Centrists Are Statists

After paying for my annual domain fee, I felt guilty about not having posted a new article to the Joel S. Dudas Netscape Life Magazine in so long. For those previously unfamiliar with this site, this was a blog before the term “blog” even existed. I started this site way back in 1997 primarily as a means of distracting myself from working on my master's thesis, and I was definitely a blogger at the very dawn of the internet era. If you don't believe me, I offer these three pieces of compelling evidence:

1. The name of the Joel S. Dudas Netscape Life Magazine does not include the word “blog”, which, so far as I am aware, did not yet exist

2. The name of the Joel S. Dudas Netscape Life Magazine includes the word “Netscape”

3. I own the domain name jsdudas.com, which would probably by now have been snapped up by the dozens of obvious would-be takers of such a potentially in-demand domain name

So I decided to finally write something new after so long. While I am reading a very interesting book about the period of Slovak nationalism, and simultaneously in a debate with a distant Slovak relative who just got her PhD and yet is somehow so ignorant and narrow minded that she can't conceive of any form of nationalism other than that which Hitler employed (Exhibit 4033456728 on how they don't make PhDs like they used to), I feel like I a need a break from that subject, and want to deal with something else topical. So I thought I would address something that has been coming up a lot lately due to the Trump era, and the way people frequently seem to be discussing themselves when discussing him. Like pretty much everything else about Trump, in reality this phenomenon preceded him since....well....at least as long as I have been alive. But, there are those out there who seem to think that everything changed forever this past January, so the imploring has a new frequency and ridiculousness about it.

OK, before I write a single other thing, let me just get the obligatory Donald Trump paragraph out of the way. I am still primarily neutral about Trump. I didn't vote for or against him (I completely abstained from that election, and why those of you who didn't still appalls me...well...many of you at least). Also, if you can pull your head out of whatever bag of media assholes you happen to be inhaling on a daily basis to see this, but shockingly little of real world material significance has actually occurred under Trump by which to either approve or disapprove of him. I didn't say “nothing”. I said “shockingly little”. Obviously, I am not including the profuse amount of stupidity swirling around either his use of Twitter or the equally moronic reactions to those tweets. You know I mean. Trump says something stupid on Twitter, and then the critics turn in an even worse performance. Someone you know may have said something they thought was funny about some annoying aspect of Trump, but the main aftertaste you get from their “snarky insight” was “wow, now feel even dumber thank I did before” in the mind-numbing way Democrats are extremely proficient at. Nor the rest of the profoundly meaningless media food fight that is occupying the vast majority of the “civic discourse” (cough cough) which is, again, basically irrelevant in reality. The comings and goings of his officials is, at the risk of pointing out what should be obvious but obviously isn't, basically TABLOID material. You have turned yourselves into soap opera watchers. A farce. And, no, I don't think that “withdrawing” from a treaty that was never executed and would never have been followed by anybody which, assuming that you eat the rest of the CO2-climate enchilada in one gulp, according to even the most alarmist of (ahem, unvalidated) model projections would have reduced global temperatures by about .3 of a degree on a planet which has spent the vast majority of it's existence several degree C higher than today doesn't count either. Basically, what we have in reality is the appointment of some judges (so far as I am aware, none of them can be called amazing but they certainly are not horrible and are at least philosophically defenders of the actual content of the Constitution more or less), some very awkward and unnerving foreign policy that has, however, materially resulted in virtually nothing one way or the other, a handful of overhyped, idiotic, and mostly new Obama-era regs we somehow survived without forever, and....not much else. So, yes, I am basically neutral. The Russian shit strikes me as completely idiotic stupidity by all parties, but still small potatoes to the actual serious scandals of what the Clintons were doing for the last 20 years. Although it is amusing to watch the Leftists suddenly freak out over ostensible abuse of power. Why all of a sudden? Do you think the rest of us have somehow already forgotten what you just got done bending over backwards excusing? You should stop it....you look ridiculous. Of course, it is hardly beyond my imagination that Trump may do something that is in actuality deserving of impeachment. He doesn't strike me as particularly bothered by the nuances of the Constitution, nor of the philosophical underpinnings involved in the founding of the Republic, nor of listening to his advisors. He is guilty of executive overreach, (hardly a problem novel to him). Or that he may actually do something idiotic with respect to a foreign policy move that actually causes a massive amount of immoral harm (ditto). But until he actual does? Sorry...I'm not crying wolf with you insane deranged lunatics who have made yourselves hoarse. I'm sorry a person like him became the president too....he makes being anything other than an avowed mainstream groupthinker harder. But you people are behaving worse than he is. When you criticize him, somehow, generally you manage to make yourselves even worse.

(that the rest of this essay essentially lambastes the neutral mentality of moderates/centrists does not mutate into irony or contradiction for reasons that will become clear, but I cannot help but lick my lips right now)

That's the last thing I am going to say about The Donald. I didn't like Obama being president, and I don't like him being president either. What bothers me a lot more, however, is some of the stuff that the average citizen says. And, back to the point I began making pre-Trump paragraph, but the holier-than-Trumpisms-while-beclowning-themselves is coming out of a lot of people's mouths lately. A lot. I can think of at least a couple of dozen individuals who I otherwise respect and/or love giving me some different variety of it, but what it boils down to is: “hey, I'm not a Leftist, I'm a Centrist/Moderate, and...” For years, when people have preambled whatever they were about to say next with some variant of this, before they even got to whatever their point was, I found myself already cringing and bracing myself for some piece of banal or misguided foolishness.

Now, for a long time, I understood my typical reaction as one thing, but there was something else that bothered me about it (spoiler alert: that “something” is the title of this article) that was on the tip of my tongue but I never clearly characterized as a distilled thought.

Before we get to that new “something else”, please allow me to review at length why I have previously found such posturing as obnoxious and harmful. What has been obvious to me for years that I didn't like about it was that it was basically a way that these sober, wise moderate people, being unencumbered by a well-thought out philosophy and consistent principles, essentially just say that “compromise between the two extremes is the best way.” That way, if one “ideologue” (one of the most abused weaponized terms in discourse today) person argues that 2+2=4 and another says 2+2=437, the moderate will pose as saying that 2+2=219.5 and portray themselves as the reasonable one in the room. Naturally, civic and philosophical questions are not as straightforward as mathematics, but the point of the illustration serves us here.

And it is crucial to understand that it is not merely a willingness to compromise when the case demands it. It is a “belief system” that essentially values compromise itself as the primary goal. It says that, regardless of the truths, or values, or methods, or costs, or motives involved, that we shall broker some resolution to “get things done.” Again, and please do not misinterpret this, but I want to make this very clear: when it comes to compromise, there is a difference between a willingness/ability to do it as some point under certain circumstances, and having compromise itself as the organizing principle. By default, you can clearly differentiate whether a person is compromising unwillingly or a compromiser by their overuse and eagerness of vilifying, even if politely, other people for standing on principles when there is a lot at stake. They are also, basically, unwilling to g to an actual fight in a real way over anything, ever. See, for example, Neville Chamberlain et al. Peace, brother, not liberty.

The compromise paradigm is often described by “ideologues” as basically fluid and anchorless, blowing in the wind regardless of where that wind blows. Some say that this approach is basically just gutless, although I think this is somewhat off the mark. In my opinion, the biological dynamic is not fear exactly. It is vanity. While fear and vanity have essentially the same root source of insecurity, they manifest themselves very differently. Fear tends to be more reactionary, whereas vanity is generally a much more deliberate, planned-out characteristic. I argue that vanity is the core biological dynamic at work here, because enormous artifices are constructed in order to proactively portray oneself or one's organization as some kind of arbiter of truth, to build an institutionalish reputation for deliberate judgment and involved reason. The legal industry shows the prestige graduation pretty nakedly: prosecutors and defense attorneys mature into being judges. While youthful firebrands of advocate fever make headlines early, gravitas are conveyed on those who are perceived as seeing over the divides, pensively weighing, and then deciding accordingly.

In and of itself, this in not a bad thing. It describes any normal maturation of thought and development of wisdom. What harms the compromisers is not the evolution into perspective-gathering, but the short circuiting of thought that occurs by presuming that brokering the more superficial elements of conflicting viewpoints amounts to a positive. It's not positive, but acting as though all extremist conclusion amounts to fanaticism is a useful tool to marginalize unmoderates, and has been used probably since the dawn of man to enhance reputations. Other people's enthusiasm is generally used as a weapon to build one's own credential. There's passion, and then there's fanaticism, but the high brow moderate has no time to tell the difference between these. There's a reputation to be preserved, and that reputation is based on a compromising middle, no matter the circumstances.

That's the reputation media companies and everyday individuals strive for on a daily basis. Such reputations, when obtained, are precious. And fragile. This is what makes the recent journalism industry meltdown so fascinating to behold. While the bias has never really been absent, massive artifices portraying themselves as impenetrable fortresses of objectivity were built. Indeed, once upon a time (one can argue as to when and who), many of them WERE pretty good at being pseudo-objective. They had to be, in order to sell. But, now, that landscape has been laid to waste, and made barren except for smoking ruins. They still sell, not as much, but the damage done to the artifices of what constituted an information authority is permanent and severe, and much of it was self-inflicted. All of it should have been foreseen and avoided by the older, wiser media managers, and they did not do so. Now, all they are left with is themselves, and their zealots, and they will never get what they had back. They may gain more zealots, or lose them, but their authority is forever gone to anyone outside of the groupthinkbox they are in. And considering that vanity was the cardinal mechanism of the construction of what the media industry was and is still primarily attempting to be about today, it is interesting to speculate on how the few remaining long-range industry thinkers wonder how the future will regard this generation. Will they be circumspect enough to be embarrassed? Most of them, probably not, since the artifice they built started in the own minds as young journalists. But I'd bet that a few will, even if silently. Particularly those whose lives were full of personal regrets, and for those who become overly self-critical, I'd imagine a unique and certain horror will be at work.

So we have, more personally, average citizens who attempt to parrot these information industry celebrities, and our comrades try to shroud themselves accordingly in a conspicuous cloak of moderation, erroneously believing that the “idealogues” will be persuaded to their centrist arguments and concede to their reasonable, watered-down suggestions. Perhaps it is the times we live in, but even superficially, this is a feeble tribe. It is not an accident that the US Congress is claimed to be full of “extremists” and not moderates. This serves hard Leftists well, because their actual ideas seem more reasonable when proposed in calm, NPR-produced “intellectual” tones, in stark contrast to whatever hyperbolic moods are evilly denying us some new incremental Statism. In reality, most people do have principles, and they stand on them, and usually many principles at once. Hard conservatives become, at best, hypocrites, because it is easy to find hypocrisy when one wants both freedom/prosperity bended with the existing dosage of lite Statist solution, and feebly pursues little else. Conservatives are mostly fighting to preserve the existing degree of Statist encroachment on our lives. This dynamic produces a lot of weasels, on “both sides of the fence.” Of course, when the fence is basically planted on Statist ground, that's still a defense of Statism.

Most moderates actually have developed a way of coping with the obvious fact that being a weasel, even inadvertently, is subhuman. They cope by creating a channel to authentic, real human belief somewhere in their political philosophy. They will allow compromise on everything else, but they steer a taproot into something that they, too, truly feel. Translated, this phenomenon is seen in people who are the single-issue voter. For simplicity sake, I am lumping one- and two- and maybe even three-issue voters into the single category of single-issue voting, because in an age where there are probably 300 or 400 important issues at stake (300 or 400? What are these issues? Perhaps a future issue of the Joel S.Dudas Netscape Life Magazine can identify all of them? Sure!), 3-issues is still basically virtually nothing. The single-issuer voter is, in my strong opinion, the lowest form of citizen/voter imaginable. Since we have criminal laws for virtually everything else, I don't think it is too out of line to strip the right to vote away for two elections and until they pass a basic civics exam from anyone caught vocalizing their notion that they are only voting for so-and-so because I feel very strongly about this one issue, damn the rest of the torpedoes. If they do it twice, they get to choose between a lifetime loss of the vote or a month in prison, because their vote has real world ramifications. Third offense, they get kicked out of the country. I'm a hardliner on this, nothing moderate about it. Alternatively, we could have solved this whole problem by just having a de facto cultural norm of punching anyone who makes a single-issue voter statement in the face right after they say it. But, since that's now considered an assault, which is a felony, that option isn't viable. If the punch were thrown in a private residence or business other than the puncher's home, and it was in California, it would also be burglary, another felony (I'm actually not joking). And even if you don't punch anyone, you are arrestable for resisting arrest, for reading this article this far, or for some other reason (not joking about that either).

Now, to be sure, single-issue voting is not the unique domain of the moderates/centrists. Plenty of other “ideologues” have started from one or two basic motivators, and then carelessly adopted the remainder of some wildly hypocritical platform according to whatever proscribed menu that ostensibly goes with their main interest. In a way, my Slovak PhD relative is correct. Many European nationalists became nationalists out of some core root issue, and then it expanded into whatever set of “beliefs” about everything else were ascribed to that by mostly popular conceptions. Many Leftists became Leftists in much the same way. Some pet issue drew their interest, they figured “government must do something about this”, and then ten years later they are now full-throated Statist propaganda organisms. It's an easy thing for a person to do. It combines the two two most human weaknesses into one: 1) care about something, then 2) be lazy. Hey, I get it.

But in breathing and thinking for a few milliseconds, of course any jackass can figure out that the universe of potential portfolios of beliefs about subjects can theoretically be incredibly complex, and so before a person who punches a touchscreen button for this or that political figure, they ought to consider the total package they are buying. I mean, you don't buy a breakfast, where the eggs are delicious but the hollandaise sauce is a little bit off on account of using a butter substitute manufactured from Detroit sewer water. You don't buy a car with nice seats but an engine that can explode if a nearby dog barks. So why you would single-issue vote, when the ramifications are far worse,...it offends me. If you are a single-issue voter, please, please...get the fuck off the site and out of my life.

Most single-issue voters, in reality, and for the reasons I explained already, aren't aware that they are single-issue voting. Every single voter should really re-evaluate their motivations, and make sure they aren't (even inadvertently) succumbing to this easy condition. The most common form, I think obliviously done, is this: moderates/centrists will often say that they have very strong stands on x and y, but that the whole rest of the Chinese alphabet they are basically agnostic on, so long as we have compromise on it. THAT'S SINGLE ISSUE VOTING, and if you nodded your head in the precedeing sentence, take a shower, go to a bar, get drunk, black out, and when you are feeling the pangs of unidentifiable regret the next morning, resolve to change yourself, forever. Starting with that.

The modern parties have become massive structures of hypocrisy partially because their political success is due to their cobbling together of single-issue voters into huge blocs. This has turned a lot of people, who probably really only care about x or y core belief, into believing that they are for an entire party platform. Gay issues are a great example of this. Not recognizing that any marriage, gay or not, is a matter of privilege, and not of actual rights, they have subjugated their entire argument according to a rights argument that is easily demolished by anyone with even a lizard brain. But it doesn't get demolished, because the Leftist part of the media is stupid, and backed by comedians who can add condescension to sophomoric thinking and movie stars who add fake gravitas. The whole thing is countered by Fox News fans who have become equally ridiculous. This all got started by single issue voting, misguided from the start, and became more misguided from there. Go see your local band and support them!?

Now, while this may seem to be obvious, I have to keep going, because honestly I think nearly half of the people I know are fundamentally single-issue voters. There's one thing they really felt strongly about, and then they wrapped the rest of the package around that stick. That may have even explained how Hitler got himself democratically elected. I mean...I'm sure if you dug into every single thing Hitler believed and advocated for (remember, he was DEMOCRATICALLY elected), probably some of them sounded good by modern standards. I'd bet he would be in favor of increased youth education spending. I really have no idea, but if I was in a bar and someone asked me, I'd bet $20 on the side of Hitler being pro-Choice rather than pro-Life. Maybe I'm wrong, but does that seem far-fetched to you? I can also TOTALLY see him as being in favor of the Clean Water Act. Purity and all that. What...you think he would have objected on the basis of individual liberty grounds?

Let me also use this golden opportunity to point out how lame it is to use Hitler in conversational politics. Since Hitler is kind of like the Trump card of a political discussion. It is done all the time, and it is usually pretty lame, and here I am doing it. My Slovak PhD relative just did it. I think that Hitler is useful as an example of an extreme to make a point, but to use the Hitler card is a weak, pathetic attempt to shut down argument at the mere mention of his name. And....yet....do you see how I did the exact opposite? Suggesting that (handsome?) Adolph was probably in favor of clean water? Since he probably was.

The more illustrative point about Hitler is not in the lameness of the rhetorical technique, but rather in pointing out another fallacy in the whole moderate/centrist paradigm. Centrists depend on making two extremes, with themselves in the middle. There are only two extremes? In a world as complex as ours? Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler provide a wonderful example of the fallacy of this concept. Many Euros try to suggest that these are the polar ends of the world's government systems. The Right are a bunch of Nationalists, and the Left are a bunch of Communists. All squabbling over certain aspects of the power debate, but that's the fundamental dichotomy. To a libertarian, or any other American who can think outside of the media/late night comic box, this is a ridiculous and fake dichotomy, and yet a lot of very sober-headed gray-headed people actually argue and believe this while sipping their Sangiovese.

That both Hitler and Stalin were Statists, the primary acceptance involved in supporting either of their idiotic philosophies, and that many segments of the American right wing detest, reject, and fight Statism primarily, in not even grasped by a lot of moderates. One of the most nauseating features of modern discourse s the lumping in of anything considered right-wing with fascism, particularly considering that modern liberalism has far more similarity to fascism (both fascism and socialism are Statist) than does small government conservatism or libertarianism. The acceptance of the moral right of the State to use it's power freely and across wide swaths of society may have a different aim in leftism as compared to fascism, but in a liberty-oriented mindset, that right and permission for government to use it's power does not even exist in the first place. The tyranny that liberty-loving people oppose makes no difference as to why it is made allowable...it is simply rejected on it's face. But no matter....while it is understandable that leftists would use the tactic of slandering libertarians with a totalitarian label that is patently ridiculous, the moderates just go along with this and portray themselves as the more reasonable variety of Statists. In a normal, sane universe, they wouldn't do that...they'd simply discuss the issue in terms of what it is, a choice between liberty and tyranny.

The effect of the moderate posture is to give additional “legitimacy” to Statism, by essentially saying “well, sure, maybe the liberals want too much government, but we are willing to use government to manage x, y, and z, we're not like those nutcase anti-government types.” This basic dynamic boils down centrism to it's pure core, and it is, basically, a pose rather than a principle. But the effect is quite real, and critical. This is the primary mechanism that has been incrementally increasing Statism in the country since (at the very most recent) Coolidge, and more realistically more or less since Tyler (who was, ironically, a Whig). The gradual growth of Statism in the country has occurred because of the aesthetic pseudo-sanity of the moderates, who have been overwhelmingly incremental Statists.

In reality, Trump is not a member of an extreme, at least with respect to ideology. Oh shit, I said I wasn't going to bring him up again. You know what the worst thing about Trump is? He brings out the worst in everybody. Everybody. He has turned his detractors into insane deranged idiots, his supporters tie themselves into ridiculous fawning pretzels spinning apologies every week, and even us Joel S. Dudas Netscape Life Magazine writers can't escape his vortex. Aaaaaahhhhhh!!!

But Trump is not a member of an ideological extreme. Extremely stupid? Heh maybe? No he is not dumb either, no more than Obama was, although in very different cosmetic ways. They both know what they are doing (to the extent that they care and can), and if you think they are bumbling morons because they can act what you'd call moronic (in very different ways), then you are the moron. No, Trump is something else. And so am I, but something other than him. And unless you are a bootlicker of the -R or -D label brands, then so are you. This is why I can be neutral on Trump, but not a moderate. If you are asking me, yes, I was delighted that he beat Clinton. I was rooting for her to lose, and she (and the entire gang of the Clinton mobsters) deserved much worse than they got, and every one of you who actually voted for her needs your head examined. That being said, those of you who voted for him wouldn't be bad to pop by the old doc either. And lest you think I am above it all I'm not, I just suffer from a different set of neuroses and need my own unique, strong medical team. It's a forest out there, folks.

But, in truth, it saddens me that a guy like him is the president. This country of 300 million people, there are so many better human beings than him. Those of you reading who do claim to like him, and did vote for him, ask yourself what you thought of him three years ago, back when Hillary wasn't a factor in what you thought of Trump. Be honest. Unless you are also planning on taking your next vacation to New Jersey, “because of the nice scenery and the warmhearted people”, I won't believe you when you tell me it was positive, and for good reason. You, like pretty much everyone else, saw him as a cartoon character. Now, sure, the situation and events have put this guy in a different world than then, but come on. Has he, um, risen to the occasion? How fucking hard is it to stay out of a forum full of idiocy and stupidity like Twitter? He decries opiods, but he tweets?! And maybe in live speeches he hits some nice notes now and then, for a few syllables, but let's face it. He's just a vainglorious developer, and I'd bet all of his money that he never thought in a million years that the country had gotten so fucked up by the Left that he would actually win.

Unfortunately, it is that fucked up. How did it get so fucked up? Sure, the Left deserves it's share of the blame, but the main problem is bigger than that. It is not this fucked up because of the Leftists. It is because of the moderates. The centrists are the ones who actually fucked this country up so much.

How on earth can I blaspheme the “vital center” so terribly? How dare I utter such vitriol against our most precious resource, the centrists who compromise and make this country work?

I will say it again: moderates are how we became so fucked up as a country. They are the ones who have provided the votes, they are the ones who buy the popular products, they are the ones the politicians pander to, they are the ones comedians joke for (and the resulting degradation in the national civil conversations), they are the ones who broker and support the compromises between “doing nothing” (status quo Statism) and doing more Statism which is, by definition, Statist itself (just less so). They never fight for a principle, they only mock those who do. Their spineless lack of defense of the country in exchange for the vanity-satiating exercises that are votes and newspaper buying and watercooler talk are what have brought the United States from a freedom loving country into one that just yawns at traffic cameras on every street corner, advocates for government-forced insurance for even routine services, thinks regulating political speech is cool, takes it's shoes off for police every time it goes on vacation without a shred of regret, and doesn't seem to actually care one bit that there are over 5,000 federal laws and more than 300,000 regulations in a country in which in theory the federal government's only jobs are to ensure that States do not infringe upon the basic rights of citizens and to manage our negotiations and defense with the rest of the world. Obviously, that list could have been a LOT longer, but I tend to think that a runon sentence has probably made it's point when it exceeds half of the entire paragraph it is in. If you thought it was comprehensive, you are probably a single-issue voter, a centrist, and like Twitter.

There is the incredibly obnoxious notion around that Washington needs to “get things done” in order for it to be successful. There are so many examples of how this is not so it isn't even funny, but I will pick one. Stem cell research. After governments got involved, the rate at which money was flowing into this research actually stalled. And the innovation rate dropped. You great human beings who just wanted to save people's lives and chastised people who pointed out that government involvement would not do that? You fucked up.

And virtually every single human being reading this is getting completely, utterly, majorly, totally, constantly, and comprehensively screwed by the biggest government program ever, namely Social Security. When I said down and analyzed how badly Social Security had fucked me over, I was literally depressed for a week Social Scurity is life-changingly bad for hundreds of milions of people. The amount of harm that program has done to this country is virtually incalculable, and yet the politicians will never touch it, mainly because of the moderates. My dear grandfather, once upon a time invoking the notion that Social Security had saved this country from the Left, told me that FDR was so wonderful.....oh.....man....he gave me many, many things to cherish, but that memory was not one of them.

“Get things done” means Statism. Government shutdown so terrible, can't possibly stand it? Give me a break. During the last shutdown, in spite of predictions of doom..the market rose, the economy accelerated. One of Thomas Jefferson's first acts was to sign a budget that slashed government spending by 25%...and the economy soared. And lest you think this is some historical anachronism, Belgium, not some banana republic like California Venezuela, but Belgium recently went through a 20-month government shutdown. Did it melt down like some Antarctic ice sheet in Al Gore's exhalation range? Nope. It's economy grew robustly, crime was unchanged, and when I visited there I didn't even know about the shutdown, only learning about it later.

What I have learned recently is not so much the moderates have given incremental Statism the oxygen it has needed to affect and implement itself into law, but what has changed for me recently is an understanding about what centrism really is for (other than it's own pose, I mean). To reiterate, in a country where the “conservatives” are kinda sorta trying to keep things more or less the same, and a country that seeks change towards Statism, even gradually, that means that the moderates are, by definition, also Statists, just with a lighter foot. Oh, sure, the conservatives have a few Rand Paul and Ted Cruz types floating around, but in reality they are basically trying to politically float in a kind of ideological ether where no one is really forced to deal with an anti-moderate proposition.

And I know...some of you are saying “what took you so fucking long to realize this?” I will tell you what. Generally, I took the moderates' appeal toward “rationality” and “pragmatism” at face value. In that, they didn't want to put too much mustard on the sandwich, but they didn't want it without mustard either. But seeing how badly the country has gone, where the meat has been taken out, replaced with even more mustard, and tripled in price, has made me ask again “how did this sandwich get to be so shitty?” And you know how? It was the hundreds of millions of customer decisions to keep buying the preceding sandwiches from this shitty PBS deli, and now here we are. The country is now truly a Statist country in all of the ways that matter, the soul of freedom is dead, unless you consider choosing which moderate society will applaud you to marry constitutes liberty for you (and I've got a whole 'nother, much darker essay in me about that whole subject).

Yes, we have a lot of cable channels, and we are prosperous in so many great ways, and that's amazing. That's the wonderful legacy of a country that was built in the crucible of individual liberty and once-free markets. That those free markets have been overrun by State control which has been allowed to remain with markets but not free ones is gradually decaying our growth. It will not happen tomorrow, and the country can live off of the wealth for some time, but the decay is now pretty clearly underway.

And the second, yet far more important benefit of this country's founding, namely the liberty itself.....that's already dead. Donald Trump's cardinal failure in my eyes, in both deeds and words, is a lack of recognition on the importance of liberty. It is, really, the most important thing, for any of us. We are all degraded by the increasing servitude, no matter how reasonable the moderates who undermine it seem. That the Left doesn't care about liberty isn't new or controversial. But the standard bearer of the side that should value liberty? Weak. Not yuuuuge. Weak.

While I don't like Leftists, or what they have done at all, on some days I like them more than the moderates. But at least Leftists are naked about what they are doing. The moderates? They act like your wiser friends. But what are they actually facilitating?

This is likeable? And reasonable?