Well, doesn’t that negate Robert‘s thesis? Musk joined the Republican Party for reasons similar to why Trump did: their party moved too far to the left than they are comfortable with. Their party left them, and it left them behind, they were not moving toward the right. The Democrats had moved so far to the left that the Republican Party met more of their philosophies than the Democrats now do.

Looked at in that light, the move to the right that Robert has written about may not be the pendulum swinging back to the right but merely an acknowledgement by Democrats that their party’s politics have left them behind, too. It isn’t a move to the right after all. Perhaps no one is changing their philosophy or changing their politics, all they may be doing is standing in place and telling the world where they stand: where they have always stood. They may no longer be willing to toe the party line as the party moves deeper and deeper into tyranny.

GWB is correct: “they certainly – not at this point – are NOT going to help us get it on the other track. At least not without a lot of suasion from our side. We need to not sit back and relax, but get to work showing them all the ways in which Progressivism is a bad idea. Because if we don’t repeal Progressivism, Trump’s 4 years will just be a blip on the downward trend for America.”

(Suasion. Good word choice.) This is the way I have felt about the Republican Party for near a decade. As the Democrat Party has moved farther left, the Republicans have followed, moving to the left hoping to pick up disgruntled Democrats. See how it is working? They now have Trump and now they have Musk. They may even pick up more prominent Democrats. This does not mean that the pendulum is moving any farther right, just that it has swept so far to the left that those who had been on the left side of the pendulum are now standing on the right side of it.

During the previous Trump administration, the pendulum continued its swing toward tyranny. There is no guarantee that it will ever swing back. Over the last century, many countries have moved left and stayed there. The model for those countries is not a pendulum but is the standard government that humans have put up with from the fall of the republic of the Romans until the rise of the republic of the United States: they tyranny of monarchies. A pendulum may be the wrong analogy, as there is no guarantee of a swing back toward the center or any momentum to take it back from tyranny to liberty. It didn’t happen in the Soviet Union/Russia.

Even the freedom and liberty enjoyed by many people around the world, over the past quarter millennium, was never enjoyed by a majority of humanity, just as the freedoms enjoyed by the Romans was a minority of the people in the world.

The real question is, how do we prevent what happened to the German people a century ago from happening to us now? For a short time, Germany had gone from a monarchy to elected leadership, but that democracy lasted only a short time before another leftist tyranny took power. Those who prospered in Germany were those who were loyal to the authoritarian leader, the Führer. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the twentieth-century population of the United States had liberty, the freedom to prosper despite not belonging to the party in power. These days, not so much, because your bakery can be over-fined for not toeing The Party line.

The problem is not that people now have their own pronouns and genders (I want to be an attack helicopter), but that Democrats truly hate what they consider to be a racist America. Rather than acknowledge that, at America’s founding, everywhere on Earth accepted slavery and that the northern of the American colonies were the first to abolish slavery of any kind, they insist that slavery and racism were the foundations of the United States. How Zinn of them. Vermont was the first place on Earth in all of history to ban every form of slavery, and the three-fifths clause was to prevent the slave states from having the power to keep slavery as an institution (check the topic of the sentence it resides in, Article I, Section 2, 3rd paragraph, 1st sentence, in blue: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript#1-2 ), but three-fifths was still too much, as the south had the power to force the north to accept the expansion of slavery. What other country on the planet spent its blood to eliminate slavery? That is how repugnant slavery was to most U.S. citizens. The Democratic Party was founded specifically to defend the institution of slavery, and it still advocates control by the few over the many — governance by overbearing government.

These days, only the ones who belong to The Party have the privileges — and the pardons — and those who don’t are arrested and persecuted for minor crimes or for crimes not committed. We went from a justice system that finds the person who committed the crime to finding the crime that convicts the person — the person who goes against The Party line.

Ole Eichhorn‘s observation is my experience, too: “In my personal circle, leftists have circled their wagons. There does not appear to be a lot of introspection or willingness to question. The cult mentality is strong.”
Rather than the country moving to the right, it seems that Robert merely observes that some people are no longer willing to toe The Party line. Does this mean that the American political scene is about to experience a new revolution? The rest continue to toe the line. The 4B movement is one form of circling the wagons. Circling the wagons shows that they are not conducive to persuasion.

A revolution restoring liberty didn’t happen in NAZI Germany.

So, how do we make sure that a liberty-restoring revolution happens here? We cannot depend upon government to do this job for us. Government is the problem, not the solution, no matter who leads it. The Preamble declares that one of the six purposes of the United States government is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Article IV, Section 4 promises: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” California is a one-party republic, which isn’t much of a republican system at all, if the choices of the people are limited to those that The Party allows. California believes that the rest of the country follows it, so how do we keep the rest of the country from following California — from being like NAZI Germany?

A weakened USSR with a China still in the grips of Mao would be better than the situation we now face in my estimation.

No, if you have the chance to take the kill shot, you take it. Throwing the Soviet Empire on the ash heap of history will always go down as one of the great moral reckonings in human history. Whatever came after, it was a great moment, and not just for the 100 million people in Eastern Europe liberated from its shackles in 1989-91.

I would have let Russia have Afghanistan–all the Charlie Wilson’s did was give us 9/11. And Nixon going to China was the WORST thing he did.

But there’s just too many contingencies in the intervening years to connect these dots as tightly as we might like to think. Arming the Mujaheddin was a low cost, high reward option at the time, and anyway, the men who became Al Qaeda were not even dominant within it at the time; it took a lot of other developments, including a whole series of bad foreign policy and intelligence mistakes, between 1989 and 2001 to get us to 9/11.

Nixon going to China was just classic balance of power politics, in the best tradition that Kissinger (whatever else was true of him) understood so well. Balance of power always comes with such risks: that in embracing a weaker power to check a stronger one, you may end up enabling an even greater threat in the long run. It still has great value in the “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” sort of political calculation. Lots of British pols in the Edwardian era were no doubt ruing their predecessors’ lean toward Prussia during much of the 19th century, who at the time had not unreasonably seen it as a more admirable and less threatening partner than Napoleon III’s France or an Austrian-dominated Germany. And after all…. in the 1860’s, it wasn’t quite so obvious what a Prussian-ruled Kleindeutsche Germany could evolve into; and after all, it could very well have evolved into something much less dangerous, had Frederick III not been struck down by throat cancer at such a young age. So, I’m inclined to cut Nixon, Reagan, Palmerston and Disraeli a lot of slack on this score.

And anyway….the political context for China policy fundamentally changed after 1991. Clinton and Dubya may have seen themselves as merely walking in Nixon’s footsteps, but they were really up to something different by that point. It was all about “democratization” (LOL) and making lots of money via cheap Chinese labor, not checking Soviet hegemony in Asia.

Peggy Noonan really disappointed me.
Ana is an example of more centrist leading Democrat women who are attractive as compared to GOPs frumps. Katie Britt looks nice–but she reminds me a bit of the mother from the movie CARRIE.

Benghazi was nothing compared to the Beirut barracks attack–but the spirit of Grandcamp served as karma what with the port explosion.

In terms of spooks, you can have security but no stealth–as per the super-Inman Embassy in Baghdad, or you can go for stealth but accept less security (what Benghazi should have been–no flags).

In Beirut–you had neither stealth nor security.

Ironically, free trade made China stronger even as Reagan made the Soviets weaker.

I would have let Russia have Afghanistan–all the Charlie Wilson’s did was give us 9/11. And Nixon going to China was the WORST thing he did.

There is a part of me that misses the Cold War era –you knew where you stood.

A weakened USSR with a China still in the grips of Mao would be better than the situation we now face in my estimation.

Reagan/Nixon/GOP killed the one–but emboldened the other.

The Founders that Republicans purport to speak for knew bloody well that “no entangling alliances” was the way to go. Reagan never understood this. He destroyed the foreign enemy–but the party of free trade that made Clinton a DINO–became America’s domestic enemy in the 1980s.

It is astonishing and perhaps depressing for a lot of us to appreciate, but Reagan’s last day in office is now 35 years in the rear view mirror – which is, to put it in even grimmer context, as far removed from us as Reagan’s first day in office was from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s last day. And if you are a Gen Z, Gen Y, or even Gen X voter (well, save for maybe those born in 1965-66), you never even had the chance to vote for Reagan. In short, it’s ancient history. The project of trying to reconcile (or contrast) Reagan with Trump is thus only going to be of interest to a shrinking pool of older conservatives, or the odd NRO essay.

For the rest, some variation of Dick Eagleson’s analysis will suffice. He’ll still be seen as an anti-establishment hero, a guy who “got the big stuff right,” but his successes and failures will increasingly be of the same historical relevance of Andrew Jackson’s or Robert Taft’s, because the historical context is so different. My sense is that he still gets a sort-of-a-pass from a lot of folks as having just been suckered on the 1986 Bill, which after all was the first of its kind. It’s almost touching to realize that there were only 3 million illegal aliens in the country when Reagan signed that thing.

Still the great thing is that all the change benefits them too. I hope they see it at some point.

DJ: What part of “No obscenities” in my rules cannot you not understand? And replacing one or two letters when the intent is clear doesn’t cut it.

I have deleted the curse word, but do it again and you will be banned.

Rand powerfully argued that to someone dedicated to reason, both the moral and the practical are always the same.

We (supporters of the moral/political ideals of America’ s unique founding, must remain vigilant in discerning to what degree “supporters” of the presumed ideals of Trump and MAGA (I voted for him 3 times), do so for reasons that these ideals are “right” or that they now “work.”

I love this sight for, among other things, the commentary often triggered by Robert’s outstanding posts! In that regard, “Cotour” and Jeff Wright’s comments are instructive.

If the battle was only a “practical” one – i.e., what “works,” freedom and capitalism would have won hands down centuries ago! It is, as it alwasys is, a battle of ideas – i.e., what is “right. Remain vigiant………..

The Democrat party leadership now dominated by the radical “progressives” among them have DESTROYED the party. The Democrat party have displayed just how fraudulent and corrupted politics can become. Job well done!

And the beauty of it all because they were not able to locally massage the national election numbers to the degree that was needed? The takeaway is that the Constitution is still functioning as designed and it is crafted to ultimately force the politically empowered in politics and government to reveal themselves to the people. So brilliant!

The Constitution is the enemy of every politically empowered politician and every government entity. Why? Because by design it constrains them and their human nature as it relates to power and control. All in the interests of the people retaining the control of THEIR government and country.

Not an easy thing to conceptualize and manifest. And that is why the Constitution is so brilliant! If and when the radicals can usurp that system then America will become what the Democrat party intended over the last 4 years, just another country under the control of their master Globalist / U.N. plan. That is how much they despise the Constitution and its constraining their aspirations.

Their push for absolute political power and control has resulted in the Pedestrian Realm populous which includes every day American Democrats who understand and will continue to further understand just how perverted, desperate un and anti-American the Democrat party leadership now dominated by the radicals / Socialists has become. And that condition will not be resolved in the 2 and 4 years you suggest IMO.

JGL 10/2/24 : “D.J. Trump is but the asymmetrical introduction to this modern-day re-founding of America. And it looks to me like J. D. Vance may well be the man to carry the torch of American Constitutional freedom after Mr. Trump is reelected and sets the stage for Mr. Vance and America to reconnect with the Constitution.”

https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/refounding-or-death

It’s nice that they might help us stop the train. But they certainly – not at this point – are NOT going to help us get it on the other track. At least not without a lot of suasion from our side. We need to not sit back and relax, but get to work showing them all the ways in which Progressivism is a bad idea. Because if we don’t repeal Progressivism, Trump’s 4 years will just be a blip on the downward trend for America.

Steve Richter: Um, you might want to reread the Fifth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. It says right there that asset seizure cannot be done with “due compensation.”

Andi: Fixed. Thank you.

“… she’s tired of being perceived as a “street communist,” and wants to be in the politburo.”

Michael Malice/ Buck Sexton
https://youtu.be/zaQjwP20b2s?t=2540

I wonder a bit whether we may be seeing the first hint of such movement on the part of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has, after all, removed pronouns from her capsule bio and also swapped out the unisex term “Representative” for the gendered term “Congresswoman.” And she has seemed genuinely interested in why so many of her constituents voted both for President Trump and for her in the recent election – after getting over her initial shock at such an “impossible” circumstance.

Jeff Wright,

I don’t think Republicans have to entertain any cognitive dissonance in regarding both Reagan and Trump as heroic figures. Nobody is perfect and Republicans understand this in a way Democrats never really have.

Reagan was wrong about a lot of things besides immigration. On of his biggest failings was his general disinterest in most aspects of domestic policy. Another was his complete incomprehension of the danger of radical Islam in the wake of the Beirut Marine barracks bombing. Reagan’s entire foreign policy attention was on the superpower contest with the Soviets. He wasn’t wrong about that being Job One, but it tunnel-visioned him more than a bit.

It didn’t help that the DNC ceased being the party of poor people and became the party of transgender snail-darter lives matter.

There are more Bob Beckel type Dems than you think–embarassed of having to toe the party line, they now free to take this brief moment of clarity with impunity.

But they are not alone

Long before Biden, Reagan helped start the influx of illegals because of cheap labor. He hoped social conservative Roman Catholics from the global south would be a model minority–but Anna Navarro was a result.

If Reagan was right, then Trump is wrong.

If Trump is right–then Reagan was mistaken.

Which idol will the Right abandon?
You can’t have them both as heroes and be at all intellectually honest.

Today’s GOP is true grass-root populism.

1980’s talk radio became popular because you didn’t hear much in the way of conservative thought outside of Bill Buckley–whose FIRING LINE was on PBS of all things.

Then, talk-radio’s take on economics was the right-winger version of Obama saying that jobs weren’t coming back–how great free trade was. Real blue-blood Cabot/Lodge thinkspeak.

But with the Internet, the tea-party folks found they really had more in common with occupy Wall Street than Bush.

Folks you might call RINOs are in fact the same old poor-hating blue-bloods they have always been.

It isn’t just Democrats having a moment of clarity.

“

And what will be the cost?

The price will be paid politically in the Political Realm.

And the price will increase when the rest of the family will be included in the blanket pardonfest.

“Always Remember: Politics is not about truth and morality. Politics is about winning and the control of and the retention of power. Truth and morality are not the business that any politician or government is in.”

Politics is like playing blood and guts 3 dimensional chess.

Pardons? I do not have a problem with them they are choices that the executive gets to make, it is a privilege that is essential to right wrongs and unfortunately to take care of the dirty filthy business that is politics.

Politics truly is the dirtiest, filthiest most corrupt activity that human beings participate in.

Greatest show on earth!

David Eastman: And those five who are crazy do nothing to convince anyone, and actual act to convince many others on the left that their side has been acting crazy during the Trump years.

All to the good.

It has been absolutely gobsmacking today to watch the number of people claiming that Biden’s pardon is not in fact a betrayal of his unequivocal promise not to do any such thing.

“If a meme is dank a man is not only right to steal it, he is obligated to do so.”
– Thomas Jefferson
https://t.ly/w3xar

Thank you.

It usually takes a very long time, at least the time one spent invested in the gutter to get there.

Some cannot make it though.

Political wrong think I.E. Liberal Leftist think is more of a mental illness than a physical / psychological dependency. (Wayne would be a good person to comment of this kind of conversation).

And most people that are able and can make the transition become like ex-smokers in their proselytizing against what they were once burdened with. It must become your religion and your core, or you tend to backslide and cheat.

Alex Jones Crashes The Young Turks
Steven Crowder PARODY (November, 2016)
https://youtu.be/ATaQ7n1iSy8
3:35