RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/kansas-should-go-f-itself

The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism

Thomas Frank is one of America’s more skillful writers, an expert practitioner of a genre one might call historical journalism – ironic, because no recent media figure has been more negatively affected by historical change. Frank became a star during a time of intense curiosity about the reasons behind our worsening culture war, and now publishes a terrific book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, at a time when people are mostly done thinking about what divides us, gearing up to fight instead.

Frank published What’s the Matter with Kansas? in 2004, at the height of the George W. Bush presidency. The Iraq War was already looking like a disaster, but the Democratic Party was helpless to take advantage, a fact the opinion-shaping class on the coasts found puzzling. Blue-staters felt sure they’d conquered the electoral failure problem in the nineties, when a combination of Bill Clinton’s Arkansas twang, policy pandering (a middle-class tax cut!) and a heavy dose of unsubtle race politics (e.g. ending welfare “as we know it”) appeared to cut the heart out of the Republican “Southern strategy.”

Yet Clinton’s chosen successor Al Gore flopped, the party’s latest Kennedy wannabe, John Kerry, did worse, and by the mid-2000s, Bushian conservatism was culturally ascendant, despite obvious failures. Every gathering of self-described liberals back then devolved into the same sad-faced anthropological speculation about Republicans: “Why do they vote against their own interests?”

Frank, a Midwesterner and one of the last exemplars of a media tradition that saw staying in touch with the thinking of the general population as a virtue, was not puzzled. What’s the Matter with Kansas? was framed as an effort to answer that liberal cocktail-party conundrum – “How could anyone who’s ever worked for someone vote Republican?” was the version Frank described hearing – and the answer, at least on the surface, was appealing to coastal intellectuals.

https://canadafreepress.com/article/joan-swirsky-interviews-author-linda-goudsmit-on-her-recently-published-opu

Joan (JS): Linda…when did you have the blazing insight that what you were witnessing in the politics of American leftists were not sincere efforts to improve the system, but rather elaborate hoaxes designed to destroy our country?  

Linda (LG): From 2017 to 2019––I wrote a number of articles in response to current events. At about the third article, I realized that there was a consistent pattern of leftist political policies that were presented as altruistic, but in  reality were deceitful, tactical, political strategies deliberately designed to collapse––to destroy––America from within. 

JS: Indeed, your book spells out the quite astounding number of 50 Humanitarian Hoaxes! And quite courageously, you identify the culprits you believe are responsible for this malevolent con job on America. I must add here that readers can also access your articles at: lindagoudsmit.com and goudsmit.pundicity.com

LG: Yes, there are many perpetrators of this stealth attack––and malevolence describes its destructiveness. But the Huckster-in-Chief is Barack Hussein Obama who, from his first appearance on the national and international stage, proclaimed his intention to ”fundamentally transform America.” Of course, most Americans had no idea that Obama’s goal was to replace our constitutional republic with socialism. We are witnessing the extraordinary success of his seditious plan today. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/more-praise-for-mike-gonzalezs-the-plot-to-change-america/

This penetrating and insightful book — with the secondary title, “How Identity Politics Is Dividing the Land of the Free” — has already been favorably reviewed by us here. It also features a nice blurb from Rich Lowry (“an incisive, unsparing treatment of identity politics”), as well as from Michael Barone and Ben Shapiro. So it hardly needs my endorsement. But the publication date is this week, and I’d like to add briefly my enthusiastic two cents.

As the title of the earlier NR review indicates, the book’s principal theme is identifying “The Intellectual Roots of Today’s Identity Politics.” A second strong theme — as you would expect from the author, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a Cuban emigre to boot — is a critique of the results of this Left-rooted sickness. And Mr. Gonzalez’s third theme is prescriptive: He aims to answer the question, posed in a different context over 100 years ago by a rather influential leftist, “What is to be done?” As the author succinctly puts it:

To achieve that end [i.e., to defeat the plot to change America], the most urgent tasks are to expose myths, reveal what really happened, explain why it is urgent to change course, and offer a strategy to do so. Though we should not fool ourselves into thinking it will be easy to eliminate identity politics, we should not overthink it, either. Identity politics relies on the creation of groups, and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group making and the entitlements, we can get rid of identity politics. Explaining all this is this book’s main goal.

That’s from the introduction, by the way; if you’re able to read that (and the conclusion) online, you should, since it will persuade you better than anything I can write to read the rest of the book.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/08/10/who-were-the-never-trumpers-and-what-motivated-them/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=

Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites, by Robert P. Saldin and Steven M. Teles (Oxford University Press, 304 pp., $27.95)

Slogans and labels serve a crucial purpose in politics, like banners on the battlefield: They rally the faithful to join a particular cause, and to know what cause they are joining. As soon as a cause acquires a name, however, the name becomes equally a term of abuse by its foes. Eventually, the name itself becomes a matter of contention, for both those who claim its ownership and those who seek to avoid its associations. So it is with “Republican,” so it is with “conservative,” so it is with “neoconservative,” and so it is today with “Never Trump.”

For those seeking to understand how the “Never Trump” banner was first raised and why some still claim it for their cause, Robert Saldin and Steven Teles have written an important and useful book. It is not a polemic. The reader will not find a brief against Donald Trump, or an attack on the Never Trumpers — though the book provides fodder for either point of view. Saldin and Teles have a perspective of their own, of course: They clearly believe that standing against Trump’s presidential campaign was the righteous thing for Republicans to do in 2016, and they want to tell the story of why some people did it and others did not. They cite, albeit with a footnoted quibble, political-science work claiming that democratic systems depend for their survival on the Right’s but not the Left’s curbing extremists. Still, the book will not be intolerable for conservative readers, whether they love Trump, hate him, or fall somewhere in between.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/mary_trump_abusing_psychology_to_abuse_her_uncle.html

Sheldon Roth, M.D., a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is the author of recently published Psychologically Sound: The Mind of Donald J. Trump.

Hidden Messages

Before you open this book or turn a page, look at the cover.  What do we see?  A handsome, young Donald Trump, in dashing cadet uniform, during one of the finest periods of his life.  In his five years at New York Military Academy, he reaped undiluted acclaim from faculty and classmates — a model student in behavior and academics, popular with classmates, a star athlete elected to the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame, garnering offers from Major League Baseball.  For a book entitled Too Much and Not Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, what is the meaning of this charming cover?  Is it Simon & Schuster’s unconscious peeking through Mary Trump’s agonized victimization?  Do they know something she is disinclined to acknowledge?

Turning to the book’s pages conjures another challenging image, a lexical one: Tolstoy’s opening line of Anna Karenina — “All happy families are alike, unhappy families are unhappy each in their own ways.”  The story of the first proposition is yet to be written, since conflict — unhappiness — is inherent to life.  Some families have more conflict, some less, but it is inescapable.  Any family in COVID-19 lockdown will readily testify to this truism.

A Psychopathology of Everyday Life

Mary Trump turns all Trump family conflict into prima facie psychopathology.  Relying as she does on fantastical speculation for thin formulations about the childhood experience of Fred Sr. and Mary Anne Trump’s complicated family of seven (decades before Mary Trump was born) further muddies her questionable psychological lens.  Equally startling is the biased degree to which she views her deceased father, Fred Jr. — perpetrator of domestic wife abuse leading to divorce, repeated abject employment failures, and an ugly history of debilitating alcoholism that contributed to his early death — as the only “self-made” hero of the family.  Even if one accepted her dubious psychological judgments, which I do not, her objectivity defies credulity.