RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/01/nationalism-is-americas

When it comes to sports, Americans look with admiration on the comeback player of the year. We can’t resist the rediscovery of excellence in a tried and true athlete. And so it was this last year with the rediscovery of an old and excellent concept. The comeback concept of the year has been nationalism (along with its nephew, tariffs). My pick is reinforced by the December 31 column of the otherwise reliable liberal E.J. Dionne, who makes apologies on behalf of nationalism.

Dionne allows that “it’s common,” among liberal elites, “to denounce nationalism, to disdain supposedly mindless, angry populists, and to praise those with an open-minded, cosmopolitan outlook. Note that those involved are praising themselves” (emphasis added).

Dionne’s column repeats the concessions of many an establishment pundit of a point to Trump and his supporters. But this is more than a point they concede—in fact, they surrender the whole match.

Now, with a President Trump, Dionne and his crew admit what the run-down towns of flyover middle America have known for decades: “Globalization married to rapid technological change has been very good to the well-educated folks in metro areas and a disaster for many citizens outside of them. This is now a truism”—having been mugged by the reality of Donald Trump and his ascendancy to president by winning the Midwest and its eastern extension, Pennsylvania—“but it took far too long for [us] economic and policy elites to recognize what was happening.”

Then comes Dionne’s New Year’s resolution: “[C]ritics of Trumpism need to recognize the ways in which globalism undercuts the rights and fortunes of large numbers of democratic citizens.” Trump was right on this key theme, the only one right in both parties.

Moreover, Dionne tries to play down his contrite confession that borders mean something: “there is nothing new (or necessarily indecent [what, this isn’t racism?]) about citizens saying that nations have a right to control their borders and to decide what levels of immigration they want to accept at any given time.”

Now we need Dionne to allow that Trump was right to upset the bipartisan consensus that got us into endless Middle East wars, while dodging the threat from the principal enemy in that region, Iran, and even subsidizing its support of terrorism. The prescient Walter Russell Mead is another commentator who sees how Trump has stirred the old order.

In fact the begrudged praise of nationalism and the nation-state is a way of avoiding Trump’s more winning phrase, “America First.” This has nothing to do with isolationism, imperialism, or fecklessness toward other nations. It is a reiteration of the policy advocated by George Washington, John Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln.

Throughout his political career Lincoln emphasized preservation of the Union, most of all during the Civil War—whether it was slave or free. For slavery, to name the most pressing issue, could not be abolished unless the country were one—for we are a country that “demands union, and abhors separation.”

More well-known is the Gettysburg Address, which begins and ends with the reality of the nation born anew: “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal . . . . this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-may-be-the-true-liberal-11546298494

President Trump’s support for criminal-justice reform surprised many on the left who pigeonholed him as an illiberal populist. Had they paid closer attention to Mr. Trump’s message, however, they’d have recognized that much of it is squarely within the American liberal tradition. With more self-awareness they’d have seen that their own abandonment of liberalism explains much of Mr. Trump’s support.

The First Step Act, which Mr. Trump signed last month, reduces the three-strikes penalty for drug felonies and retroactively limits the sentencing disparities for crack cocaine that disproportionately burdened African-Americans. That will reduce prison terms for about 2,000 current federal inmates.

Contrary to the depiction of Mr. Trump as racist, the act is wholly consistent with the way he campaigned in 2016. He invited minorities to vote for him because Democrats had left them behind: “What have you got to lose?” His pride in lower minority unemployment is obviously heartfelt.

In his economic policies too, Mr. Trump was anything but a flint-eyed conservative. He made it clear he wasn’t about to gut the welfare system. He wanted trade deals that would generally benefit Americans, and a border wall to preserve American jobs. In all this, he’s occupied the sweet spot in American politics, combining social conservatism with middle-of-the-road economic policies.

The media hasn’t paid much attention. Instead, it’s fixated on Steve Bannon and right-wing populism. Mr. Bannon makes common cause with European rightists and the brutish Yellow Vest protesters who destroyed a portion of François Rude’s “La Marseillaise” at Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. The Bannonites seem to have forgotten Edmund Burke’s lesson that while the English and Americans do revolutions well, the same can’t be said of the French.

U.S. conservatives aren’t like the European right, and there’s a reason. Constitutional liberties are the center of American nationhood and identity.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272412/new-years-resolutions-we-should-be-making-bruce-thornton

Since Election Day 2016, one story has dominated our attention––the person and rhetoric of Donald Trump. No amount of achievements by Trump and the Republican Congress at home or abroad can distract the bipartisan NeverTrump chorus from shrieking over tabloid trivia ranging from mysterious nudie selfies, to the president’s fifty-year-old draft deferments.

Expect 2019 to be even more all Trump, all the time. For Democrats, Trump has become their Moby Dick, the hated monster they’ll destroy themselves to kill. For the media, Trump has been a ratings gold-mine. As now disgraced CBS honcho Les Moonves said two years ago, Trump is “damn good for CBS.” This year promises to be no different. The progressive media will likely keep its long-running series, “The Mueller Show,” and the start this year of the 2020 presidential primary season will see “The Primary Follies” improve its ratings with numerous Dem guest-stars for the intergenerational war between the rich, old white establishment, and the “woke” young guns “of color.” And don’t forget the long-running show “Family Feud,” featuring pouting NeverTrump Republicans with their snarky patter and virtue-signaling verbal tics.

All very entertaining, no doubt. But while we gorge on this high-carb junk TV fare, serious issues confront the Republic. We need to make a collective New Year’s resolution to pull the plug, and focus on these looming challenges.

On the foreign policy front, our continued clinging to the old narrative of moralizing internationalism needs to end. The idea that, as Woodrow Wilson expressed this faith in 1917, “National purposes have fallen more and more into the background; and the common purpose of enlightened mankind has taken their place,” began to be exposed as a pipe-dream long before Trump came on the scene. The populist and nationalist revolts across the West have shown that the bulk of ordinary citizens are tired of pampered, patronizing global elites presuming to know what’s best for them, and demanding ever more power in order to effect the improving changes they claim will usher in utopia.

That dream of world governance, moreover, is contrary to the conditions of most peoples’ existence. A critical mass of citizens still finds their identities in the particular traditions, histories, faiths, mores, landscapes, customs, cultures, and languages among which they live. Their revolt is against an imperial cosmopolitanism which demonizes that rich diversity as retrograde and bigoted, a troublesome poltergeist from our benighted past. But there is no “common purpose of enlightened mankind,” for there are no “citizens of the world” or “global community,” apart from the tiny elite of credentialed and privileged managers of the “new world order.” Ordinary people are loath to cede their national identities, freedom, and sovereignty to such haughty, self-selected overseers.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

January is not only a time we look back, but, like Janus, it is a time we try to penetrate an impenetrable future. In doing so, we must remember that predictions, no matter how analytical and allegedly impartial, are influenced by ideologies and biases. However, I suspect we all agree that the 2020 Presidential race began as soon as the ball dropped in Times Square. The Democrat field will be crowded. Youth and idealism will challenge age and experience. Far-Left socialists will combat centrists. On the Right, the big questions: Will Republicans try to unseat President Trump? Or will Mr. Trump decide one term was enough, declare victory and retire? After all, he will turn 74 in 2020, and the Presidency is not where most people would choose to spend their “golden” years. Of course, he is not “most people.”

………………………………………………………….

Back to December. It was a month of contrasts, like the opening sentence in A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…” The economy was the strongest in a dozen years, yet stocks fell. Equities saw their biggest Christmas Eve sell-off in history. On the next trading day, they had their largest point gain ever. Questions arose: Should President Trump be true to his campaign promises, or should he compromise? He is condemned for not doing so; he is condemned when he does so. Is nationalism a force for evil, as Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron claim? Or is nationhood necessary for liberty, as most conservatives believe? Are those who voted for Brexit and Donald Trump, and who have rallied against the state and the corrupt policies of elites in business, finance and government ignorant, or are they battling elitism, statism and the status quo? Are people better off when the focus is on identity – intersectionality – rather than the individual? Will millennials bend toward capitalism, or will they lean toward socialism? Did Michael Flynn lie, or was he entrapped? Has an increase in carbon dioxide allowed the earth to become greener and more productive, as a NASA survey last month alleged, or will it be the death of the planet, as Kyoto and Paris assert? Has there ever been a U.S. President more critically scrutinized and more vilified by MSM than Donald J. Trump?

Hypocrisy among politicians is an unfortunate fact, as is affectation in the media. We saw it in the multi-day George H.W. Bush memorial and burial, which was an over-the-top extravaganza, even for a decent and accomplished man – Air Force One from and to Houston, a memorial service at the National Cathedral and another the next day at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church and then a slow train ride to the burial site in College Station. It was a send-off usually reserved for kings and potentates. But it felt like those who had long condemned the man and his politics were trying to atone for what they had done, or were they using his death to contrast the polished, gracious Mr. Bush with the brash, artless Mr. Trump?

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/30/our-exhausted-

The unlikely 2016 election of Donald Trump—the first president without either prior political or military office—was a repudiation of the American “aristocracy.” By “rule of the best” I mean the ancien régime was no longer understood to suggest wealth and birth (alone), but instead envisioned itself as a supposed national meritocracy of those with proper degrees, and long service in the top hierarchies of government, media, blue-chip law firms, Wall Street, high tech, and academia.

The 2016 election and refutation of the ruling class did not signal that those without such educations and qualifications were de facto better suited to direct the country. Instead, the lesson was that the past record of governance and the current stature of our assumed best and brightest certainly did not justify their reputations or authority, much less their outsized self-regard. In short, instead of being a meritocracy, they amount to a mediocracy, neither great nor awful, but mostly mediocre.

This mediocracy is akin to late 4th-century B.C. Athenian politicians, the last generation of the Roman Republic, the late 18th-century French aristocracy, or the British bipartisan elite of the mid-1930s—their reputations relying on the greater wisdom and accomplishment of an earlier generation, while they remain convinced that their own credentials and titles are synonymous with achievement, and clueless about radical political, economic, military, and social upheavals right under their noses.

Remember the “new normal”? Our economic czars had simply decided anemic economic growth was the best Americans could expect and that 3 percent annualized GDP growth was out of the realm of possibility. Big government incompetence combined with Wall Street buccaneerism had almost melted down the economy in 2008. Recent presidents had doubled the debt—twice.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22188/when-harry-cheated-on-sally,http://goudsmit.pundicity.com
http://lindagoudsmit.com

When Harry cheated on Sally he accused Sally of cheating. What? It is called projection. Psychological projection is a “psychological defense mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities by denying their existence in themselves and attributing them to others.” Projection is a method of blame shifting – Harry blamed Sally for what Harry did.

When Harry accuses Sally it is incumbent upon Sally to defend herself from the bogus charges. This cunning maneuver shifts the focus from Harry to Sally which is the underlying strategic objective of the false allegations. So, while Sally is busy defending herself Harry’s guilt goes unchallenged and he can continue to cheat. The best defense is an offense.

Political projection operates in the same way. A politician or political group accuses the opposition of doing precisely what they are doing themselves. The coordinated attack on President Trump and the well-orchestrated, well-funded effort to destabilize and delegitimize his presidency is a prime example of political projection.

So, who is the opposition and what are the charges?

In my 12.23.18 article, “The Betrayal of America: Who Do You Trust” I define globalism as synonymous with one world government and state unequivocally that:

“Globalists are the existential enemy of American sovereignty, independence, and they are desperately trying to destroy America first President Donald Trump and every one of his America first initiatives. Globalism is at war with Americanism…Globalist politicians are enemies of the state and serve their own agenda on both sides of the aisle. Their loyalties are to the global enterprise (one world government) and not to the United States of America.”

So, how do the globalist elite control the corrupt globalist politicians in the Washington swamp? They finance their preferred candidates of course!

Hillary Clinton was the globalist darling of 2016 – OOPS – that did not go as planned. So, the deep state had to switch to alternative Plan Y – their insurance policy that would destroy President Trump by any means necessary. The litany of allegations and accusations leveled against POTUS are staggering and the commitment to investigate them shown by the deep state operatives is stunningly hypocritical.

https://quillette.com/2018/12/27/from-astrology-to

Piety has been transferred to cults like climate change- but clergy, with the exception of Orthodox Jews and Evangelical Christians, preach to the choir of the “social justice warriors” …..ironically contributing more to cults than to faith and ritual….rsk

If you count yourself among the secularists cheering for the demise of religion, it isn’t hard to find comforting statistics. Nearly every survey of the state of religion in my own country, the United States, presents a similar picture of faith in decline. Compared to their parents and grandparents, Americans are less likely to self-identify as religious, attend religious services, or engage in religious practices such as daily prayer. Full-blown atheism is still a minority position. But the ranks of the “non-religious”—a broad category made up of those who reject traditional conceptions of God and religious doctrines, or who express uncertainty about their beliefs—are growing.

Even those who self-identify as Christians are less inclined to talk publicly about God and their faith than their predecessors. Indeed, many Americans are Christian in name only—using the term more as an indicator of their cultural background than as a declaration of a spiritual life committed to the teachings of Christ. And the rest of the Western world is even farther ahead on this same path.

But secularism advocates should pause before celebrating such trends. A deeper investigation into the religious nature of our species casts doubt on the view that science-centered secular culture can succeed without a space for the sacred.

Scholars have proposed a wide range of theories to explain the persistence of religious faith in all human societies. Many of these theories involve a heavy dose of what may be described as “blank slate” thinking—by which human interests and beliefs are shaped entirely by social influence. Yet such top-down, culturally-driven explanations ignore the possibility that religious faith originates in bottom-up brain-driven cognitive and motivational processes.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13489/political-debate

The European Union, too, is clearly on the decline. Despite Pollyannish talk of creating a European army and closer ties among member states, the EU has lost much of its original appeal and faces fissiparous challenges of which the so-called Brexit is one early example. I believe that the only way for the EU to survive, let alone prosper, is to recast itself as a club of nation-states rather than a substitute for them.

Another significant trend concerns the virtual collapse of almost all political parties across the globe. Within the year now ending, a number of mostly new parties forced their ways into the center of power in several European countries notably Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Holland and Sweden. Interestingly, the more ideological a party is, the more vulnerable it is to the current trend of decline in party politics. This is why virtually all Communist and nationalist parties have either disappeared or been reduced to a shadow of their past glory.

The massive development of cyberspace has given single-issue politics an unexpected boost. Today, almost anyone anywhere in the word could create his or her own echo-chamber around a pet subject. Here, the aim is to fight for one’s difference with as much passion as possible.That trend is in contrast with another trend, promoted by the traditional, or mainstream media, offering a uniform narrative of events. Turn on any TV or radio channel and go through almost any newspaper and you will be surprised by how they all say the same thing about what is going on.

As the year 2018 draws to a close, what are the trends that it highlighted in political life?

The first trend represents a growing global disaffection with international organizations to the benefit of the traditional nation-state. Supporters of the status quo regard that trend as an upsurge of populism and judge it as a setback for human progress whatever that means.

Today it is not the United Nations alone that is reduced to a backseat driver on key issues of international life. Its many tentacles, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, too, have been reduced to a shadow of their past glory. In the 1990s, the two outfits held sway on the economies of more than 80 countries across the globe with a mixture of ideology and credit injection. Today, however, they are reduced to cheer-leading or name-calling from the ringside.

The European Union, too, is clearly on the decline. Despite Pollyannish talk of creating a European army and closer ties among member states, the EU has lost much of its original appeal and faces fissiparous challenges of which the so-called Brexit is one early example. I believe that the only way for the EU to survive, let alone prosper, is to recast itself as a club of nation-states rather than a substitute for them.

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/12/27/isaac-

In many ways, the world may seem more like 1984 today than it did in 1984.Electronic surveillance of our every keystroke. Shifting international alliances. Authoritarian risings. Fake News!

The dystopian world that George Orwell imagined 35 years before the year 1984 seems closer to today’s reality than it did in his 1949 book’s namesake year.

But on Dec. 31, 1983 — as the world was about to ring in that Orwellian year — another noted author took a crack at predicting what the world would look like a further 35 years hence, in 2019. And how well science fiction writer Isaac Asimov did in that Toronto Star special can now be examined as that year dawns.

Asimov — who died in 1992 — predicated all his New Year’s Eve forecasts on the assumption that the world could avert a nuclear war in the coming decades. And even as the intervening Cold War thaw appears to be refreezing — with a new nuclear arms race in the offing — our species did manage to avoid annihilation.

Thus we survive to gauge the accuracy of Asimov’s predictions in his other two essay themes: computerization and space utilization.

And it appears he was no Nostradamus.

For example, while he did predict there would be a space station up and running by 2019, planning for that international effort had been underway for years by the time of his writing.

Outside of some unmanned probes, however, the station was as far afield as humans would venture into the heavens over the next three and a half decades. And his fanciful visions of large mining projects on the moon — let alone the massive, orbiting structures they’d provide materials for — seem loony in hindsight.

On computers, he was equally hit-and-miss, says York University computer scientist Zbigniew Statchniak.

To be fair, Statchniak says, computing was advancing at such a speed as 1984 dawned that predicting where it might go would have been next to impossible.

“Having said that,” he adds, “I think he got easy things right and difficult things wrong.”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/12/kavanaughs-trial-by-ordeal-burning-truth-in-effigy/

The news from Washington is that 85-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the lionised liberal so often depicted as the Supreme Court’s heroic bulwark against Trumpism, has lung cancer. When the time comes, will it be possible to find a replacement prepared to face the Jacobin accusations and evidence-free slanders heaped on a blameless man?

The smearing of US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was hardball politics at its most disingenuous. The stakes were unambiguous. The Democrats and their supporters wanted to delay and derail his nomination. The tactic was to wait till the end of the regular nomination hearing and then leak an accusation that the judge was guilty of sexual misconduct. Base politics for sure, but Democrats had tried twice before to derail a Supreme Court nomination with confected allegations. So the ploy was not surprising. Republicans kept their nerve. They patiently navigated three weeks of brutal character assassination of a major public figure with a spotless track record.[1] In the course of those days the Democrats attempted to turn the supplementary Senate Judiciary Committee hearing into a show trial. As that unfolded, the very nature of “Brett Kavanaugh” changed. He was transformed from a nominee for America’s highest court into a symbol of America’s political division.

A part of Kavanaugh’s trial by ordeal was simple political payback. Kavanaugh had worked under Ken Starr at the Office of Independent Counsel investigating legal matters related to Bill Clinton’s sexual conduct. Kavanaugh’s appointment as a Circuit Judge to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia was blocked by Democrats for three years during the George W. Bush presidency.[2] The Kavanaugh imbroglio, though, turned out to be much more than just opportunistic payback. The two weeks of attempted trashing of Kavanaugh’s life and reputation tapped a much deeper vein in American life. A tsunami of protest, pressure, intimidation, bluster, stunts, grandstanding, demagoguery, defamation and table-thumping erupted across much of left-leaning America, leaving moderates and conservatives shocked.

At a certain point the Kavanaugh hearing stopped being about him. Instead it become a reckoning of the broader America society with itself, in particular a reckoning about the nature of truth. The Democrats put truth on trial. The result was disturbing. The Kavanaugh ordeal revealed that long-observed and once keenly-held notions of evidentiary truth have been rejected by a substantial minority of Americans, many of them in the vocal professional-managerial elite.[3] Evidentiary truth means that an allegation or claim that we make about serious matters needs to be backed up with compelling facts and independent observations before it can be accepted.