How to lose an election
Having mostly detached from social media and YouTube, especially over the last three weeks, I've had time to catch up on reading and writing. I still scan headlines in the morning and throughout the day.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) popped up on my regular e-haunts, and it became clear very quickly that they were going to self-sabotage on stage. As the recent loss of Massie in Kentucky shows, Boomers matter. A lot. They earned the generational tag because there are so many of them, and they will do whatever it takes to keep the good times rolling. The DSA is a predictable reaction to the endless indulgence and money printing of infinity dollars by the Boomers over the last few generations, but there are more than enough elderly Boomers around to swing an election.
No border was too porous, no number of unrequested imports via immigration too high, to slake the thirst of the acquisitive Eternal Boomer. The liberal nostrums of the 20th-century – from the "progressive" income tax to the beauty of American "free speech" and "democracy" – yielded a very tiny caste of people with most of the wealth. The progressive income tax is the forced extraction of up to half of another person's – a laborer's – annual wages. It is then sent to the very wealthy, who own large corporations that secure contracts with the state. Keep running this money pump for decades, and you end up with very wealthy people getting big, juicy government contracts.
And that profit from government contracts? It's used to buy equities. The profits are protected from the real work of the progressive income tax through exemptions, write-offs, a host of other tools which ensure the rich stay rich, get, in fact, even richer, before ending up with all of the money. In a nation of 350 million, we now routinely get jobs reports showing a few thousand hires in a month. Nothing like 300 or 500K of the Obama years.
Recall that Jeff Bezos's accountants claimed the $1200 deduction for his children in the same years he was making over a billion. He was already getting massive write-offs, to the point that he didn't owe anything. But Jeff still took the $ 1,200-per-child deduction. Not one dime paid into the system for that year. That's what his employees are for. Let those suckers be held by their ankles over the gaping maw of the U.S. federal budget and its progressive income tax. The tax is no different from the medieval scalping of peasants by European aristocrats, only far larger.
To put the equity price explosion of the last decade into perspective, during the Obama years we had the largest sustained bull market in human history. Compare the price of a share of Microsoft stock in 2009, a few years later in 2016, and today. Straight up. $30 to $500. Insane. And it was across all the equities listed on the S&P. But while the share price was going up, the jobs reports were showing 300K for new hires. On paper, superficially, it looked like jobs were keeping up with asset inflation.
And what were the sectors for new hires during these booming years? Bartenders, food servers, hotel cleaners... low-level, dead-end service jobs, not the kind that lead to home ownership and stable family formation, unless both people are working multiple jobs. The vast majority, in fact, month after month, year after year, were in these low-level service positions.
Now we have job reports where it's 50K hired, maybe 100K. Or like yesterday's, a net loss of 22K for July. So while the population has been growing from immigration, and while Boomers have been retiring and dying, they leave behind not even the paltry bartending and waitressing jobs for others to do. Eating out has become, post-Covid, a luxury for most people, one they had to cut back on as food prices spiked and never came back down to earth.
And the Boomer largesse with unborn generations' wealth – hey, you weren't going to need that Medicare Part D anyway! – sustains the drive to be a good person, to be recognized as such by everyone. It's easy to pull the ladder up after you've made your ascension to the top, to tell yourself that it's okay to be generous with phantom money that will have to be repaid, one way or the other, by the young. Pull yourself by your bootstraps as I did!
The West is dying in the street; we are all peeking out from behind curtains, watching it crawl into a gutter during a heavy downpour. We all know it's almost dead; it smells, and it needs to be let go. As Western institutions buckle under the weight of their own degeneracy, there is a need to have skilled people in the upper echelons of society. White people lost the will to live a long time ago and benefit by recruiting the best of the best from overseas. As Tainter indicates in his study, empires do not so much die as kill themselves.
No one wants to bring Old Man West into their house, though, and put him up in a spare bedroom. Why? Because the dying man crawling across the pavement also has a lot of papers and documents (in a rainproof document bag) which point to hidden caches of wealth spread out all over the place. If I go out there and bring him in, let him take his last breath in my guest room, my neighbors will know what I'm up to. Because they are peeking out, but through sighted weapons.
So it's a standoff, with all of us listening to miserable Old Man West gasp as he crawls down the street, but there is no last will and testament, just a planned mad scramble to carve up his estate, find his secret wealth stashes when he gives up the ghost.
When empires decline, everyone in their vicinity is laser-focused on the process, sizing up other bidders across the way, to figure out what they can get once life has slipped the leash. A dead empire is carved up like a Thanksgiving bird and portioned out to the patient onlookers. Collapse is like a collective estate sale with lots of screaming and fighting.
We've been at that point in the West for quite some time. The recent invasion of the Spanish city of Ceuta by 60K Africans is, from rumors, about to be followed up by another wave. The open-border Biden years saw millions pour across the borders, fresh food for capitalism to digest. Not surprisingly, there are credible indications that the onslaught was coordinated by the U.S. and Israel as retribution for Spain's refusal to let its land and air be used for the extermination of the Palestinians. This could be a pure conspiracy theory born of what is just a coincidence. Coincidences do happen, right?
I am not especially conspiratorial anymore. The socialist chief executive of Spain and his party dog-whistled to the whole world that they were done with the natives. The doors were opened, and a welcome sign hung out: "Free donuts!" The mobs came. They took the socialists up on their offer. Not exactly a conspiracy.
I come back to the DSA because the extreme left at this point is really the only force that can end the Gaza genocide. But, and this is a very big fatal one, they are already self-sabotaging by going back to the anti-white language of the Biden/Woke Years.
People observed that Trump's return to the White House effectively ended DEI, Woke, child genital mutilation (version 2.0). It only temporarily suspended it. Crazy is still there waiting to go cray-cray again. The drag queens are still there, the doctors who want to slice off dicks and boobies are still there, the forced-vaccination apparatchiks, capitalists, NGOs, single mothers, AntiFa; they are all there. Corporate capitalism made the strategic decision to cut back on the Woke shit as a tactical retreat since it was just enervating and demoralizing, pissing people off across the political spectrum.
The crazies, meanwhile, bide their time, waiting to see the Blue Team wave coming in November 2026 for a sign of reversal as Trump's Golden Age fizzles into another failed war in the Near East. USAID will get revived, and suddenly, the neo-liberals who run the Democratic National Committee will have funding again as those out of power return to office. Kulturkampf will rear its ugly head again, but there's not much fight left in the aging Boomers, the kind who pushed Massie out of office.
It's telling that with the return of Trump to the presidency, YouTube and social media relaxed their censorship of alternative voices. These voices are voices in the head only, and for all the many years of babbling on social media, there has been only a worsening of life in the West. The Internet never translated into a broad coalition of sane people – white, black, brown, red – who used the tools to agree to a baseline for a healthy society, and then worked to make it happen. The Internet, in fact, precipitated a worsening of public dialogue, making once sane writers and thinkers turn into neurotic assholes. You can see the effects of constant Internet usage in yourself and in those who you once thought knew better.
Social media is always on, always making people crazy and even more miserable. That shit never sleeps. Your immiseration is the Internet's purpose. You think you have things together; you can turn it off at any time, walk away. Maybe you can. But for every one of you, there's an obese, unhealthy (physically and mentally), single parent who has just handed an iPad to their kids. Those kids will be raised by it, learn most of what they know, like how to interact with the world, from a digital open sewer. They will see full-on sexual intercourse between adults by the time they are eight. They will have spent so much time scrolling through social media that they will be mentally ill, emotionally warped, unable to connect with others through the normal sequence of child-play socialization. They will beg for socialized medicine, for the services of a doctor to saw off their bits and bobs so that they can let their inner Buffalo Bill out.
The DSA, from what I can tell, is squandering the opportunity to make changes by going back to the deep well of racial animus. The capitalists who brought in the millions of people from non-Western cultures knew what they were doing when they began re-seeding their home turf. Multi-racial societies are divided societies; divided societies are easier to control, since victims and grievance purveyors expend vast amounts of energy adding poison to the stew. All politics is racial now, and it shouldn't be.
To explain to an immigrant that the beloved democracy they worship never extended the right of the people to vote as a nation to open the gates to them and their families invites rage. The average native did not ask, did not want, and did not invite you into his country. The capitalists and the empire builders did; they rule democracy and always have. So, if you want to complain about the abuse of democracy, understand that the natives of the West were abused by it first when it became the instrument used to kill their fertility, deaden their cultural sense, and destroy any pretense of there being a common good. The immigrant was used as a weapon by the wealthy, as much a victim as the native-born of the host countries. Many newcomers have a narrative about white supremacy they have imbibed with the help of disaffected natives who themselves, in an earlier generation, would've been found at a Shambhala center. Oikophobia is real, yo.
In the 1960s and 70s, intelligent whites sometimes found themselves in Eastern meditation-based cults. In more recent years, the same demographic branched out into professional self-loathing via anti-white supremacy causes. The anti-white movement has itself become a decentralized cult, every bit as hostile to the last vestiges of whatever is meant by "the West."
If you are a member of a small minority, your psychology may be negatively shaped by looking different from those around you. Not always, but oftentimes. If attractive white women are shown in magazines, you will complain inwardly that you do not match the "model" and grow further embittered towards your home, which feels anything but. If history books talk a lot about Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, or John F. Kennedy, you will bristle at the absence of people who look like yourself.
East Asians have, according to statistics, done rather well economically and socially in the U.S., but their voting patterns show they are even farther to the left than other traditional left-leaning ethnic groups. The fringes are not about reform, but radical, hate-driven rejection of the status quo.
When the New Americans see the decline in black economic and social life over the last sixty years, since the Great Society programs, do they feel guilt at having become another layer of stratification in the colonization story of America, another weight atop black people?
No sooner was Jim Crow dead than the capitalists opened the floodgates to the world. Blacks – people who have been in America for centuries and suffered mightily under slavery – never had a chance to consolidate their gains. No, they were hit with a deluge of new arrivals, competitors in the workplace. America could have wisely chosen a policy like those of other nations, which emphasized taking the best of the best from all over the world to meet everyone's needs, not just big business.
The DSA will someday be exposed for what it is: funded by white rich people in the background, another psy-op like Occupy Wall Street that flashes briefly and then vanishes because it's led by nutcases who are easily co-opted, thrust in front of the electorate as a warning against changing our beautiful liberal system. Keep the immigration floodgates open by all means – it's good for capital – but don't get any ideas about real reform.
Even if DSA ends tomorrow or next week, it will have served as the useful idiot who, loud and proud, turned off the abandoned masses to the cause of national reform and the strict regulation of capitalism. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, social reform was possible when the nation was largely homogenous. Now, it's off the table thanks to international capitalism. Humans are just fungible objects to be moved around the globe. J.D. Vance says he is not comfortable with this view of humans, but his words are meaningless. His party and the opposing party long ago agreed, under the mantle of international capitalism, that this is the way forward.
China, in contrast, used state capitalism to lift the largest number of people out of poverty in human history, and did so in a relatively short period, but it had racial homogeneity working for it, much like the early pioneers of America and Britain's social reform movements. Under China's economic system, the state wears the pants in the relationship, and oligarchs are quickly put in place if they get uppity.
The Han are a family, and while there are other minorities in the south and west, the population is Han and is dominated by its customs, institutions, and outlook. The Chinese, unlike Trump, do not sit around pining for more H1-B workers from abroad. They don't import ethnic minorities who compete with their own prosperous and talented people for the purposes of driving down wages.
It is hard for a Westerner to understand that one can be a state capitalist, end poverty, improve the lives of many millions, and never import one single immigrant to help out with that mission. When the Chinese people turned against child-rearing, as all technological societies eventually do, their answer was robotics. They made the switch to clean energy and automated manufacturing by analyzing trends and planning accordingly. This is something Western capitalism cannot do – plan long term.
If the Chinese population falls because people do not want the burden of childbearing, there is at least a thick cushion, as robots take over the manufacturing sector, further lowering prices and improving resource efficiency. The Tangle has suggested in other posts that children would be much more welcome in an automated society where leisure and free time are promoted as social goods for everyone to enjoy.
The DSA went into full racial mode, into harsh anti-white language with its candidates. Recall the earlier observation about crazy: That shit don't sleep.
From listening to the left for several years, I've learned that they think white skin means the person wearing it is living the high life, going to country clubs, etc. It never occurs to them that many of the natives they vilify are themselves scraping by, only barely. Generalized, abstract hate statements like "white supremacy" implicate and condemn an entire race of people whose ancestors have lived here for generations. When the emotionally unstable are pushed out into the public square as left-wing reform candidates, having an open hostility to natives, they guarantee that no reform will ever take place. Capitalism gonna keep on capitalizing. If the Rapture happens tomorrow and natives are scooped up into the heavens, it would still be a multi-racial mess left behind on earth. Raptured white people will still be blamed, but the hate between groups will also be redirected.
Francesca Hong lost her primary in Wisconsin. A Korean-American, she lambasted Thanksgiving, but the Swedes still carried her to within 3,000 votes of victory against an opponent who is bland and will do squat to stop the decline.
Christmas has taken a beating in recent decades, so it was only a matter of time before the New Americans took aim at the other national holiday. Thanksgiving is not Hong's thing, she hates it, fine. But we are now asked to jettison a centuries-old custom by a Korean woman who has been here a few minutes because her take on the holiday is the right take. Again, will this rouse the sleeping electorate to support the DSA? Swedes in Wisconsin and Minnesota, sure, but it won't materially help anyone. It's a moral panic and guilt-based posturing that creates more public fatigue over the capitalists' obsession with manufacturing fake conflicts. Give thanks, shove some pumpkin pie in your pie hole, stop ranting about white supremacy. Your people came here because they wanted a better life, and we shouldn't have to listen to petty bourgeois moralizing while the system fails.
Crazy, race-baiting national candidates are not going to pull white or black laborers, the unemployed, and the victims of empire into the voting booth. It's pretty clear they have already been written off as not worth the investment.
In Minnesota and Wisconsin, there are plenty of Germanic/Scandinavian types with the weird self-loathing, self-hatred that we saw on full display during the Floyd riots. The kneeling and begging forgiveness from black people was the rage for a few months – a kind of status-currency among people who like preening for moral applause. Missing was that most people just found it deeply ick. But the ultra-liberal Nordic traits of this region just do not translate at all to the rest of America's regions. Nordic self-flagellation/self-loathing is not going to be enough to drive a big turnout for DSA candidates in New Jersey and South Carolina.
Guilting is not a positive energy for reform, and it will not build a national coalition. It dehumanizes one group on the racial grievances of minority groups who were never invited into their country by the host majority population. When SCOTUS recently upheld that simply being born on U.S. soil grants one citizenship, was that evil white supremacy in action? Is white supremacy letting the laws stand which grant infinity chain migration to people who may have acquired residency by jumping the fence, skipping the process that others followed?
The West cannot sustain its populations on its own steam; or as Bill Clinton said, "People stopped having babies." It requires immigration of truly skilled labor to keep its economy treading water, never mind growing, according to Trump. But given there are no jobs left according to labor numbers, what exactly is the reason for keeping immigration high?
I accepted a long time ago that the native-born can no longer form families, have children, and educate younger generations in a way that would make the current techno-state sustainable. The national project isn't viable, but it can, like the British Empire, accept a framework for a controlled crash. Right now, we've brought in lots of people who have grievances and hatreds for the current system; they aren't thinking in terms of coalition building with natives to limit the damage before it turns into something much worse.
If you want a movement that improves the conditions for human life, you focus on the things that matter: Affordable, guaranteed healthcare; an end to asset inflation that causes housing prices to shoot up out of reach of the worker; an end to the theory and practice of a "billionaire"-class; a self-issued and self-regulated currency, no Federal Reserve cartel or central bank.
The Fed came into being at the same time as the progressive income tax and it has been one giant looting operation ever since. Few on the left figured out that the banking cartel, the ultra-powerful, who drafted the income tax and the Federal Reserve Act, were not interested in the well-being of ordinary people. Anyone who suggests that the Fed should be abolished and the regulation of the currency restored to we, the people, is dogpiled by all parties – left, right and center. It's unthinkable for anyone to argue that the dozen or so private banks should not have total say over our own currency; or that we should have to pay interest to them for money we, in theory, control completely through our republican institutions. The Fed operates well outside of the oversight of duly elected representatives. It cannot even be audited.
Most importantly, America must have a full drawdown of military aid, military spending, and overseas military bases; a balanced federal budget; an end to money for foreign aid, including Israel.
All wars and military engagements must be approved by a full vote of Congress. Elected officials can no longer look the other way as someone like Trump drags us into another forever war. Military leaders and service members must be given wide latitude to refuse orders to carry out or in any way assist in the genocide of other human beings.
Now these may sound really out of reach to you, but in this Christmas wish list, I mentioned only things that would benefit the working and middle classes – regardless of their race – while protecting the global south from the predations of imperial capitalism. I didn't have to talk about white supremacy, the evils of Thanksgiving, how the police force works for white people, etc. There were no appeals to free, taxpayer-funded genital removal surgeries for 11-year-olds. No cringe cries for gay pride parades in downtown Moscow, in Red Square.
(And Red Square was called that well before the Soviet revolution.)
Hasan Piker, campaigning for Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan (and who won his primary recently), is Exhibit A in mental health issues caused by diversity and constant Internet exposure. He's the perfect unwitting tool for any capitalist who wants to keep the status quo. A few postings like this, and the average native worker who might get off the couch and poll for the DSA will surrender, crack another Bud Light (champagne of drag queens), and drop into sweet oblivion.
There is something about socialism and socialists that makes it off-putting for normal people who want to see an end to American bloodletting in the developing world. Two-thirds of the electorate want Medicare for All. Even more would support the ending of special tax exemptions for corporations and oligarchs. We won't get that thought. No, we'll have weird sex crap agendas and campaigns against Thanksgiving pushed down our throats, causing sane people to tune out.
On an unabashedly pro-capitalism site like ZeroHedge, the bitter hate of socialism is put in front of Boomers whose only idea of the situation is that "Hey, America was really good to me." To say, the left is its own worst enemy and global capitalism's strongest ally. If I were an oligarch, I too would, like the Soros family, be funneling as much money as possible to these socialist outfits and noisemakers.
I learned this week that a close family member was diagnosed with a serious illness, possibly terminal. The couple has been under financial stress for some time as the economic decline has kicked into overdrive, and they will, like many people, probably not live long enough to ever see a payout of the Social Security pension system they helped fund. Their retirement savings will be heavily taxed as they begin withdrawing funds to pay for food, utilities, and other expenses. The president and Congress will continue to refer to all these tax-funded programs as "entitlements," implying that they are nice-to-haves the nation could forgo in favor of the $1.5 trillion, war-heavy budget for 2027.
Their health insurance premiums are already through the roof, and as the last wage earner loses his job to ill health, the insurance goes with it. There are expensive stop-gaps in place, but the writing is on the wall. Medicare is not an option for years to come. All their decades of military service, work, and saving will be devoured by treatment costs, and they will end up losing everything.
This is what white supremacy looks like.
They are despondent and do not want to hear stories from the DSA mouthpieces who wish for capitalist blood in the streets and the raping/colonization of their children and grandchildren (à la Piker).
My relatives do not want, in other words, to be told about their "privilege."
El-Sayed is an Oxford-educated doctor who worked for Columbia University as a teacher. He doesn't have a lick of sense to know that Hasan Piker and other radicals can do nothing for his campaign besides alienate a broad swath of the electorate he claims to care about. Piker brings nothing positive to his campaign and I have to doubt the sincerity of El-Sayed's stated aims. If you want political power, you have to deliver real goods. We were promised peace and prosperity under Trump; we've gotten war, naked insider trading, and poverty instead. Trust is at an all-time low.
El-Sayed wants to abolish ICE, which strongly suggests it's back to open borders, a free-for-all of criminal activity caused when Biden opened wide the southern frontier. The doctor hasn't explained how his Medicare for All plan will handle the flood of illegal immigrants who will overrun hospitals and clinics. It's hard to make non-Americans understand that our days are numbered, the system is in failure mode, the dashboards lit up with red flashing warning lights. Immigrants see the shiny City on a Hill up close, but don't understand it's all fake, all funded by unpayable debt they and their children will be forced to pay.
The perversity of it all is that we could end up with a strong tilt leftward in November in a Blue Wave, but still end up with a Congress that rubber-stamps funding of Israel as it continues with its genocide in Gaza and its war against civilians in Lebanon.
