, to give me these DTs.