Sunday, November 27, 2016

In response to Hunter Wallace's 'White Collar Supremacy': only Neo-Nazism will work



The New York Times published an anti-Trump, anti-nationalist op-ed piece ('White Collar Supremacy', 25/11/2016) and Southern nationalist Hunter Wallace wrote a rebuttal to it. I think Wallace's reply will become a landmark essay; at the least, he intended it to be.

Here is an extract:

I’ve been involved in this scene for 15 years now and know it inside and out. I think I know what makes these people tick. The ideal of the White ethnostate – a vague, romantic vision of White kids running through cornfields in some place like Iowa – isn’t motivated by hostility to other races.
The White ethnostate is attractive because racially and culturally anxious Whites associate it with security and stability. In the White ethnostate that White Nationalists envision, there are no non-Whites. No one is lording it over oppressed black people. There is nothing like slavery or Jim Crow. There are no gas chambers or cattle cars. It is more a vision of Mayberry than the Third Reich. Mayberry, that’s dark.

Imagine a world of cishet White males going about their lives with nary a thought about social justice. In the White Nationalist utopia, you can turn on your television and Jamelle Bouie isn’t there because multiracial democracy and all the perpetual strife and racial antagonism it generates has ceased to exist. To be sure, Ta-Nehisi Coates hasn’t been reenslaved on a Southern plantation. He isn’t stepping into the sidewalk and tipping his hat and saying “howdy, bossman” either.
Maybe Ta-Nehisi Coates has reached a zen-like state of self-fulfillment after becoming a senator in a dashiki in Liberia? In this world, Jamelle Bouie can finally sleep at night in a Tanzanian ujamaa village without being tortured by the white supremacy of the Trump administration. No one has to worry about White cops shooting the black kids anymore. Black Lives Matter was disbanded because black people were granted their independence. In her youth, Sarah Silverman was known for her vulgar performances. After the White ethnostate was achieved in 2048, this raunchy old Jewish lady is still alive and cracking jokes, albeit in a Tel Aviv nursing home.

The White Nationalist vision of paradise is simply not having to deal with these people and their bullshit anymore. If marriage isn’t sacred, why should the nation-state be sacred? Why is the liberal world order sacred? Why is multiracial democracy sacred? Why can’t the “pursuit of happiness” be a divorce?

Don’t you believe this because Whites are superior? Surprisingly, the answer is not really – it’s just that, I want to live in a secure and stable country, not this clusterfuck we have today. I want my children and grandchildren to look like me. I want them to be proud of their ancestors. I want them to grow up in a normal White country and to have a bright future. I don’t want to see my community transformed into the Star Wars bar scene. To be perfectly honest, White people today have fallen into a pretty sorry state.

My response, which is somewhat theoretical and abstract, is as follows.

Politics is a plenum, where space is occupied at every point, and the opposite of a vacuum; in that space, we find multiple participants contesting against one another for political power. None of the actors can be completely destroyed, nor can they fade away; they won't renounce - ever - their claims to political power. Your only recourse, as a contestant in that arena, is to fight them and take that power from them. The likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sarah Silverman and Jamelle Bouie are participants in the game, have possession of political power, and just like a football team in possession of a ball, won't give it up willingly. Therefore you need to fight.

In politics, the struggle of ideas - ideologies - can be compared to a Darwinian struggle for existence. Ideologies proliferate across the surface of the earth, and compete for scarce resources; those which have developed adaptations which make them uniquely fitted to survival will live, and flourish, and reproduce; those that don't, will go under. The Hitler doctrine is that 'Life is struggle', meaning that the good things in life - good political things - must be fought for. They are not delivered to you on a plate. Hitler shares this view with the Marxist-Leninists, and fascism - and German National Socialism - has more in common with Marxist-Leninism than any other ideology. Both fascism and communism are doctrines for fighters. This is one of the reasons why fascism has survived - since its defeat in 1945 - all attempts to destroy it and thoroughly extirpate it. We all know, after the war, what the Allies did the Germans in order to remove the 'scourge of fascism', but France and Italy must be looked at in this connection as well. After 'liberation', perhaps 90,000 French perished at the hands of the communists and the French Resistance; in Italy, the number of people killed by the communists and the partisans reached the tens of thousands. Fascism survived such ravages, and it has survived some truly horrible leaders in the post-war era: think of personalities such as Harold Covington, Frank Collins, Bill White, Erich Glebe, all of whom have given 'National Socialism' - Neo-Nazism - a bad name. Many of today's self-declared 'National Socialists' are skinheads, yokels, degenerates, weirdos, snitches... In this group of bad 'Nazis', we find people who are poor ambassadors for the Neo-Nazi ideology and for the white race as a whole. (Hunter Wallace disparages these people as 'vanguardists'). Yet the Neo-Nazi idea soldiers on - and on. It has been around seventy years, and will be around long after assorted fads such as the Alt-Right have gone.

Hunter Wallace's vision of 'white children running through cornfields' seems - to most of us in the movement - healthy and decent; but to many of our opponents - and there are more of them than there are of us - it sounds downright evil, malevolent and disgusting, even. This is how warped and upside down Western politics has become. Being an 'advocate for whites', wanting to help 'white people' - such words and phrases are toxic in contemporary political discourse. In the movement, we don't understand this, because we are so up close to these ideas. We read forbidden and subversive material online every day, and have become so accustomed to it that we stand in danger of walling ourselves up and living in a bubble. The 'Normies' don't think in terms of race, and when they hear racially-charged words and phrases, they duck and run for cover. They believe, correctly, that such talk will get them into trouble with the authorities.

Trump's victory will bring about immigration restrictionism, in America and elsewhere in the West. But the Left - who are still in charge - will put up a tremendous fight against it. One of the weapons they will use - unfailingly - is the Holocaust. In October of this year, British Prime Minister Theresa May put forward some fairly moderate proposals to restrict immigration from the EU. This led to the usual hysterical reaction from the Left and comparisons to the Nazis:

Immigration was the key issue in the June 23 vote for Britain to leave the bloc, a result that sent shockwaves through Europe and the global economy, and sparked political turmoil at home.
May's government this week proposed measures including urging employers to publish a record of how many non-British citizens they take on, and toughening rules on non-EU foreign hires, as well as tightening visa regulations for foreign students.

These have provoked some furious reactions, from critics who accused May of a lurch to the right.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan said the list plan sent a "deeply worrying message to the millions of people from around the world living and contributing in our country".
Tamara Rojo, artistic director of the English National Ballet, said the proposals evoked memories of the Holocaust.

"After 20 years contributing to this great country... how long before I am made to sew a star on my clothes?" she said.

National Socialist Germany never practised such measures, of course, but the point is moot. The Holocaust will be brandished at every opportunity in the coming years and will be used to club us - the white Western people - into submission. These analogies will be inappropriate, but the Left isn't given to rationality and sanity.

Only a head-on approach will work. The Holocaust story must be blown to smithereens - shown up to be part of the Jewish religion (and hence a lie); likewise, any atrocity lie told against the Nazis (by the Poles, Czechs and Russians) must be exposed. The latter duty must be performed even if Polish, Czech and Russian nationalists are offended; we can't claim to represent the interests of all white nations. If we are to choose between Neo-Nazism and Eastern European nationalism, we must take the former over the latter, because it, being German in origin, belongs to the Culture (in Spengler's sense of the word) of the white, Western European peoples.

The anti-Nazi propaganda of the 1930s and 1940s gives us a more accurate picture of the doctrine than today's, because it mostly lacked references to the Holocaust tale, which came to prominence in anti-fascist and anti-Nazi propaganda by the 1970s. The American anti-Nazi saw German National Socialist and Italian Fascist Man as brutal and cruel, but possessing of a certain swagger, vigour, vitality and virility. The flamboyance and theatricality of his rituals put his countries on a par above the Western democracies, and fascism worked - there was less unemployment in Germany under Hitler than there was in America under Roosevelt. But whatever good that existed in Italy or Germany was marred by the fascist's brutality and insatiable lust for dominion (Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia led to sanctions from America).

An element of truth existed in that American, British and French anti-fascist propaganda. I object to the Holocaust Revisionists - while at the same time recognising that they have done great work - on the grounds that one, they lack a political theory and two, in their desire to do away with all the (largely baseless) propaganda against the Germans, they end up making the German people into victims and turning the 'hard' Nazis 'soft'. To me, those 'hard' elements of Nazi theory and practice will prove to be useful in years to come; and the Left is terrified at the prospect of the return of the 'hard' Germans - this is the one thing that keeps them awake at night.

The paradox is that Hunter Wallace's vision of 'white children running through cornfields' can't be attained except through 'hard', fascist methods. In other words, in order to get back to healthy, clean, safe and sane, white all-Americanism, you need to go full Nazi. That's the message of the poster for the TV series Man in the High Castle (2015-) above. For many 'movement conservatives' - such as Mr 'I grew up in a house next door to a cornfield' himself, Vice President-elect Mike Pence - that's too much to bear. Americans would end up losing their 'liberties', their 'freedoms'. At the least, the present order must be overturned.

The Left understands the paradox: Americanism - the old, decent, safe and sane Americanism, what Ayn Rand (who was accused of fascist sympathies throughout her career) would call 'rational' - can only return through fascism, or something like it. That's why the Left equates Trumpism and 'Making America Great Again' with the most coarse and brutal doctrines - KKKism, white supremacism, Neo-Nazism... Below is a screenshot from the lunatic American Maoist political cult / group, Bob Avakian's Revolutionary Communist Party:


And here is a rather amusing caricature of Trump looking like Gerhard 'Gary' Lauck, the eccentric old American Neo-Nazi of the NSDAP/AO:



My message to the movement is: don't fight these comparisons, embrace them - become what your enemy fears. We need to go on the attack.

But, you say, the Normies won't like it. More so than the Left - which never, never worries what the Normies will think of it - we are constantly looking over shoulders in fear of what the nice, normal everyday people will think. My answer to that is that we can't ever know, for certain, what the Normies do think; we only know how they vote at election time - and we don't know the reasons why they voted as they did... What specifically made the American electorate prefer Trump to Clinton? We can't say. The electorate resembles a mute and inarticulate beast: it makes decisions, but again, we don't know - and cannot know - the reasons behind those decisions.

In our political discourse, we must invoke the past, the history, of our people and our civilisation; but that's too much for some of the 'moderates' in our movement, who believe that we must speak continually of the present and must never refer back to the past. But again, the Left never stints when it comes to teaching history and theory; it indoctrinates the youth with rather intense (by today's academic standards) studies of Marx, a German theoretician from the 19th century, and the history of the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Communist Revolutions, two events which took place - in countries far away to most Westerners - nearly a hundred years ago and seventy years ago respectively. The Left doesn't underestimate the intelligence of the working-classes and their capacity to learn, and neither should we.














Putinism and Russian national greatness refuted - in one 4Chan post


I recently came across a thread at 4Chan / Pol, 'How do we make Russia great again?', started by a well-educated Russian poster living in rather impoverished circumstances.



 How do we make Russia great again? Anonymous (ID: yTBLaVHt) 11/25/16(Fri)17:50:01 No.100151762
I just spend 1/10 of my month salary to buy food for a couple of days. I work as an engineer in a water supply company.


(You can click on this link to read the post, but after one week, a thread on 4Chan is deleted, so it won't be there for very long).

Putinistas, and Putin's hired propaganda troll army, didn't put in an appearance in this thread, which is what makes it so valuable; we hear, from ordinary Russians, what life in Russia under Little Vladimir Putin is actually like. Yekaterinburg sounds particularly bad:


Anonymous(ID: HtaGyGqU)
11/25/16(Fri)19:51:32 No.100160791
>>100159151
>What about everything East of the Urals?
Drunk Criminalland.

The only places that are not totally bad are Moscow and St.-Petersburg. Ekaterinburg, probably the third largest city, is a polluted criminal shithole with like 3 subway stations and broken roads in the city center. The rest is worse.

The cops are universally as bad as criminals. Medicine outside Moscow and St.-Petersburg is utter shit, and inside it's mostly pretty bad. The median wage is like $4000/year. The economy outside pumping oil is virtually non-existent. And so on, and so forth - you probably get the idea.

A picture can speak a thousand words, and in this thread, we have plenty of pictures, which don't exactly give a positive impression:









The Soviet satirist Alexander Zinoviev wrote a book called Homo Sovieticus (1986), which Tomislav Sunic summarises here. According to Zinoviev, you find laziness, slothfulness, at the heart of Soviet communism. When people think of communism, they think of gulags, famines, purges, five-year plans and the rest, but really they should associate it with a certain mode of life - one which entails mediocrity, slothfulness and taking it easy. Workers in communist countries receive half the pay as their counterparts in the West, but do half the work; you can't be fired from a job and you can't be unemployed (at least not for long). You receive very little, but you learn to make do - and enjoy life - with very little.



The Slavic mentality - in particular, the Russian mentality - finds this way of life congenial. Stagnation - especially under Brezhnev - reigned, but to a citizen of the USSR, that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Russians have always had a reputation for slovenliness, laziness and complacency, even before the advent of Bolshevism, and in 2016, they are more or less the same people as they were a hundred, two hundred, years ago.

Some ambitious Russians seek to escape 'Russianism' by fleeing the country; others stay and achieve spectacular success, mainly through graft and kickbacks. Little Putin - who is one of the richest men in the world, if not the richest - provides an example of the latter. Here you can see his palaces, super yachts, air fleets and watches.



After reading that 4Chan post, I actually feel a little sympathy for Putin, who grew up in impoverished circumstances and whose family shared communal housing with ten families. Any intelligent and ambitious person would want to pull themselves out of the Russian mire by any means necessary - even if that means stealing from one's own people, as Putin does.




Trump's Monetary Deflation

Since Trump's election, we've seen an extraordinary strengthening of the dollar, as manifested in the fall in the price of gold and other commodities. This could lead to deflation - and a recession - if the fall in prices across the board is not balanced by the economic growth brought about by deregulation and supply-side tax cuts.

In supply-side economics, the dollar - or any currency - is seen as a commodity, one that goes up and down in value with supply and demand. If you have an excess supply of dollars, dollars become plentiful relative to goods, and the dollar price of goods will go up. Conversely, an excess demand for dollars leads to a scarcity of dollars relative to goods and a fall in dollar prices. Excess supply of dollars leads to inflation, excess demand, deflation.

During an inflation, commodity prices - especially gold and oil - are the first to go up, and we see a boom in the commodity-producing sectors (such as oil and mining) and real estate, and also in the financial sector. Investment banking, stock trading, private equity, lending, will experience good times; an excess supply of dollars leads to the phenomenon of 'hot money' - large amounts of dollars being passed from hand to hand and which must be spent, invested or lent.

Commodity prices will go up before consumer prices in an inflation, and the gold price will go up before other commodity prices. The gold price, out of the entire 'galaxy of prices' (as Jude Wanniski calls it) is the first to tell us how much 'liquid' - how many dollars - is out there. If the gold / dollar price stays stable, then the central bank is providing just the right amount of liquidity. Under a gold standard, the central bank keeps the dollar fixed to gold - that is, keeps the gold / dollar price stable.

In August 1971, Nixon took America - and the world - off the gold standard. We saw skyrocketing gold prices. The green bar measures the rapid rise of the gold / USD price, which peaked at around $USD850/oz in day trading (the grey-shaded columns indicates recessions):




That led to, as we could expect, high inflation - the worst global inflation in history. But monetary policy can turn the other way. Excess demand for the dollar can cause a sharp drop in the gold / dollar price. Here the red bar measures gold / USD price's fall, from one of the most severe deflationary episodes in US history - the early 1980s under Reagan:



Commodity and real estate prices collapsed, and commodity producers were wiped out. The financial sector, which had been lending cheap money to the Third World during the 1970s, also experienced a downturn. Because of the scarcity of liquid, short-term money market interest rates went into the double digits.

The second episode occurred in the late 1990s, in Bill Clinton's second term:



Again, commodity producers were hit hard - the oil price sank to $USD10 a barrel - and investors pulled money out of commodity producer stocks and shovelled it into risky dot-com companies.

The Bush 43 years - the 2000s - saw a remarkable rise in gold and commodity prices, with gold hitting (what was then) an all time high of around $USD1000 / oz. in trading. Then, in that fatal summer of 2008, the gold price fell - and fell - and fell. It dropped to nearly $USD700/oz.


As in the early 1980s, the financial sector was hard-hit.

Bernanke piled more liquidity into the financial system after 2008, and gold went up and up, peaking at nearly $USD1900/oz. in 2011. After 2012, Bernanke backed off on the quantitative easing experiment - which had not produced much in the way of growth - and the gold price has been trending downwards ever since, a descent which has only accelerated since Bernanke's departure. Gold has bottomed at around $USD1000/oz. a year ago - in November 2015 - and after a brief turn upwards, seems to be going downward again. The present close is $USD1181/oz. It should go lower over the coming months.



The gold price drops because of an excess demand for dollars - what causes that excess demand? In the early 1980s, Reagan cut the top rate of personal income tax from 70% to 50% and capital gains from 28% to 20%. This led to a huge demand for dollars. In the late 1990s, Bill Clinton's tax cuts on capital gains (back to 20%, where it had been at Reagan's first term) and on Roth-IRAs brought about that excess demand. Now, in 2016, investors are driving up the value of the dollar in anticipation of deregulation and huge - yuge! - tax cuts under Trump. The prospect of the Fed's raising interest rates this December also plays a part.

During a deflation, consumers - and consumer goods industries - benefit from the rising dollar; but, because there are not enough dollars to pay for all the goods being produced, a recession results more often than not. That was the case in 1981-82, 2001 and 2008-09. Hopefully, that won't come about this time.

At the moment, the markets seem to be taking the deflationary wobble in its stride. If we are to divide the Dow Jones by an ounce of gold, we see that the Dow hit its highest in the Obama years in November 2015, when it reached 16.69 ounces (not coincidentally, gold reached its lowest level in years - around $USD1000/oz. - in that same month). Since November 2015, the Dow has fallen in value. But after Trump's election, it is making up its losses.



It could go higher. During Bush 43's first term, the Dow hovered around 25 oz. The Trump recovery could see the Dow returning to that level. The future looks bright.

Saturday, November 26, 2016

Castro dead, Trump now a Neocon? Reaganite?


Remember, during the election, how we heard - over and over - that Trump admired 'strongmen' and 'authoritarian regimes'? That side of Trump pleased many on the Left, who regard many of today's authoritarian and dictatorial regimes (such as in Russia and Syria) as 'progressive'; likewise, it pleased many on the Far Right (e.g., the Paleocons, the Libertarians, many of those on the Alt-Right), who regard many of those same regimes as fellow rebels against the globalist New World Order.

Now, after Castro's death, we find President-elect Trump sounding like a Reaganite - or a neocon. Here's Trump on front page of the BBC website:




And here's neoconservative Never Trumper John Podhoretz on the front page of the doyen of neoconservative and Jewish journals, Commentary:



Here is Trump's statement on Castro in full. He sounds like your average free-market conservative, a lot like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio - or Ronald Reagan:

“Today, the world marks the passing of a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades,” Trump said in a statement released on the news of Castro’s death Saturday.
“Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights,” Trump said.

“While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve,” Trump said.

“Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty,” Trump said. “I join the many Cuban Americans who supported me so greatly in the presidential campaign, including the Brigade 2506 Veterans Association that endorsed me, with the hope of one day soon seeing a free Cuba.”

Just as significant is this article from the official Trumpist newspaper of record, Breitbart.Com:



Who are those four dictators? Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, Xi Jinping of China, and these two men:




Breitbart, the official organ of the Trump Republican Party, not being sufficiently reverential of Little Vladimir Putin and Ba'athist Bashar - this does not look good at all. Putinistas, Assadists and National-Trotskyites, read it and weep.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

I've lost respect for Styxhexenhammer666 - over Syria



I just lost my respect for Styxhexenhammer666.

He's evidently swallowed the Putinist and Assadist propaganda on Syria, hook, line and sinker - propaganda which has infected the Far Right, the Alt Right, and the Far Left, in Australia and abroad.

The truth of the matter is this. Ba'athist / Arab nationalist dictator, Hafez al-Assad, had ruled Syria, a backwards country, from 1970 to 2000. Assad showed himself to be a wily politician and one who possessed great political skill, as evinced by the fact that he survived in office for so long, just like other long-lived dictators Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro. And like Castro and Mugabe, he was a butcher. During the 1976-1982 Syrian civil war against the Muslim Brotherhood, he massacred tens of thousands of his own people. After his death in 2000, power was handed to his son Bashar. In 2011, Syrians revolted against Bashar as part of the Arab Spring. As his counterpart Ghaddafi did in Libya, Bashar responded with massacres. Any liberal, secular and moderate Syrians - few as they were - were killed off, and the uprising became a civil war, with Islamists predominating.

Bashar is repeating history, and following his father's tactics, by reducing Syria's cities to rubble and massacring civilians (as Hafez did in Hama in 1982). Contra Styxhexenhammer666, Bashar caused the current 'refugee' crisis plaguing Europe. Had Bashar been deposed in 2011, or had he stood down, and had not Putin supported him to the hilt, there would be no refugee crisis.

Styxhexenhammer666 has fallen for the Bashar and Putin con. These two men, along with their Islamic supporters (i.e., the Mullahs in Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon) and the many pro-Putin and pro-Assad Marxists such as our own Communist Party of Australia and John Pilger, claim to be rebels against a 'globalist elite', but in fact form part of that elite themselves. They are only interested in perpetuating their own power - even if that power is confined to their own little niche movement (and contemporary leftism is one such movement). In the case of the Syrian and Russian and Iranian elite, it comes down to money: they became rich under the patronage of their respective dictators, and they want to stay that way - hence their desire to stay in the saddle.

Bashar may end up remaining king of Syria, but he'll be a king of pile of rubble. He'll have lost all legitimacy as a ruler. Yes, the Ba'athist Bastard Brigade are tough blokes, all right - but no-one likes a bastard.

I can't be bothered with Styxhexenhammer666 any more. The same with the Daily Shoah at the RightStuff.Biz. Once I heard host Mike Enoch (a few episodes ago) declaring that Assad, in bombing the hapless civilians of Aleppo, was 'bombing ISIS', I switched off.

We on the Far Right, or Alt Right, or whatever, are a feeble-minded bunch whose knowledge of history doesn't extend further than 2001; as such, we are easily duped by Putinist and Assadist propaganda. We've been taken in.

Yockey examines, in Imperium, the subject of Culture Distortion, and how one Culture (e.g., the Jewish-Islamic-Semitic) may overlay, suppress and distort another (e.g., the Western). In Imperium, Yockey was concerned with the Jewish element of the Arabic-Semitic Culture most of all. But, were he alive today, he would be concerned with the Arabic: after all, Zionism is Jewish nationalism, Ba'athism is Arab nationalism, and the latter has begun to infect the West at the level of fringe politics at least. Yockey himself championed Arab nationalism and Nasserism in the 1950s, and by the 1970s, we on the Far Right went further still and made a fetish of Palestinian nationalism. As if the Palestinians - or any other Arab group - had any bearing on the white racial cause.


Saturday, November 12, 2016

Norpoth vindicated - or not? / Trump 2016, Truman 1948



Did Professor Helmut Norpoth predict Trump's victory on November the 8th?

When I first encountered Helmut Norpoth's primary model, I was impressed by it and its consistent track record of predicting the two-party vote in presidential elections (within a margin of error) which in turn determined, more often than not, the winner. He predicted that the Democrats would win 50.2% of the two-party vote in 2000: the party went on to win 50.3% - so this was a highly accurate call - but went on to lose the electoral college vote; in his own defence, Norpoth states that his model only makes the claim to predict the two-party vote, not the electoral college result, and so, in this instance, didn't really predict the winner.

After November the 8th, his model has garnered a great deal of attention because it predicted a Trump victory through the two-party vote. Norpoth swam against the tide this year, because his was one of only three models - the others being Allan Lichtman's and Alan Abramowitz's - to state that Trump would win. Norpoth deserves the acclaim for sticking his neck out and getting right. But there's a problem: Norpoth's model predicted that Trump would win 52.5% of the two-party vote, and while Trump was ahead in the popular vote on election night, he's been behind for several days now. Below we see the results so far from CNN:



So Trump has only won 49.7% of the two-party vote to date, but, like Bush 43 in 2000, won the electoral college (albeit to a greater degree than Bush). Norpoth's model did not predict this.

As of now, millions of votes haven't been counted, and it could be that Trump will pull ahead, thereby proving Norpoth right. This will take time, however, and so we shouldn't be showering Norpoth with plaudits just yet.

Trump's victory bears an uncanny resemblance to Truman's in 1948. Truman won 303 electoral college votes, Trump is projected to win 306; Truman won 28 states, Trump 30. Norpoth predicted Trump would win 52.5% of the two-party vote (and perhaps Trump will win something approaching that figure); Truman won 52.4%. In 1948 and 2016, a consensus of media and pollsters concluded that both Trump and Truman would lose. And, just before November the 8th 2016, Newsweek magazine even gave us a Chicago Daily Tribune moment, with a President-elect Clinton commemorative issue printed up before November the 8th:




These issues were recalled, and now fetch a high price on EBay.



Monday, November 7, 2016

President-elect Trump, and What Will Follow






Four years ago, on election eve 2012, I believed that Romney stood a chance of winning; had I been aware of Dr Helmut Norpoth's system - which predicted an easy Obama win in 2012 and retroactively has predicted the winner of every US presidential election of the past hundred years - I would have been disabused of the notion.

Norpoth's model cracks the code of US presidential elections. It relies on two premises. The first is that the candidate who wins the primaries - in particular, after 1952, the primary in the state of New Hampshire - goes on to win the election; the second is that an incumbent party in the White House can't win a third term unless it has won its second term in an electoral landslide (see the re-election of the Republicans and Democrats in 1988 and 1940 respectively - both wins were built on the back of huge victories in 1984 and 1936). In contrast, a re-election after a first term proves, for the most part, to be easy, so long as the incumbent candidate can again win the nomination in the New Hampshire primary without difficulty. In 2012, Obama coasted through the primaries (including the one in New Hampshire) and faced no opposition, and this in itself predicted an Obama victory. This rule - that whenever a president cruises through the second-term primaries and easily wins re-nomination from his party, he always wins - holds true for the elections  of 1916, 1936, 1940, 1944, 1948, 1956, 1964, 1972, 1984, 1996. If the candidate of the incumbent party has won the nomination after a loss or a narrow win in New Hampshire, he goes on to lose: see 1952, 1968, 1976, 1980, 1992, 2000. Norpoth uses mathematics to prove his point, but we can understand his model without it. All we need to know is his two premises, and from these, it followed that Obama would win in 2012 with no trouble.

What of 2016? After the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries were held in February this year, Norpoth confidently predicted that Trump would win. South Carolina has become important in Norpoth's model since 1992; it forecasts the black vote and how well a candidate does in the South. During a 'change election' - that is, an election held after an incumbent has held office for two terms - a candidate can do badly in the New Hampshire primary and still go on to win the election, providing that he did well in the  South Carolina primary: see Clinton in 1992, Bush 43 in 2000 and Obama in 2008. (It should be noted that each of these three candidates swept the South; even Obama, a Democrat, managed to take North Carolina, Virginia and Florida). Which brings us to 2016. Trump won crushing victories in both New Hampshire and South Carolina, whereas Hilary won only in South Carolina. (Hilary's appeal to blacks led her to surpassing Sanders; the Jewish candidate from Vermont whose following was, in the main, white, couldn't break through to black voters in the South and elsewhere). This led Norpoth to predict that the Democrat two-party vote would fall to 47.5% (meaning that Trump should win with 52.5% - a performance comparable to Bush 43's in 2004).

So Trump, the primary winner, won the nomination: suppose he hadn't? Then, says Norpoth, the Republicans would have gone on to lose. The party which doesn't put its primary winner forward for the nomination always loses and in fact will suffer a crushing defeat. Norpoth posits that Republican losses would have been minimised had the party nominated the primary winners Roosevelt in 1912, Brumbaugh in 1916, France in 1932, Borah in 1936, Dewey in 1940, MacArthur in 1944, Warren in 1948 and Lodge in 1964; similarly, the Democrats would have minimised their losses had they nominated their primary winners McAdoo in 1924, Kefauver in 1952 and 1956, Johnson in 1968, Muskie in 1972 and Hart in 1984. As we can see, for the past thirty years, the Democrats and Republicans have always given the nomination to their primary winner; the party no longer will take the nomination from a primary winner and give it to a candidate who is comparatively unpopular. This year, the 'Never Trumpers' and 'Tru Conservatives' in the Republican Party wanted to engineer machinations at the last minute before the convention which would deprive Trump of the nomination, but fortunately for the party (from the point of view of Norpoth's model), those efforts didn't pan out.

Once the nominations were locked in - for both the Democrats and the Republicans - at the July 2016 conventions, then, Trump's path to victory was assured; nothing could change the course of events - not polls, gaffes, scandals, 'ground game', 'October surprises', and certainly not psychological warfare waged by operatives for the Democrat Party and the 'Never Trump' faction of the Republican Party. One of the blessed things about a Trump victory will be that the relentless spamming of the message boards and comments sections by Democrat Party 'Correct the Record' trolls will come to an end. We won't have to put up with them any more.

The 'concern trollers' - who have promulgated the line that 'Trump just can't win' - will disappear as well. These men spread their doom and gloom on Far Right and nationalist boards as part of an effort to suppress the Trump vote, for motives known only to themselves; but after November the 8th, they will vanish. (Or perhaps they'll remain and take a new line: that Trump won't abide by any of his commitments, that he'll stab the elect Trump movement in the back, and so forth).

We'll also see the anti-Trump pundits - the Maureen O'Dowds, the Charles Krauthammers, the George Wills, the William Kristols, the Jonah Goldbergs, the James Pethokoukises and the rest of that 'I don't like Hilary, but how could anyone vote for Trump' brigade - put in their place. (Many of these pundits who claim to be 'conservative' are in fact in wolves in sheep's clothing; their 'conservatism' has become subordinated to leftism and Culture-Marxism). And the patronising know-it-alls in the mainstream media, who condescend to 'give advice' to Trump on how to win, and auger that Trump will fail for not having followed their advice, will be shown to know very little after all. They couldn't accurately predict the results of an election, so, we may ask, what are we paying them for?

Finally, the Marxist Left will be thrown into disarray. At present, the hardcore and communist Left consists of two factions: those within the Democratic Party and those outside of it. The first of these has largely taken over the Democratic Party - and indeed, has authored its 2016 platform - and probably will consume it entirely after a Clinton defeat; the old, centrist-liberal party of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton will be converted into a thoroughly Marxist party with a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren as a figurehead. As for the Left outside of the Democratic Party, which has criticised Obama throughout his time in office, it will continue to fester and moulder and live a subterranean existence as usual; but it will be put out, to say the least, by a Trump victory. Presumably it will try and foment more Black Lives Matter race riots, and incite Hispanics and Muslims against Trump.

Given that Trump has enjoyed a strong working-class backing, and has made use of a populist rhetoric which borders on (at times) anti-capitalism and Marxism, a window opened for the Left early on; but it did not seize the opportunity. It could have jumped on board the Trump train and attempted to recruit his followers to Marxism: the really clever and far-sighted of the communist activists could have used the Trump phenomenon to their own advantage and formed an alliance - albeit an unorthodox and unconventional one. But the Far Left in America has shown itself to be constitutionally unable to pull off such a tricky manoeuvre. For one thing, it hates the white, working-class voter; secondly, it has aligned itself with the blacks and Hispanics (and now, in 2016, Muslims) against the whites and has made race war its goal. The Marxist Left in America has always striven to recruit blacks and aggravate racial tensions, and has always held to the idea that race war helps bring about class war, but, over the decades, the Marxist and socialist doctrines have become subordinated to what is a kind of black supremacism; American Marxists have become tools of black, and now Hispanic, nationalism - and  of Islamism as well. This explains why American communists were unable to think pragmatically - or 'dialectically', as Lenin would put it - in relation to Trump.

It could be that Clinton will win and Norpoth's model will be proven wrong. But a even far simpler model than Norpoth's shows that a Clinton victory is unlikely. Trump is polling well in Ohio, and Ohio - being middle America, part of what Colin Woodard in American Nations (2011) calls the 'Midlands' - has gone with the winner for every election since 1912, with two exceptions. The first is 1944, when Dewey beat Roosevelt in Ohio by a mere 11,500 votes; the second is 1960, a controversial election in which, Norpoth argues, it was Nixon and not Kennedy who really won the popular vote. In both instances, Republican candidates won Ohio but lost the election. But Ohio has gotten it right 24 out of 26 times - not a bad track record. Because the much-vaunted opinion polls show Trump consistently ahead in Ohio, it's reasonable to believe - given the history of the past hundred years - that he'll go on to win the election.