More James Madison

The New Neo Posted on by

Another quote to ponder from James Madison:

…[O]n a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism. If we go over the whole history of ancient and modern republics, we shall find their destruction to have generally resulted from those causes.

The Founders were very aware of the tendency of majorities to stomp on the rights of minorities. We tend to think of “minorities” as meaning minority ethnic, racial, sexual, or religious groups. But that’s not what Madison meant. He meant any party or group that is out of power and up against a majority determined to keep it that way and take away some of its rights.

That’s why we’re a republic and not a democracy. The Democrats’ left flank – which is very large these days – is determined to make us a democracy, however, in the sense of abolishing the filibuster so that a bare majority can do its will, and in terms of abolishing the Electoral College.

For most of the 20th Century it used to be that major legislation that affected people’s lives – such as Obamacare – was not passed by razor-thin margins. Either one party had an overwhelming majority that really did constitute a mandate, or if the majority wasn’t so huge then both parties knew that it was good if both majority and minority parties were in some sort of basic agreement about any large overhaul in the system. Civil Rights, Social Security, Medicare, all had significant bipartisan approval.

But now, the Democrats are willing to exercise a tyranny of the majority even when the country is divided quite equally. The present Democrat majority is barely that. They know they are poised on the edge of losing that majority in the future, and it’s threatening, and so they want to seize power and consolidate it and extend it while they can, in any way they can. Obviously, if there was significant cheating in the election, that would be one way. But even without that, there are the court-packing proposals, support for illegal immigration and ultimate citizenship, and plans to give DC and Puerto Rico statehood. It’s all part of the same plan and the same goal, a path to permanent power not through persuasion but through other means.

Long long long ago, I used to think that the names of the parties – Democrats and Republicans – were somewhat arbitrary. They are not.

The GOWCP

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s the Grand Old Working Class Party now:

After the 2020 election, Republicans need to rebrand their party as the champions of working-class voters and steer away from its traditional embrace of big business, Sen. Marco Rubio said in an interview with Axios.

Why it matters: Rubio told me he is leaving the door open for a 2024 presidential run — so his comments are some of the earliest signals of how the GOP contenders may try to acknowledge President Trump’s successes while finding their own path.

“The future of the party is based on a multiethnic, multiracial working class coalition,” said Rubio…

Rubio said Republicans have long believed in and supported the free market, “but the free market exists to serve our people. Our people don’t exist to serve the free market.”…

He added that working class Americans [are] “very suspicious, quite frankly, dismissive of elites at every level. And obviously that’s a powerful sentiment.”

What to make of this?

(1) Rubio thinks Trump has reshaped the Republican Party and given it a clear direction.
(2) Rubio would like to run for president in 2024.

Rubio is an interesting politician – at least, to me. He has a habit of annoying the Republican base by being too cooperative with Democrats, particularly on immigration – at least, he was in the past. But I’ve long felt he’s got some pluses that make him attractive as a politician. The first is that he’s actually pretty smart and can speak quite well. The second is that he’s young and the third is that he’s Hispanic. Hispanics may be a new strength for the Republican Party.

Ted Cruz – whom I prefer – has the same characteristics but is smarter and without the baggage of compromise. But Cruz is (or used to be) personally off-putting to a lot of people. I was not one of them; I’m a Cruz fan. But I recognize that some people just plain don’t like him.

Neither Cruz nor Rubio has forsaken Trump at this point, either. I saw a clip of Cruz saying that Trump has every right to challenge irregularities in the election (can’t find it at the moment), and here’s Rubio on it:

“At the core of our republic, its legitimacy comes from people’s confidence in the elections,” Rubio, a Republican, told Fox News host Sean Hannity Tuesday evening. “Right now, you got half this country that has doubts about the veracity of this election.”…

Rubio appeared to back Trump’s push for recounts in the 2020 election, saying that both Democrats and Republicans “should be welcoming of having this process be open and transparent.”

“That’s why the process that exists in the law, there’s a process in the law that exists, after the election, before the results are certified,” Rubio said.

“That process has to be allowed to move forward. Otherwise, we’re going to have a result here that half the country will harbor significant doubts about.”

Why am I talking about 2024? Well, why not? It’s a very depressing time right now. I’m well aware – very aware – that if massive fraud is really occurring in elections (as may be the case), it really doesn’t matter who runs. I don’t need to be reminded of that.

But I also know that I don’t see the future and I need to also focus on things that don’t bring me down. I try to have a balance here, and in addition that means that I sometimes talk about frivolous things, or history, or art, or the deeper questions of life, or any number of non-political topics.

Biden AWOL…

The New Neo Posted on by

…on Veterans Day.

CORRECTION: Some readers have called my attention to the fact that the post by Ace that I linked to above seems to have missed an appearance that Biden did make on Veterans Day, to a Korean war memorial in Philadelphia. However, reading Biden’s remarks there, I have to say they are about as self-aggrandizing and mean-spirited as expected, and he doesn’t fail to slyly hint at one of the lies he repeated during his campaign, that Trump dissed the troops:

…[A]t the Korean War Memorial near Penn’s Landing. Municipal Court President Judge Patrick Dugan introduced Mrs. Biden as “first lady.”…

Mr. Biden used the holiday as an opportunity to advance the inevitability of his inauguration on Jan. 20, despite the Trump campaign’s ongoing legal challenges in several states.

“This Veterans Day, I feel the full weight of the honor and the responsibility that has been entrusted to me by the American people as the next president, and I vow to honor our country’s sacred obligation,” he said in a statement.

The Democrat also made a thinly veiled reference to pre-election accusations by anonymous Trump opponents that the president doesn’t respect the sacrifice of military service members. Mr. Trump and numerous allies have disputed those reports.

“To all of our proud veterans, know that I will be a commander in chief who respects your sacrifice, understands your service, and who will never betray the values you fought so bravely to defend,” Mr. Biden said. “I will never treat you or your families with anything less than the honor you deserve.”

What a nice guy and gracious healer, that Biden.

A historical note on mourning a country

The New Neo Posted on by

Blogger and commenter David Foster writes:

I’ve been remembering something written by the British general Edward Spears, describing his feelings in the aftermath of Munich:

“Like most people, I have had my private sorrows, but there is no loss that can compare with the agony of losing one’s country, and that is what some of us felt when England accepted Munich. All we believed in seemed to have lost substance.

“The life of each of us has roots without which it must wither; these derive sustenance from the soil of our native land, its thoughts, its way of life, its magnificent history; the lineage of the British race is our inspiration. The past tells us what the future should be. When we threw the Czechs to the Nazi wolves, it seemed to me as if the beacon lit centuries ago, and ever since lighting our way, had suddenly gone out, and I could not see ahead.”

Yet it was only two years after Munich that Britain demonstrated its magnificent resistance to Nazi conquest. Maybe there is hope for a similar turnaround in the USA?

I sure hope so.

I was saying to someone the other day that I’ve had plenty of disappointments and sorrows in my life. But at least they only affected me and were mostly important only to me, however sharp the pain. For many years I never felt the pain of a beloved country slipping away, and yet I feel some of that now. It’s not a new feeling, either, but it’s intensified in the last year.

I don’t like what we’ve been learning lately about how far things have gone in the US, but if this is the way it is, then we needed to know about it:

Consider what we have learned about the leaders of the country in the last four years.

We learned that they would do everything in their power to destroy a president who takes them on: delegitimizing his election; baselessly demonizing and slandering him as a Nazi, racist, and bigot; lying perpetually through media conduits to undermine and smear him; pulling documents off his desk to subvert him; concocting false narratives meant to portray him as a traitor to justify spying on him and his confidantes; waging legal and political jihads aimed at toppling him; weaponizing national security, intelligence, and law-enforcement apparatuses to punish him and like-minded dissenters from the ruling class orthodoxy; impeaching him over his desires to root out political corruption; threatening to wear wires in a bid to entrap and remove him under the 25th Amendment; claiming obstruction of justice over rightful decisions to fire subordinates as he sees fit; illegally leaking information about the most sensitive of subjects concerning his policies while simultaneously invoking state secrecy to prevent the revelation of systematic ruling class corruption and criminality; and often engaging in outright insubordination…

We learned that our courts—up to the highest court in the land—would hold such a president to a different standard than other presidents…

Everyone knows about chicanery in Democrat machine-run districts. But never has there been anything like what transpired at the apex of the perpetual coup on November 3rd. In the middle of an election night on which the president made historic gains with blacks and Hispanics and romped in the two bellwether states of Florida and Ohio; in which his Republican colleagues stunned pollsters by dominating Democrats in toss-up and even Democrat-favored races; in which the president was up by large margins in every major battleground state, suddenly, without explanation, the counting stopped.

Were the machines kicking into gear to conjure up the votes needed to stop the catastrophe of the president winning re-election? Certainly such things had been done before in isolation, but in the urban centers of several states all at once? Could a fix of this magnitude really be in?

Much more at the link.

Whether a “fix of this magnitude” actually happened, the sad thing is that the forces arrayed against Trump have already done so many clandestine and destructive things that half of America think it’s very believable that if the Trump opposition could have engineered such a fix they would have had no hesitation whatsoever in doing so.

Mail-in voting wasn’t a bug, it was a feature

The New Neo Posted on by

Everyone who knows anything about elections and fraud knows that mail-in voting raises the risk of fraud. There are several kinds of mail-in voting, though, and each has different risks. Absentee voting is tolerated but the voter must make the request, and that adds an extra layer of safeguard. Riskier still is universal mail-in voting in which ballot requests are mailed to every voter on the rolls – or, riskier yet, a ballot itself mailed to everyone on the rolls. States that have had this system for years at least have had a chance to work out some of the kinks. But this year’s expansion of the practice to many states with no experience at all in it – and voter rolls that had not been well updated in the past – was an invitation to disaster.

Well, now we have the disaster. And I submit that not only did everyone know some version of this would happen, but the Democrats consider it a feature rather than a bug. The upshot is that trust in our voting system has been undermined on a scale never before seen, and that such a phenomenon could and should have been foreseen and prevented. It was foreseen, but not prevented.

I had a pre-Election Day fear that it would all come down to Pennsylvania and that the votes there would be so mixed up that it would be impossible to verify anything, and that if fraud had been committed there would be no way to prove it. I think that nightmare has come true but in an even worse form, with multiple states involved.

More:

After this Nov. 3, one thing is poignantly clear: mail-in voting is a proven disaster. As we’ve seen, it’s grossly susceptible to fraud.

Many Republicans, including President Trump, have been warning about this for months. Democrats and the mainstream media also know it’s incredibly risky. But they’ve been obfuscating or flat-out lying to us about it for months.

How do we know? They once warned about mail-in voting themselves. Consider this New York Times article from 2010, which noted, “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show.”

The Times article also says “fraud is easier by mail.” This should be common knowledge, and already was among election officials. Leon County, Florida elections supervisor Ion Sancho told the Times: “The only cases of election fraud have been in absentee ballots… The more people you force to vote by mail, the more invalid ballots you will generate.”

The New York Times article concludes: “Election experts say the challenges created by mailed ballots could well affect outcomes this fall and beyond. If the contests next month are close enough to be within what election lawyers call the margin of litigation, the grounds on which they will be fought will not be hanging chads but ballots cast away from the voting booth.”

Much more at the link.

Looking at election statistics

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “I am Sparticus.”]

I found this video fascinating. I know enough about math and graphs (although nothing about programming) to more or less understand what they’re saying, but I can’t evaluate it independently. Also, I don’t know if it would have any clout in a court of law. In addition, why on earth would any voting software need a mode in which votes could be weighted like this? Why would that ever be okay rather than fraudulent?

The main speaker, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, is characterized by Wiki as a conspiracy theorist of dubious reputation. However, his scientific credentials seem on the up and up, and some of his assertions that Wiki characterizes as “misinformation” don’t seem all that suspect to me. Just to take one example: “In March 2020 he published an open letter to president Donald Trump where he wrote that a national lockdown was unnecessary and advocated that large doses of vitamins could prevent and cure the disease.” As time has gone on, there has been quite a bit of evidence that lockdowns haven’t helped and that Vitamin D can really improve outcomes, so I don’t see how such assertions can be dismissed out of hand. The jury is still out on so many things about COVID.

Ayyadurai also ran for the Senate in the Republican primary in Massachusetts in 2018, and ended up running as an Independent and getting 3.4% of the vote. This campaign slogan of his against Elizabeth Warren makes me smile: “Only a real Indian can defeat a fake Indian.” Guy’s got a sense of humor. Lastly, he and actress Fran Drescher were an item from 2014 to 2016. Make of that what you will.

At any rate, as with any other science, the facts and the conclusions should stand or fall on their own. If anyone more conversant with the statistical and programming issues than I would like to weigh in, feel free:

Caroline Glick on the 2020 election

The New Neo Posted on by

From Caroline Glick:

As President Trump said in his remarks Thursday evening, it may take time for the legal challenges to work their way through the courts and determine definitively who will be inaugurated on January 20. But we can already see that whoever wins, America’s democratic order is steeped in crisis…

The Democrats’ fomented the crisis, which places America’s very future as a constitutional democracy on the line when they refused to accept the results of the 2016 election. The media caused it by abandoning journalism in favor of political activism…

Clinton’s delegitimization of Trump and his voters morphed into a rejection of the rules of American democracy. All Democrat efforts to oust Trump from office and to block his ability to govern since, like the political violence the Democrats have employed with greater intensity in the intervening years, are a function of that move.

The Democrats revealed their new post-democratic character and totalitarian bent on inauguration day. When the millions of Democrats came out to protest the peaceful transfer of power, they called themselves “the Resistance.” They weren’t opposing Trump. They were resisting an illegitimate regime. And to take down the regime – that is, the US government – all means were justified…

It’s impossible to know how things will develop in America in the coming weeks. But it is hard to see a rainbow over the horizon. If Trump is declared the winner, the Democrats won’t accept the legitimacy of the verdict. Their use of political violence will undoubtedly rise.

And if Biden is declared the winner, the Democrats will not rest on their laurels. Having already adopted the totalitarian mindset, they will insist their newfound power be used to advance their post-democratic program. Indeed, they already are.

It’s not a rosy picture. But it seems accurate to me.

I do find it exceptionally hypocritical, even by Democrat standards, to be angry at Trump and the Republicans challenging the initial results of the 2020 election through the courts, in legal fashion, when in 2016 the Democrats were already putting in place the slow-motion never-ending deception-based coup against Trump. They are also now well into their preparations to indict him in the court system (of NY state, at the very least) for something or other – whatever they can find. I predict that, should they succeed, such an unprecedented (in this country, that is) and vindictive move will be supported by most rank and file Democrats.

Out of sorts

The New Neo Posted on by

From commenter “MollyG”:

I just feel incredibly sad this evening. Sad because I can’t share my Dem/progressive friends’ transports of unhinged joy at the attempted DNC/MSM. coup. Sad because I love my friends but cannot look at them, since their spittle-flecked rage and hypocrisy literally turns my stomach. Sad because facts do not matter to them, and any sort of penetrating conversation will lead us down the multiple rabbit holes of their ignorance and Trump Derangement Syndrome–induced cognitive dissonance. Sad because I can feel them beginning to shun me for wanting an open and honest count of the votes. If you remember the famous Biergarten scene from the film Cabaret, I am the disaffected old guy at the table while everyone else stands up and sings “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” with the Hitler Jugend. Ironic that the sore losers of 2016, with their “Resistance” fantasy, have actually put us on the brink of 1930s Germany with their Kristallnacht violence over the summer and fall and, now, their calls for what sounds like a Final Solution to the Deplorables. We are not living now in a normal country.

I’m feeling estranged from friends, too, but that happened quite some time ago. For years I had refrained from talking to them about politics because earlier efforts went essentially nowhere, and sometimes caused enmity. What was the point?

But a couple of months prior to Election Day this year, I started talking again. Not often, but sometimes. But although there were a few pockets of decent conversation, for the most part I was impressed (and not favorably) by how little people seem to know of actual events, and how recalcitrant to change the Trump-hatred was and still is.

Now I assume they’re happy, although the three people I’ve actually spoken to post-election don’t seem happy at all. They seem relieved that Trump wasn’t re-elected, but very worried about where the country is headed. That worry doesn’t seem to have a focus (although one person is worried that Trump will refuse to leave the White House) for most except for the vague sense that the present divisiveness and anger won’t be taking us in a good direction. So there is fear, too.

Perhaps not as great as my fear, but I’m not even sure of that. I have yet to speak to a person who’s happy about the way things have turned out so far.

Et tu, Libertarians?

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “om.”]

I was thinking about the Libertarians, and how they may have screwed things up this time, and here’s someone thinking along the same lines:

Although some who voted Libertarian might otherwise have voted Democrat, while others might have stayed home and not voted if there were no ballot alternative to Trump and Biden, the vast majority of Libertarians would have voted for Trump and Perdue if the idiots of the Libertarian Party had not been on the ballot. Look at Ron Paul and Rand Paul: they both are determined libertarians (hence Rand’s very name), but they affiliate and come down unabashedly as Republicans, not as Democrats. …

But there is no need to waste time and pause over the catastrophe the Libertarian Party has perpetrated, sabotaging the very values libertarians hold dear for smaller government and less interference with our freedoms. We have had one of the greatest presidents in our history these past four years, and we now may have lost the chance for four more years to nail down the gains because of the idiots in that party who did to Trump now what Ralph Nader’s acolytes did to Al Gore in 2000 and what Jill Stein’s Green Party helped do to Hillary Clinton four years ago. Even more pernicious than Democrat shenanigans, the Libertarian Party are the ultimate villains of this election because, if they had gotten out of the way, Trump would have beaten even the fraud.

Here are some figures from the article:

Arizona (11 Electoral Votes)
Biden — 1,633,181
Trump — 1,613,833
Libertarian — 49,454

Pennsylvania (20 Electoral Votes)
Biden — 3,359,270
Trump — 3,316,019
Libertarian — 77,513

Wisconsin (10 Electoral Votes)
Biden — 1,630,570
Trump — 1,610,030
Libertarian — 38,415

Georgia (Presidential Race) (16 Electoral Votes)
Biden — 2,465,500
Trump — 2,455,305
Libertarian – 61,888

Georgia (Perdue-Ossoff)
Ossoff — 2,365,916
Perdue — 2,456,211
Libertarian — 114,566

I’m not advocating shutting down the Libertarian Party, nor is the author. I just wish voters would understand that voting for a third-party is very often counterproductive to the policies they’d like to see instituted. This year, it’s extremely counterproductive. And yet I have no illusions that libertarians will be listening to me.

I read several months ago that one of the strategies of the Democrats this election was to keep the Green Party off the ballot in many states, for just this reason. The socialists were none too happy about it:

In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump by 11,000 votes in Michigan, 23,000 in Wisconsin, and 44,000 in Pennsylvania. In each state, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein received more votes than Clinton’s margin of defeat.

This led the Democrats, and their media apologists, to blame the Greens for a defeat which Clinton brought on herself by running a right-wing, anti-working-class campaign which allowed Trump to posture as the advocate of coal miners, steel workers, auto workers and others whose livelihood had been destroyed by the policies of big business and the Obama-Biden administration.

One conclusion drawn by the Democrats from the experience of 2016 was that the basic democratic right of third parties to ballot access and of the public to vote for a candidate of their choosing must not be allowed to disrupt the two-party system of Wall Street, the Pentagon and the CIA. Over the past two months, they have blocked the Green Party from obtaining ballot status in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and the Socialist Equality Party from obtaining ballot status in Michigan—the same three states which were the margin of defeat for Clinton in the Electoral College.

While the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party—which is running its own candidates Joseph Kishore for US President and Norissa Santa Cruz for US Vice President—have fundamental class and political differences with the Green Party, we defend their right to participate in the 2020 elections. We denounce the Democratic Party for its repeated and blatant abuse of ballot access procedural rules and the courts to have Hawkins and Walker kicked off the November ballot.

The Democrats were smart to do this, and it may have ended up giving Biden just the edge he needed, whether or not fraud was committed.

Victor Davis Hanson speaks about the election and after

The New Neo Posted on by

VDH has long been one of my favorite political commentators. I don’t agree with everything he says in this entire video, but I’ve cued it up to show a part where he makes an interesting analogy (although he starts by assuming that “for now” it looks like the anti-Trump forces may have won):

And here’s the whole thing. He’s more optimistic than I am about the radicalism of what the Democrats might be able to do in the next four years; I hope he’s right and I’m wrong:

[NOTE: Here’s Hanson post-election, writing about the NeverTrumpers.]