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In praise of authoritarianism
Not from me; I say it’s spinach, and to hell with it. But others find it a good election message:
I don’t know if Ms. Berlinski endorses the particulars of D muthafargery. I don’t know if she just liked the swinging’-Richard coq-of-the-walk posture of muthafargery from an internet videosthat cherrypick moments from charismatic politicians who really said some things, y’all. But she’s on to something; weakness is not an effective message in 2020.
Still, it’s hard not to infer a trill of joy that the Ds are doing this, and hence will win. So.
Is it just me, but when the Ds have embraced every statist “solution” and intrusion into the economy, elevated identity politics to a religion, let cities burn, lost their voice when it came to condemning mobs that spatter every civic structure with obscenities, shrug at Jew-hatred when the popular people say it, promise to make citizens of illegal aliens, and recast the national narrative to conform to the 1619 project – complete with witch trials and struggle sessions for anyone who does not parrot the new history – well, perhaps your enthusiasm for competent, ruthless people might be less than enthusiastic?
Maybe it’s just me! But I’m trying to imagine a scenario in which ruthless statists is a concept that makes conservatives stand up and cheer.
Competent, ruthless people weld people’s doors shut to keep them inside when Covid strikes. Competent, ruthless people billyclub citizens who do not wear masks.
Competent, ruthless people enforce compliance with their ideas with every tool in the arsenal – legal, social, economic – because after all, the personal is the political.
Competent, ruthless people pack the Supreme Court.
Competent, ruthless people gun down protestors.
Sorry, reductio ad absurdum there, utterly unmoored from history. Sorry! It’s different in this context, because “ruthless” in American politics means an unwavering desire to pursue the necessary policies through the established system by whatever means necessary, yet scrupulously adhering to laws, norms, and conventions. That’s all!
Whatever: at least we have a standard. Competency is not enough. The necessity of defeating Trump requires not just the absence of ruth but its abolition. It needs a hard, pitiless heart, and this sentiment is best expressed with Quentin Tarantino dialogue to make sure we get the point. You know people are serious when they use the really bad swears.
Published in General
They don’t think they have to maintain the mask anymore (ironic, that), and they are letting their Fascist freak flags fly.
“We have met the Nazis, and they is us.” And they’ve decided they’re cool with that.
I’m just having a hard time seeing the word “patriotism” playing well with the left half of the base. Doesn’t that imply a flag, or something else identifiably American?
Or is this one of those “I’m an American patriot like your typical Greek is an American patriot” kinds of things?
We all know that’s a lie.
We’re talking about a party that is becoming dominated by a movement that uses a clenched fist as their emblem.
Hey, I think we just got the new name for the Washington NFL team! The Washington Ruthless Statists. Yeah, that works for me. Washington’s a one-party town if there ever was a one-party town and that party is the Democrat party. They own the town lock, stock and barrel. And, even when the Republicans somehow cheat their way to the White House, the Democrats still figure out a way to run the show. The team logo’s pretty easy – a jack-booted thug stomping on a human face.
Go Statists! Cancel the Racist Competition!
As long as they’re the realer, most-betterist patriots. Then it’s, like…. ya know, cool.
They are letting their ids run free. I don’t want to give them power. I want to give them Xanax.
Exactly. I wonder how many Democrat voters are re-examining their core beliefs and think, “You know, maybe this isn’t the way to go about establishing Utopia.”
The November election is going to be interesting . . .
It’s sad and disappointing to see Claire use that kind of crude and violent language.
Claire wouldn’t know competence from a hole in the wall.
“We’ll make the trains run on time and take care of those “deplorables” in society”…..
And Kennedy would not be a Democrat in todays world.
Great post. I think it does a good job at pointing out the insincerity of this type of talk by using good historical points. The talk about competence and ruthlessness strikes me as insincere (if a Conservative said it…) and it seems we don’t get the competence and what is worse (!) is that ruthlessness becomes a substitute. Its a classic of statist political behavior behavior because their policies are often so difficult to implement if people won’t obey. Once your political career, and perhaps even your life, rests on riff-raff obeying, then you will do what it takes to get them to obey.
We can muddle through riots and civil unrest (in a couple of blocks). I know some neighborhoods will be devastated, but we can survive that. The thing that will be harder to overcome is that we are seeing an open, developing, symbiotic relationship between a political party and groups dedicated to ongoing looting and civil unrest in order to achieve their political aims– either by exhausting or frightening the population. That is something that is hard to walk back from. (I’m talking about democrats and their relationship to Antifa and BLM btw.)
Who is Don Winslow and why is he at all qualified to know whether patriotism is fake or not.
Well, this Don Winslow understands patriotism, but he is a comic strip character. That one dated to WWII and is probably rolling over in his grave at Claire’s statement. He fought people like the Don Winslow who made the tweet.
“Fake patriotism”:
He hated the Communists. In fact, he forcefully criticized the Eisenhower administration for not supporting Taiwan (Formosa) sufficiently. Reading the debates between Kennedy and Nixon is startling today.
Joe, Jack’s father, was soft on Hitler and Stalin and Communism. He was a loathsome despicable human being. The story about what he did to his oldest daughter Rosemary has forever placed him beyond redemption as far as I’m concerned. But Jack was the exact opposite politically.
None of them. They are so used to Democrats lying to get elected they don’t believe them.
I liked Claire when she was active here, and I still do.
But I don’t like, and will not vote for, “competent, ruthless” statists who have no respect for the Constitution, particularly the first two amendments.
Question for Claire: will competence and ruthlessness cancel out the 4th, the 5th, and the 6th Amendments too?
This is intended to be rhetorical, I assume. (?)
Isn’t Ms. Berlinski in the category of those who, at some point, decided it was inconvenient to interact with the membership?
Sure he would. He would have changed as required.
We clearly need an investigation into Parisian tampering with American elections. At one point I would have read that from Claire as sarcasm, but having followed her political descent and warm endorsements of and camaraderie with the finally convicted libel artist Christopher Steele, the man the full weight and power of the FBI could not verify, it is clear that she is caucusing with Senator Palpatine now.
Once she decided that Trump is the American Le Pen all manner of excess and opprobrium have issued from the city of magic. Trump has more flaws than money, but a close assessment of Trump and his opposition proves him to be the lesser of two weevils by far. The notion that he is as evil as the monster that consigned whole segments of the population to concentration camps, FDR, is sheer hyperbole.
If she, as a journalist, can be so utterly wrong about Steele, she really needs to focus on restoring her reputation or focus on her career as a fiction author. Mugging for Twitter mobs is not a good look for her.
Modern history sees the same story play out over and over again: a period of wealth generation during which the socialists salivate over the ways and means it can capture private bank accounts.
Our president fixed the economy after the recession-inducing Democrat years. Unfortunately, rather than learn how to get an economy going again after a period of draining it with regulations galore, the Democrats, having run out of money when they were in office, see it as money to take for themselves. Socialism drains capital sources dry. It leaves nothing for investment and growth.
If the American people are smart, they will reelect Trump because now more than ever, they need someone good at quick economic fixes.
She went emeritus so as to work on her book… which it seems is never going to come to fruition as it has devolved into a moving target, valiantly fighting phantoms and ghosts.
I’ve personally been wondering if it’s more that she found it inconvenient to interact with Americans on American soil.
My father in law is English, but a naturalized citizen here. He was back in Blighty last fall to visit with his family (until COVID, this was at least an annual meetup), and he was aghast at the way the media portrays the US. Even his more conservative relatives could not describe Trump in terms other than venomous, but the reasons they gave were ill informed. He sat down those who would listen and laid it out. “Believe nothing about the US, or especially about Trump, if it comes from your media,” and he walked them through several examples. He’s not sure he convinced anyone, but at least he sowed some doubts.
I cannot help but think that Claire is likewise in that same bubble, unable to see things here except through the venom and spite and a bunch of snot-nosed European reporters who hate being stuck here.
I’m not so sure about that. Kennedy came into office cock-sure that he knew everything, that Eisenhower had been an overly cautious idiot who had caused our Cold War with the USSR, and that Kennedy’s youth and “clean slate” would set a new bar.
Berlin and Cuba and quickly proved the reality of Eisenhower’s positions, and Kennedy wised up. We’ll never know how much, but he did change in office, he did grow.
I noticed that she is still listed as a contributor on the City Journal site, but I can’t recall the last time I saw anything by her there or in the magazine.
Not so different from the media bubble over here, eh?
Her most recent piece in City Journal was published in April of last year, a good piece on the Notre Dame fire. No f-bombs.
Thanks. I probably have that around somewhere, but I thought it had been awhile. I never had an issue with her writing from Europe on events on the continent, since that’s her lane. On U.S. domestic matters, not so much.
I understood that reference.