The Coup Economy

 

 

I.

 

Trump won 2020, and that is easy enough to prove.

 

The re-election of a president in the United States is achieved by different means than the re-election of a prime minister in Canada, the UK, Australia, and other countries of the Anglosphere; for the electoral victory of an American presidential candidate of the incumbent party is determined by certain of the American states and, in addition, by the change in the incumbent party's popular vote. Given that, if we are to look at the 30 presidential elections that took place from 1900 to 2016, we can use a simple formula to determine which candidate won.

 

To understand the rule, we need to go back nearly a hundred years, when the pattern was set in the 1928 presidential election; in that year, Herbert Hoover, who became the Republican presidential candidate after Calvin Coolidge declined to run for re-election, won in a landslide, and the party’s popular vote was greater than that of 1924. In the electoral college count, Hoover won 444 electoral college votes to Alfred 'Al' Smith's 87, and of the states that Hoover won, three of them - Ohio, Florida, and Iowa - would prove to be the most decisive in future years. After 1928, the principle became this: if the presidential candidate of the incumbent party wins the three states of Florida, Ohio, and Iowa, and if the incumbent party increases its popular vote, then the candidate wins. The principle holds true in the re-election of Roosevelt in 1936, Eisenhower in 1956, Johnson in 1964, Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984, Clinton in 1996, and Bush 43 in 2004.

 

Nixon's narrow loss in 1960 may be the exception that proves the rule: after all, he did win Ohio, Florida, and Iowa. But the numbers from election to election differed: when measuring the Republican popular vote of 1960 against that of 1956, we see a slight drop. In 1960, the electorate felt little enthusiasm towards either candidate and hardly seemed to favour one above the other; in the popular vote, Kennedy beat Nixon by less than 120,000 votes. But this is typical: administrations rarely win a third term, because after two terms, they become stale and worn out. Like the 2000 race, the 1960 was dull and listless, the two candidates bland and mediocre.

 

Supposing, then, that we knew nothing about the past 31 US presidential elections except for two pieces of information - which candidate of the incumbent party seeking re-election won the states of Ohio, Florida, and Iowa, and which candidate of the incumbent party increased or reduced the party's popular vote. Working off these two pieces, we must conclude that Trump won 2020. He won Ohio, Florida, and Iowa; and his popular vote increased by 12 million - the largest increase in American history.

 

But Biden was inaugurated. Why? We only need cast our minds back to the peculiar circumstances of 2020. The entire world - or rather, the elite of the world - was gunning for the Americans who voted for Trump in 2016. The re-election of Trump could not be permitted. And so, we learned in the days and weeks of counting after election night that Biden - a senile incompetent and a nasty old man lacking in charm - was the most popular American presidential candidate of all time, winning more votes than Roosevelt or Reagan. And we learned that manufacturing votes and falsifying election results is not against the law. The police, the courts, the secret police (that is, the FBI), and the Department of Justice itself - all did nothing, for the elite sections of the American state had turned against Trump. But when a head of state is deposed by an elite stratum that is lacking in popular support - that, by definition, is a coup d'état. Biden was selected, not elected; he was installed. Thirty or forty years ago, Americans would have called such a constitutional arrangement a 'dictatorship', Americans being always quick to condemn such things, and in the times gone past, a country that prevented 'free and fair' elections and permitted a 'dictatorship' to exist would have been subject to American sanctions - and perhaps even American bombing, if the sanctions were not working.

 

2024, then, is no ordinary election. After nearly four years that have been marked by a lack of what Bush 43 would have called 'freedom', the American electorate must decide whether power is to be retained by the Biden junta or relinquished. And what makes 2024 even more different is the turning of American politics towards what Carl Schmitt called the political. A distinction is now made between the friend and the enemy. Trump and the 74 million Americans who voted for him in 2020 have become the enemy - the inner enemy. Schmitt's disciple Yockey writes in Imperium (1948):

 

This organic right to determine the inner enemy is not always exercised in the same manner. It may be open: arrest, sudden attack, shooting down at home, butchery in the streets. It may be concealed: drawing up of punitive laws general in their terms but applying in fact only to one group. It may be purely formless, but nonetheless real: the ruler may attack verbally the individual or group in question. Such a declaration may be used only to intimidate, or it may be a method of bringing about assassination [italics mine]. It may be economic pressure — such a tactic is naturally the favorite of Liberals. A “blacklist” or boycott may destroy the group or individual.

 

It matters not that the US Constitution makes no room for the political. Yockey, an American and a lawyer, understood that the American Constitution does not stand in the way:

 

It goes without saying that the exercise of such a right has no connection whatever with any written “constitution” which purports verbally to distribute the public power in a political unit. Such a “constitution” may forbid such a declaration of inner enemy, but units with such constitutions have never hesitated in need, and have often invoked such procedure independently of need.

 

All of this could have been avoided. In 2017, Trump and the Republicans failed to take advantage of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, an opportunity that could have been exploited: the Republicans could have rammed through draconian legislation that would have secured future elections. Postal votes, early voting, voting machines, same-day registration, and the Democrat Party practice of extending the counting of votes for days, weeks, months on end - all could have been banned, and voter ID and a clean-up of the electoral rolls could have been rigorously enforced. The stamping of serial numbers on ballots could have been made compulsory, and to ensure maximum attendance, election day could have been made a nationwide public holiday. Such laws would have brought elections in America in line with those of the First World; indeed, even some Third World nations – Thailand, for instance – have surpassed America when it comes to enforcing elections that are free, fair, and transparent in the best classical liberal tradition. Properly applied, electoral reforms would have guaranteed a second Trump term, and on that point, even the respectable conservative or centrist would agree.

 

We can contemplate the road not taken. In an alternative timeline, Trump takes up a second term in 2021, and towards the end of 2024, does what Biden should have done in 2019, which is, shuffle off into retirement. After Trump's departure, the 2024 election would have been a bland and colourless affair, much like the 1960 and 2000 elections. Perhaps the two candidates would have been DeSantis and Newsom.

 

But let us return to the present. The irony is that through their actions, the Democrats have almost ensured a third Trump electoral win and a second Trump term, but this second term, of course, is not a given; possibly, the Democratic Party will follow the example of Maduro in Venezuela in 2024 and use trickery, fraud, and force to 're-elect' the candidate of the incumbent party. But the difference is that the Chavez-Maduro regime has been in charge of Venezuela for a quarter of a century, and it has had plenty of time to practice; whereas some freedom still exists in America, and unlike the Maduro and Putin regimes, the Biden regime has not won complete ascendancy. More importantly, the mood of the American nation has changed since 2020.

 

But let us suppose that, even though the national mood has changed, Americans are willing to let the Democratic Party get away with it again. According to the polls, the election will be close, and this is precisely what the Democrats want - a result that approaches a tie. Perhaps the presidency will be decided by a single state - Pennsylvania, for example - and only after days, weeks, months, of counting ballots. In this scenario, which is the optimum one for the Democrats, all the newly counted Pennsylvanian ballots will favour Harris; America and the world will be astounded by how popular Harris is as a candidate. Trump will ‘lose’, and respectable conservatives will plead with Republicans to accept the election results. Wiseacres on the Right will tut-tut and say that Trump would have won if only he would have followed their advice; Trump ran a poor campaign, and they would have done so much better. Trump pandered to minorities and liberals excessively, and Trump ignored the white American working-class…

 

As we know, in 2020 the Democrats pulled off the above trick in not one state but five, and they got away with it because the American people let them get away with it. Even though it is true that in 2024 the ground has shifted, the Democratic Party still possesses great advantages, of which I can name three. The first Democratic asset is the media, which is completely owned by the Democratic Party - or is it the other way around? (Rush Limbaugh often wondered aloud: is the media a wing of the Democratic Party or is the Democratic Party a wing of the media?). The second advantage is the Democratic Party's ability to falsify election results, and the third is the informal right of veto, which is used to strike down any president not to the liking of the Democrat / media complex. In most political systems, including the American, rights of veto are traditionally accorded to the minority by the majority out of a sense of fair play, but over the course of the past eight years, we have been treated to the spectacle of a minority abusing that right. And even outside America, we can find instances of the same abuse. Thailand's Constitutional Court, which represents the monarchy and the army, reserves for itself the right to oust elected governments, dissolve political parties, and ban ministers – even prime ministers - from politics.

 

But in other respects, going into 2024 the Democratic Party is seriously disadvantaged. The most grievous burden is the ideological vacuousness of the Biden-Harris regime or the clique that stands behind the regime. The clique is comprised of journalists, washed-up Hollywood celebrities, respectable conservatives, disgruntled academics, and misanthropes of the sort that attempted to assassinate Trump twice. Ideologically, the clique stands on neither the Left nor the Right, and none of the members hold to any real intellectual and moral convictions: all that drives them is hatred of one man.

 

The irrationality and emotionalism of the anti-Trumpers has not prevented the anti-Trump movement from building a political theory, however. The first point of the new doctrine is that the 2020 coup was not a coup; the second, that the coup was 'democracy', as is the right of the minority to veto a choice made by the majority; the third, that anyone who opposed the coup, as Trump did in the dying days of his first term, was endangering ‘democracy’; and the fourth, that the outcome of the 2020 coup - the installation of the Biden-Harris regime – binds the American people and lasts forever and ever, like a marriage vow. It is not subject to revision, and questioning it has now become in the eyes of the media a crime in itself.

 

We can understand why it is that the anti-Trump clique so firmly insists that there was nothing untoward about the 2020 election: to admit to wrongdoing would be to undermine the legitimacy of the Biden regime. It stands to reason that they will not bend on this point, and even if God Himself to come down from the heavens and reel off the true number of votes for Biden and Trump in Fulton County, Georgia, they would still not bend. But this obstinacy places them in an unusual and difficult position. Those who are familiar with the history of England in the 17th century and America in the 19th know that an extreme obduracy and unwillingness to compromise can lead to civil war. To an extraordinary degree, attitudes hardened in the Trump years, and it was in this time that American journalists entered the realm of what Schmitt calls the political; they stopped being journalists and started being politicians.

When one is confronted by the political, one is tempted to respond in kind. What the Bidenites have done to others can be done to them, once the shoe is on the other foot - as they are beginning to realise.

 

When mulling over all this, I see that I could write two essays. One would be political, the other would avoid the political - that is, it would instead talk about inflation, interest rates, the stock market, taxes, and growth in GDP.

 

I think a discussion of the political economy is far more needed now, because even if Trump succeeds in overcoming his Schmittian enemy, he will still need to patch up a country that is in a shambles: that is, he will need to shift from a wartime presidency to a peacetime. Lincoln won the Civil War, but the victory left the country in ruins. Long after the end of the war, America returned to prosperity and became a great power only after two crucial steps were taken: the wartime income tax was abolished in 1873, and the US dollar was fixed to gold - at the pre-war rate of $USD20.67 an ounce - in 1879. These measures ushered in the Gilded Age, the American counterpart of the European Belle Époque. To judge by Trump’s recent statements, we can glean that Trump wants to return not to the monetary policy of the Gilded Age but to the fiscal: Trump has declared several times that the income tax ought to be abolished and that tariffs be relied upon to generate revenue. This shows that Trump is thinking ahead, that he is looking past his possible inauguration. But he is best advised to pay attention to the monetary as well as the fiscal policy of the Gilded Age, because the increase in inflation and decrease in value of the US dollar against gold may prove to be his undoing, even after all his enemies are vanquished.

 

II.

 

For thousands of years, gold has performed three main functions. It has served as a medium of exchange, allowing the easy summing up of the worth of one good that is to be exchanged for another good, and it has served as a unit of account – for example, the value of a nuclear submarine or a packet of cigarettes can be measured as a fraction or a multiple of an ounce of gold. Closely related to these two functions is a third: gold works as a store of value. Gold never loses value, which is why it has been used as money for thousands of years. Daily the dollar price of an ounce of gold goes up and down - mostly up these days - but these shifts mark the fall or rise in value of the dollar against gold, not the other way around. Gold is the constant and the dollar is the variable. During the Civil War, America floated the dollar, and the dollar gold price doubled, shooting up to $USD40 an ounce: the dollar had lost value against gold, that is, it had devalued. When America returned to gold fourteen years after the end of the war, the gold-dollar price revalued, and went back to the pre-war parity of $USD20.67 an ounce. There it stayed, until Roosevelt devalued the dollar in 1933: after the devaluation, it took $USD35 to buy one ounce. The motive behind the devaluation was that in the midst of the Great Depression, Roosevelt wanted a weaker currency and higher prices. Forty years later, another president devalued for much the same reason. In 1970, gold cost $USD35 an ounce, and in 1980, nine years after Nixon had broken up Bretton Woods and taken America off the gold standard, gold cost $USD850 an ounce. And as could be expected, by 1980 American inflation had reached levels not seen since the Civil War.

 

The supply-sider John Tamny has written an article imploring the next president to pay attention to the gold signal. In 2020, Tamny notes, only $USD1700 was needed to buy one ounce of gold, and in 2024, over $USD2700 is needed. Most of the depreciation occurred in mid to late 2024; at the start of the year, gold cost $USD2000 an ounce, and the way the dollar is heading, we may be soon looking back at early 2024 as the good old days.  

 

As to why the dollar has lost value, Tamny blames lack of demand. Like the value of any other commodity, the value of the dollar increases or falls with excess demand and supply, and if the amount of dollars in circulation exceeds the appetite for dollars, then the value of the dollar will fall. Tamny speculates that the demand for dollars has slackened because of the threat of international turmoil - the threat of a war with Iran, Russia, China - or because of Trump’s tariff policy, which Tamny believes is destructive.

 

Fortunately, this monetary problem can be solved easily. The Federal Reserve needs to sell things, like bonds for instance, and when it receives payment for a sale of, say, $USD100 million worth of bonds, it should take that $USD100 million and dispose of it. The Federal Reserve should destroy money - much like Superman setting fire to piles of currency with his heat vision - until the US dollar regains its value and falls back to $USD2000 an ounce.

 

 

It is only then that the prices of commodities will decline. At the moment, they have reached a two-year high:

 

 

III.

 

But wait, are not the American stock market indexes - the DJIA, the NASDAQ, the S&P 500 - hitting record highs? Yes, but we are seeing (to use economist's jargon) nominal increases and not real: we must adjust the gains for inflation, which is to say, we must divide the indexes by the price of an ounce of gold.

 

The chart of the DJIA divided by an ounce of gold tells a sad story: the gold Dow has declined to its lowest level since 2020:

 

 

Scrutinising it, we see that the decline started around February 2024, which is when the gold dollar price began its rapid climb to $USD2700 an ounce. If we peer closely, we see a tiny rally - nothing more than a brief spurt - in July, when Biden dropped out of the race, and after that, the gold Dow resumed its descent.

 

If a Trump presidency meant good things for the market, we could expect the gold Dow to shoot up as the likelihood of a second Trump term increased, but this has not happened. Having said that, I predict that if the Biden-Harris regime is shown the door in November, then the market will rally - it will stage a relief rally - because while the market feels lukewarm towards Trump, it despises Biden-Harris. But whether the relief rally turns into a bull market remains to be seen. So far, November 2024 looks promising: if you examine the chart carefully, you will see an uptick.

 

In order to understand the market’s ambivalence towards Trump, we must look to the America of a hundred years ago, when the Republican Party won three successive presidential elections on a platform of curtailing immigration, keeping the dollar fixed to gold, and cutting taxes (the top rate of income tax was reduced from 77% to 25%). Fifty years later, Republicans had abandoned two planks of the platform: Nixon had hiked taxes and taken America - and the world - off gold. The injurious effects of the latter compounded those of the former: inflation pushed Americans into higher and higher tax brackets, because the income tax schedule was sharply progressive. By the eighties, it became clear that the sensible thing to do would be to cut taxes and fix the dollar to gold once again; Reagan, following the same course of the Republicans of the 1920s, cut taxes nearly to the same extent as Calvin Coolidge, but he never restored the gold standard, even though anecdotal evidence suggests that he was amenable to a restoration. Today, any talk of returning to a gold standard and fixed exchange rates is derided by journalists and economists alike as quackery.

 

After Reagan, the supply-siders had won the argument – in the Republican Party at least – on fiscal policy but had lost on monetary policy. And this is where Trump steps in. A Republican throwback, Trump sympathises with the Republicans of a hundred years ago who favoured high tariffs. To his credit, he is willing to go along with the 1920s Republican party line on taxes, and he agrees enthusiastically with the party line on immigration, but when it comes to the party line on gold and fixed exchange rates, he is indifferent. If anything, he seems to be of a mind that a weak dollar will boost exports. This is an old dogma that will not die, and like a good many such dogmas, it is immune to disproof. None of the advocates of a weak currency think to look at the evidence; the export industries of Venezuela and Zimbabwe, for instance, hardly benefited from weak, if not worthless, currencies.

 

So, if the market were to score the two presidential candidates of this year’s election, it would grade Harris as being bad – extremely bad – on taxes, fair to medium on tariffs, and bad on money; it would grade Trump as good on taxes, bad on tariffs, and bad on money. The market needs to perform what the statisticians call weighting: does bad tariff policy outweigh good fiscal policy?

 

The matter is further complicated by the introduction of taxes that are not traditionally considered to be taxes: the residents of Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado, are labouring under the immigrant tax or what I call the Great Replacement tax; the Haitian immigrants – or more accurately, the Haitian invaders – dwelling in Springfield do not ‘create jobs’ and ‘boost economic growth’; they are a net drain. Economics is meant to improve life, but the free-market liberals who tout immigration and the Great Replacement have lost sight of that, and canny politician that he is, Trump has not lost sight. The success of Trump – or Roosevelt, for that matter – shows how the American electorate can favour a candidate who is bad, even appallingly bad, on fiscal and monetary policy but good or at the least passable on everything else. The electorate, like the market, performs its own complex calculations, and after a lengthy ratiocination, spits out a verdict that is simple and binary, a yes or a no.

 

IV.

 

In 2024, Trump may win the election but may not be allowed to take up the presidency once more. After 2020, we understand how this could happen, but the question is, how do we know in advance which candidate will win the election? The polling in the state of Ohio tells us. Ohio is unique in that in most elections, the candidate who wins Ohio wins the presidency. This is true of 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 – and for 28 out of the 30 elections from 1900 to 2016. The exceptions were 1960, a peculiar election discussed above, and 1944. In the latter, Roosevelt won his usual electoral college landslide, winning 432 electoral college votes to 99, so one could not characterise it as close like 1960 or 2000; 1944 remains an anomaly. In every election except for 1944 and 1960, Ohio has served its purpose as the ultimate bellwether state, and perhaps because Ohioans are more average-American than most Americans. On election eve in 2024, all the polling indicates that Trump will take Ohio easily, like he did in 2016 and 2020. Under normal ‘democratic’ conditions, America would be contemplating another Trump term.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'Madness & Doom': Trump 2024, American White Nationalists, and the War on the Living

I.

 

In an election year in America, even the most eccentric and isolated member of the dissident Right must acknowledge the existence of mainstream American politics, if only for a moment, and who knows, under pressure to remove himself from his self-imposed isolation, even if only temporarily, he may even concede that the outcome of the election will have a great bearing on the fate and well-being of white people in America. Drawing upon my knowledge of mainstream economics and politics, I will be writing here in order to help the dissident Rightist navigate American politics and arrive at a fixed position, but I do not intend to inveigle him into taking a ride on the Trump train, for the Trump campaign should not want the support of the American white nationalist - look at the harm that David Duke's endorsement, which was most suspiciously timed, did in 2015.

 

We know that in an election year, the left-wing media will do its best to associate in the public's mind Trump and 'white nationalism' to the detriment of the former; and that the same media will be making a false comparison. Race and immigration play an outsized role in the election of 2024, perhaps more than in any other election in recent history, but if we were to view the matter objectively, we shall see that white nationalism and MAGA travel along tracks that run parallel to one another but never intersect. 'White nationalism', 'National Socialism', 'Third Positionism', 'Tradition', and any other factional grouping of the dissident Right stand not to benefit politically from a Trump victory, and I think that the American dissident Right has finally comprehended this fact; the American dissident Right did not comprehend it during Trump's first term, a time when it had invested a great deal in Trump and when the investment did not pay off; and that disappointment is why for years afterwards bitter and disaffected members of the American dissident Right complained, and most angrily, that Trump 'didn't keep his promises' and that he 'did nothing'.

 

So, would a Trump victory in 2024 change anything in America - would it lead to a cessation of the depravity that Kevin Alfred Strom chronicles here? Maybe, maybe not; regardless, American mainstream politics now is an interesting subject in itself: it should be discussed, it should be examined in its own right. I here ask the 'extremist' reader for forbearance.

 

II.

 

The astute reader will see in this article the appearance of the 'rational markets hypothesis', which asserts that when all participants are put together in the same market on the same day they always make the right decision. According to the theory, an individual participant in the stock market may be wrong and spectacularly so; but when all the participants are pressed into an aggregate, the 'wisdom of crowds' emerges. Take, for example, the crash on October the 29th 1929: this was the most famous day in Wall Street's history; it was the day of the crash that precipitated the Great Depression. No doubt you could have found a single investor on that day who was quite bullish and at the same time quite ignorant, a man who made the wrong call (to avail ourselves of financier's jargon), a man who saw no reason to dump his stocks all at once. But that is one man plucked out of a crowd; the great majority made the right call. It was entirely justified in selling its stocks; in abandoning the market; and in holding a pessimistic view of America's future.

 

So why was it justified? The answer is to be found in the research of the publicist of supply-side economics Jude Wanniski, who contended that the market crashed on that day after a piece of dramatic breaking news, which was that the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill had passed the US Senate. I will not rehearse the story of the notorious bill; suffice to say that its passage plunged America into recession, and then, after President Herbert Hoover signed into law a series of brutal tax hikes, depression. Wanniski's point is that the market responded and responded rationally to bad news. The countervailing thesis is that the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) crashed on October 29th, 1929, for no reason at all, the market being irrational, the crowds possessing no wisdom.

 

Controversially, Wanniski extended the rational markets hypothesis to politics: an individual voter may be quite stupid, but when all voters, including the stupidest, are put together in aggregate on election day, they always make the right choice. For example, when choosing between two objectionable and lacklustre candidates A and B, voters will always choose theone who will do the least harm.

 

I remember Bob Bartley, editor of the WSJ editpage and my boss back then, asking me why I thought Jimmy Carter [in 1976] was winning the primaries when he did not seem to stand for anything, with his competitors complaining that he fuzzed and fudged all the issues being debated. I recall telling Bartley that if one candidate says, "Elect me and I will kill every fifth American," and another says, "I will kill every tenth American," and another says "every 15th," and another "every 20th," and then Jimmy Carter steps forward and says "I haven’t made up my mind. Maybe I won’t kill any Americans." The voters will of course pick Carter, as they did, going on to beat President Ford in the general election.

 

The electorate cannot be fooled any more than the market can, and it works with all the information, however incomplete that information may be, made available to it, and in essence Wanniski's theory is that, like the participants in the stock market, the electorate uses all the information it can gather, and it goes on to act rationally.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

But if Wanniski's theory is true, how does it explain the presidential election of 2020? Voters knew in advance that Biden suffered from cognitive difficulties; that he was in poor physical health; that he and his family were corrupt; that he was a nasty, aggressive old man; that he was prone to outbursts of irrational anger, as dementia sufferers often are. And furthermore, they understood what the Biden platform entailed. Now in 2024, one must laugh and laugh maliciously at the Democratic voters in Denver, Colorado, and Chicago, Illinois, and Boston, Massachusetts, all of whom are complaining most vociferously about the consequences of the Biden immigrant invasion: the voters in these sanctuary cities have now got what they voted for - and in spades. And Wanniski's thesis is that they knew what they were voting for. The Biden package - tax hikes, environmentalism, Covidian mandates, open borders, transsexualism, a pro-crime policy that protects the criminal and punishes the victim - was hardly a secret. In addition, the electorate, which according to Wanniski understands economics better than any economist, would have known what the consequences of Bidenomics were. Nevertheless, Americans put Biden into office. He won 81 million votes, more votes than Obama, more votes than Hilary, more votes than any presidential candidate in history. Or did he? Perhaps we can rescue the Wanniski hypothesis by arguing that the electorate did not want Biden and that he did not win 2020; what happened was that the Democratic Party, the Far Left, Big Tech, and the Hollywood entertainment and media complex, carried out a coup against Trump. Biden was installed; he was selected, not elected.

 

To say the least, what happened was extraordinary; all American presidential elections had been free and fair up to that point excepting the election of 1864, which took place when America was chopped into two. Granted, there have been some extremely close elections - think of Nixon versus Kennedy in 1960 and Bush versus Gore in 2000 - but as I will argue, 2020 was not one of those.

 

So, what happened in 2020? Wanniski speaks of the 'rights of the minorities'. Being a family man and a New Yorker, he expounds the doctrine by sketching out the following parable. A family of five pile into a car and drive to the Hamptons or the Catskills on a vacation; on the way there, the youngest child, a little girl, becomes upset and agitated, yells and screams, and demands to be taken home. The rest of the family views the prospect of a trip as being neither nor there, and does not care all that much about it: it could easily out-vote the girl and proceed on, but if the trip is to be cancelled in order to assuage the girl, and keep peace in the family, and put an end to the girl's caterwauling - then so be it. The father turns the car around, the family drives home. The little girl stands in the minority; in a democracy she would be outvoted; but she possesses in this instance a weighted vote, that is, a vote that counts two, three, or more times more than a single.

 

The parallels between this and 2020, and indeed the entirety of Trump's first term, are obvious. Those suffering from TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) behaved like spoiled children. And unfortunately for Americans, the anti-Trumpers wielded most of the political power. Although they did belong to a minority, they did enjoy weighted voting privileges. On election night in 2020 and in the months leading up to Biden's inauguration in January 2021, they got their way; and Americans - except for the small minority who protested at the Capitol on January the 6th - allowed them to have it.

 

Wanniski gives a formal explanation of the theory in The Way the World Works (1979):

 

But while a politician can not satisfy electors who are diametrically opposed, neither can he ignore one class of elector or another, perhaps with the idea that because he can not possibly satisfy both, he will throw in his lot entirely with the one. Even when an issue can be settled by numerical voting, ninety-nine-to-one, the politician must attempt in some way to accommodate the one. At the extreme, if the issue settled ninety-nine-to-one is perceived by the one as in some way threatening his very survival or directly inviting his extinction, the one may resort to extralegal balloting to defend himself, perhaps even attempting assassination. In determining the consensus of the electorate, then, the successful politician does not view the electorate as a collection of numerical units, but as a bundle of individual interests each with a different set of intensities.

 

Now after three years of Biden, voters in the cities of Denver, Chicago, and Boston are experiencing buyer's remorse, and that places the Biden junta's survival in doubt. Carolyn Yeager observes, 'Even the sophisticated electoral cheating technologies semi-mastered by his Democrat party will probably not be sufficient to keep him [Biden] in the White House'; that was written in April 2023, and Biden's chances have hardly improved since then.

 

Rest assured, on election night 2024, history will repeat itself, and 2024 will look a lot like 2020: voting machines will mysteriously malfunction and flip millions of votes from Trump's column to Biden's, and after an order is given after midnight to stop the counting in seven swing states, millions of postal votes all for Biden will magically appear. But the difference between 2020 and 2024 is that the Democrats must defend everywhere. They cannot afford to lose one single traditionally blue state. And then there is the question of morale: the anti-Trump brigade who ousted Trump in 2020 will do their best to make sure that Biden 'wins' another term, but their hearts will not be in it, because after three years of Biden we can safely assume that they are quite demoralised and deflated.

 

III.

 

In 2020, Biden made history, or more accurately, broke with history, and to understand the rupture, let us look to the history, starting with the 30 presidential elections held from 1900 onwards. An outside observer who was ignorant of American political history could easily determine with a reasonable degree of certainty who was the winner of each election by knowing only handful of variables, and he could achieve this feat without knowing the actual outcome, i.e., without know who was declared the winner.

 

The first variable is this: who did the state of Ohio go to? From 1900, when the state went to McKinley, to 2016, when the state went to Trump, Ohio has gone to the winner 28 out of 30 times. And twelve out of 30 times Ohio, in conjunction with one of the two other states Iowa and Florida, has gone to the winner; and in 16 out of 30 times, all three states have gone to the winner. In short, the general rule is: if you win Ohio and either Florida or Iowa or both, you win the election.

 

Another variable we must account for is the increase in the number of voters voting for the incumbent's party. In the presidential election of 1928, Herbert Hoover, the presidential candidate of the incumbent party, which was the Republican Party, won Ohio, Florida, and Iowa, and at the same time won more votes than the Republican candidate Calvin Coolidge in the election of 1924, and Coolidge had won that election in a landslide. By improving upon Coolidge's vote, and winning the three key states of Ohio, Florida, and Iowa, Hoover was bound to win. And so, for the next hundred years afterwards, the pattern was set. The principle became that a presidential candidate who is an office holder running for re-election has won the election every time upon winning Ohio, Florida, and Iowa and at the same time improving upon the incumbent party's popular vote. This is true of Roosevelt in 1936; Eisenhower in 1956; Johnson in 1964; Nixon in 1972; Reagan in 1984; Clinton in 1996; and Bush 45 in 2004. As we can see, the electorate behaves in a consistent and predictable manner. 

 

This is why 2020 broke the mold. Trump improved upon the popular vote of the 2016 election, and he improved upon it by 12 million; the charge that in 2020 Trump had lost his base in 2020 does not stick; in 2020 Trump won all the votes that he had won in 2016, and he went on to win an additional 12 million. As well as that, Trump won Florida, Ohio, and Iowa handily (and in the polls for 2024, in Ohio he enjoys a double-digit lead). But in 2020, none of that sufficed to stop the electoral dynamo that was Joseph Robinette Biden. He won Hilary's 65 million votes and an additional 16 million. One of the great puzzles is where that 16 million came from: between them, Trump and Biden won more votes than there were registered voters.

 

The most important question of 2024 is whether the 16 million voters, if they ever existed, will be returning. I tentatively answer no: that in 2024 we will be seeing a dramatic shortfall in the number of votes for Biden. To repeat, we can hazard a guess that the Democratic Party and its anti-Trump base have by now become deeply demoralised. The evidence for that is all around us. According to the polls, Biden's approval rating has reached a record low, and in those polls, a majority of those asked if Biden deserves re-election answer in the negative. In most national polls, Trump is equal or ahead of Biden by a few percentage points. We can predict that if the momentum away from Biden and towards Trump keeps up, the Democratic Party base vote will collapse, which is to say that the 65 million who voted for Hilary in 2016 and Biden in 2020 will not be returning.

 

Students of American political history know that what counts more than the popular vote is the electoral college. In polls of the more decisive battleground states, Trump is pulling ahead. Supposing that Trump wins Arizona and Georgia and picks up Nevada (which has not gone to a Republican presidential candidate in 20 years), then the electoral college count approaches a near draw: the Republicans win 268 and Democrat 270, and that is even if Biden 'wins' Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In such a scenario Biden only needs to lose one traditionally Democratic state, one that could be either be on the eastern seaboard, or in the south towards the border with Mexico, or in the Mid-West, and then - the election will be handed to Trump. It is within the bounds of possibility that angry residents of Chicago, Illinois, or Denver, Colorado, or Baltimore, Maryland, could turn on the Democrats. And so, the election stands on a knife-edge.

 

IV.

 

As well as the polls, two markets are predicting a Trump victory - the betting market and the stock market.

 

Interestingly, the odds of Trump being the next president reached a high in May 2022 and then crashed around the time of the November 2022 House of Representatives election; Trump's odds stood at their lowest in this period and DeSantis' at their highest.

 

The rise and fall of Biden's odds follow a different trajectory; they did increase in 2023 but never exceeded 39%. In contrast, as of the time writing, Trump's odds have never reached a higher level.

 

Some financial commentators assert that the recent rally in the stock market should be attributed to the likely prospect of Trump's return to office; it is pricing in that possibility, or to use financier's jargon, it is 'discounting', that is, it is carrying over the future into the present. And what lies in that future? The market sees all the familiar supply-side-isms, mainly tax cuts and deregulation. And it anticipates an increase in the production and export of oil, natural gas, and coal, and a decrease in the use of wind farms, solar panels, and electric cars; in short, it expects President Trump to repudiate environmentalism wholesale.

 

To understand the extent of the stock market's rallying, we need to use gold. In the supply-side doctrine, the value of anything can be expressed as a fraction or multiple of an ounce of gold, and to be included in that anything is the American stock market index. We have recourse then to the gold Dow, which is the DJIA index divided by an ounce of gold. If we look at a chart of the gold Dow, we see that the highest it reached in the past five years was 20 ounces, which is high, but nowhere as high as it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

 

 

We cannot explain every twitch and tremor in the stock market, but we can account for some of the big falls and rises. Without a doubt the big fall from 19 to 13 ounces in early 2020 can be laid at the door of the Covidians: the lockdowns, forced shutdowns of business, and forced layoffs, devastated the market. The gold Dow had recovered by early 2022, but then fell after the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War in February 2022. By October 2022, the market had recovered from this mini recession, so why did it fall again? One can blame successive interest rates increases; these hurt the bond market and the commercial real estate market, and while the rate increases were small by the standards of the 1970s and 1980s, they were large by those of the 2020s.

 

 

And the reason for the fall of October 2023 is obvious: Hamas' raid, Israel's retaliatory offensive, and fears of a spread of a regional conflagration. After that came the Trump re-election rally, and it is no coincidence that at this point - October 2023 - that the betting markets graph shows Trump's odds overtaking Biden's.

 

The supply-sider Stephen Moore expresses scepticism towards the notion that the stock market is rallying because of Trump's improved performance in the polls and the betting markets:

 

Trump has made the case that the rise in the stock market in recent months is a result of the higher likelihood that he will be elected in November. I don't put too much stock in that claim. If the stock market tanks, is he responsible for that, too?

 

However, an analysis by ace investor Scott Bessent and a member of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity economic council finds that fluctuations in the stock market over the past year HAVE correlated positively with the betting market odds that Trump will win. Right now, he stands at just above 50%.

 

This relationship could be spurious, and of course, by far the biggest factor that drives stock valuations is profits.

 

Having said that, he does concede that Biden's economic agenda is poison:

 

One last piece of investment advice: Investors should pay attention to the Democratic agenda if they win in November. The Biden economic plan calls for doubling the capital gains tax, taxing unrealized capital gains and raising both the corporate tax rate and the dividend tax.

 

That is very bad news for sure for stocks. And THAT, you can take to the bank.

 

Now, this lends weight to Wanniski's rational market hypothesis. If the market is always right, and if it believed that Biden was going to 'win' in November, then it would be crashing right now, because there is nothing it dislikes more than what Biden is proposing.

 

IV.

 

One of the main reasons why the electorate seems to have turned on Biden is inflation, that is, Bidenflation.

 

 

This has been exported worldwide, and there is not a country that is not suffering from the highest inflation since the 1980s. Trump has vowed to reduce inflation, but the irony is that he and the Covidians he surrounded himself with in 2020 bear the main responsibility for it.

 

When taking the extraordinary decade of the 2020s into consideration, for the first time in recent history we see a global inflation that has not been brought about by bad money, i.e. by depreciating currencies. It is true that the dollar has depreciated against gold by over 55% in the past five years: in 2019, it took only $US1300 to buy an ounce of gold, and now it takes over $USD2000.

 

 

But the depreciation of the dollar, while harmful, occurred gradually over the course of five years and not all at once, unlike the sudden and shocking depreciation of the 1970s. No, the cause of the inflation of the 2020s can be traced back to what economists euphemistically call breakdowns in the supply-chain, which are what happens when millions across the globe are forced to stop supplying and exchanging their goods and labour because work has become somehow 'unsafe'. One cannot think of another time in history when global economic activity, and a good chunk of it at that, came to a halt because of government efforts to combat a virus.

 

Once a supply-chain has been broken in several places, it cannot be fixed easily. But we can return to normalcy by returning to what we had before 2020. And what was that? An absence of Covidian mandates, that is, regulations that prevent people from trading their production with one another; an increase in supply by cutting taxes on production; and little to no restrictions on the production and consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas.

 

We must fear a further depreciation of the dollar, which along with other currencies has a lost a great deal of value over the past few decades - it is hard to believe that 25 years ago gold only cost $USD250 an ounce and oil only $USD10 a barrel - but I think that in the current year central banks have realised the error of their ways and are not willing to devalue their currencies further.

 

Having said that, at the time of writing, gold has climbed past $USD2100 an ounce, which goes to show that one can never tell with the Federal Reserve, which, when every time in the past twenty years it has met with an economic quandary, has devalued.

 

V.

 

Instinctively, Trump wants to move America to the opposite place of where it is under Biden. The market recognises that and is responding accordingly. It does dislike Trump's tariff-hike threats, but it puts these to one side; any imposing by Trump of trade barriers, particularly barriers against China, will hurt no more in the 2020s than it did in the 2010s.

 

In one of the strange echoes of history, 2024 is revisiting 1980. Despite being aged 69, the always-smiling Reagan of the 1980 campaign conveyed youth, vigour, optimism, belief in America's future, and an irrepressible forward rhythm. And as the market discounted a Reagan victory, some economic indicators improved even before Reagan was sworn in: in the middle of 1980, before the election was held, the dollar firmed, and the price of gold collapsed: it fell from $USD850 an ounce, which is the highest it had ever been in history up to that point, to $USD300. The market anticipated that Reagan would win, and the prospect of a Reagan boom led to an increase in demand for dollars. The demand outstripped the supply, and so the value of the dollar increased. That is, the increase in the value of the dollar meant that one needed to spend fewer dollars to buy the same amount of gold. This foretold that inflation, which had plagued America and the world throughout the seventies, would soon wane. Relief was at hand, even though Carter still was in office. The phenomenon reminds us of the rally we have seen in the DJIA since October 2023.

 

The market looks to the future, but its knowledge of what will happen in that future is limited to the information it possesses at the time. In the sweet summer of 1980, it foresaw the Reagan victory, but it did not foresee the Reagan recession that would follow, a recession that was the worst since the end of WWII. Nowadays we look at the eighties through rose-coloured glasses, and we fail to understand how difficult it was for so many - particularly in the first two years under Reagan - and how we are better off now than then.

 

VI.

 

This brings up to the subject of national morale. In Biden's America, there are three nefarious forces working to lower it, and the first of these is Biden himself, a man of a gloomy mien, a man whose body and mind are deteriorating, a man who naturally enough has no reason to look forward to the future. During one of his typically rambling speeches at the campaign stops in the 2020 Democratic primaries, one of those in attendance was struck by the incoherence of Biden's talk but also by its extreme pessimism; Biden was preoccupied by the themes of decline, cancer, death. The second force, and one that a man of Biden's temperament was instantly attracted to, was Covidianism. During its zenith, Covidianism locked down millions with the intent of driving as many mad as possible, and if any one of the lockdown's victims were to take his own life - and a large number did - then the Covidians counted that as a win. Such nihilism and misanthropy met its match in that of the third force, the environmentalists. They want to drastically limit the number of air-breathers, preferably white-skinned ones; the environmentalists are uninterested in the carbon emissions of the denizens of Africa, China, India, and the Middle East. An ideology that is as destructive as the ideology of Covidianism, environmentalism in the 21st century is proving to be as dangerous as Freemasonry in the 20th.

 

The three forces have combined to make America a sad place to be. I know nothing more demoralising than the sight of three obese - and probably diabetic - African Americans Alvyn Bragg, Fani Willis, and Letitia James persecuting Trump and members of his administration. And all this while Democratic mayors, governors, district attorneys, and judges have turned not soft on crime but pro-crime. This is perverse. The present regime goes against nature, and such deviating cannot be sustained at least not for long, which is why Covidianism, the ultimate anti-natural ideology, burned itself out after a run of two and a half years.

 

 

VII.

 

Can we frame the conflict between Trump and Biden, Republicans and Democrats, as a conflict between capitalism and socialism? At first sight, that would make sense. Trump has worked most of his life in business, and big business at that, whereas Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, Harris, Feinstein, et al., have never worked a day in their lives in a real job. And since at least the 2010s, the Democratic Party has been in the grip of the radical Left, the six factions of which from 2020 onwards were: 1) Black Lives Matter; 2) 'woke' capital; 3) proponents of Critical Race Theory and other forms of academic neo-Marxism; 4) anarchists and antifa; 5) old-school communists; and 6) Social Justice Warriors (SJWs).

 

Covidians, who infiltrated both the Trump and Biden administrations, are the odd man out. Covidian practices were inspired by those of the Chinese, particularly in Shanghai, and these in turn were rooted in Chinese techniques that sought to engender what Mao called 'thought reform' and 'the washing of the brain'; if you want to read more on this unsavoury subject, click here. But despite the Maoist antecedents, the Covidians did not follow a particular ideology of either the Left or Right; they portrayed themselves as being pure technocrats who had abstracted themselves away from any ideological commitment, scientists who had moved beyond politics.

 

Nonetheless, if we are to delve further, we can find certain themes underlying the thought of the Democrats, the Covidians, and the Left, for when writing about Marx, Wanniski observes penetratingly that Marxism can only be valid when an economy is contracting, not expanding; it only holds true for states of economic crisis, of recession, depression. The classic problem faced by all communists after they had seized power was how to get the wheels of production turning again. They were unable to find an answer in the economics of Marx, because Marx wrote only on things going wrong, not right. It was not that the communist regimes were opposed to growth and expansion, only that they did not know how to bring these about. By the end of the seventies - when Wanniski published his book - Wanniski declared that Marxism, along with the two other prominent schools of economic thought Keynesianism and monetarism, had failed, but he warned that if the capitalists of the West proceeded on their present course, they would meet the same fate as the capitalists of the East, in particular the capitalists of the former Republic of South Vietnam.

 

In the conflict between capitalism and socialism, Wanniski found a division between the desire for risk, adventure, and entrepreneurialism on one hand, and the desire for safety, comfort, and caution on the other; we know on which side of the ledger the Covidians, for whom 'safety' was absolute and paramount, stood. Cults, too, prize security and safety before all else and forbid their followers from venturing into the outside world, and the man who escapes a cult often has difficulties adjusting to real life.

 

The exploring of these themes - 'Life', 'Death' capitalised - brings us close to the doctrine of vitalism. Half in jest, Nietzsche wrote that the sight of the ugly, the aged, and the infirm, lowers our vital energies; it saps our will to live. Nearly 140 years after Nietzsche made his famous remarks, we can see in them a grain of truth. In 2024, the sight of the Soviet-style gerontocracy in America depresses and enervates. And in addition, it encourages intergenerational resentment; the boomers will not stand down, they are hogging the trough. Biden epitomises this aspect of boomerdom. Part of the hostility expressed towards Biden by Democrats in a state such as Michigan can be traced back to Biden's favouring Israel in the current Israeli-Palestinian war, true, but also to the age gap between Biden and the anti-Israel protestors.

 

It is easy enough to find an instance of the prominence of the aged and infirm in American life; what of the ugly? The answer is it is all around us. Wind farms, transsexualism, fat acceptance, LGBTism in its more grotesque forms, AI art (especially the AI art of Google Gemini) - all of it is ugly. One of the worst things one can say about the Great Replacement is that it has made life in the West increasingly ugly; one must agree with this under the pressure of the facts, unless one in the spirit of an unyielding contrarianism argues that Palestinian diaspora protestors, the dysgenic trash that is Jose Antonio Ibarra, and the encampments of illegals in New York, Boston, and Chicago, are aesthetically pleasing, beautiful even. And perhaps our leftist does really treasure them, for one thing that we have learned after 2020 is that the American ruling class really does despise white Americans, that is, Americans, and really wants them gone, dead, replaced. And as goes America, so goes the rest of the Anglosphere; one can find the same sort of ugliness in Australia as well as America. And it spreads across an entire nation: the wind farm disfigures the country; the Great Replacement disfigures the city.

 

VIII.

 

American boomers are an enfeebling but also a conserving force. Trump for the life of him cannot understand how things have gotten to where they are now, and he wants to turn the clock back, to the good old days, to the way things used to be. Trump is old enough to remember the past, the America of Operation Wetback, the America before Hart Celler. Most importantly, he does not hate Americans, and he does not want to destroy. Critics of Trump will object to this assertion of mine and they will point to Trump's conduct in 2020; but, if we view the world events of 2020 and with objectivity, we shall that not a single major head of state in the entire world (and these states included Russia and Ukraine) refused the blandishments of the Covidians; all of them locked down their people, made them wear masks, and mandated the clot shots. Politicians who bucked the Covidian consensus, like certain heads of state in Africa, wound up mysteriously dead.

 

It is possible that these forces of darkness will 'win' once again. The subject of the 2024 election rarely comes up for discussion in the writings of the Americans of the dissident Right. The sole exception is VDare, which, four years after the fact, is countenancing the possibility that Biden may have not won 2020. In 2024, VDare is cultivating an atmosphere of pessimism and gloom: polls, betting markets, and stock markets be damned, 2024 is just like 2020, and the Democrats will use cheating to flip the states of Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to Biden once again. America is due for another four years of Biden, and Biden's second term will be worse than his first, if that is possible.

 

If VDare is correct, Americans are faced with an insoluble paradox. To secure free and fair elections, America must ban postal voting, same-day registration, voting machines; it must enforce voter ID; and it must make a practice of the speedy counting of ballots and not allow counting to drag on for weeks and months on end. Such legislation would bring America's electoral system into line with that of other countries in the Anglosphere. But here is the rub: to enact these reforms, the Republican Party needs to win elections, and the Democratic Party will not allow it to.

 

Prudence advises caution, and perhaps we should be pessimistic about 2024. Perhaps Trump will win in a landslide, but the Biden junta will falsify election results once again; perhaps, even if Trump does get into office, he will not be able to make a difference. Either way, America's long national nightmare will continue. That is the default American dissident Right and white nationalist view. Who is to say that they are not correct? But we need hope, and living without hope is no way to live.

 

Advice for Americans: a Communique in the Course of a Coup

 

I. 

I should have put a qualifying sentence at the end of my last article, and that is: these are the reasons why Trump will win if the election is free and fair. As we now know, the election was not free and fair, and it was more befitting of a Third World country than the United States. Trump would have scored well above 300 electoral college votes if not for Democratic electoral fraud in four Democrat-controlled cities in the north (Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta), and for all we know, he may have even won Nevada and Virginia were it not for possible fraud there as well. The American Left is at present executing a plan which it had laid down in advance of the election; it is following a coup scenario which was 'wargamed' as part of what is called the Transition Integrity Project. 

Now, some (only a minority, I am pleased to say) on the dissident Right contend that none of this matters, both Trump and Biden are the same, etc., etc. I am writing to persuade those who are undecided or who have fallen under the influence of the black-pillers and nay-sayers. I wish to impress upon the Americans in the dissident Right that there is a time for political activism, it is now. 

II. 

The American Far Right or nationalist Right or racialist Right (or whatever you want to call it) should want to save Trump's presidency. Why? 

The first argument is: it is in the self-interest of the dissident Right that the presidency be saved. For years leading up to the 2020 election, the Left has vowed to punish anyone who supported and voted for Trump. Now reports indicate that an incoming Biden administration will pursue this goal; it will hardly be interested in national reconciliation and harmony. 

At the moment, the Left is focusing all its attentions on Trump, his base and the Republican Party - it wants to depose Trump, demoralise his base and turn the Republican Party against Trump and populism - but sooner or later it will turn to the Far Right. White nationalists, race realists, 'neo-reactionaries', Neo-Nazis, et al., will be deplatformed and perhaps even fined and imprisoned. The Biden regime may not have control of the Senate or even the House, but it will have control of the Justice Department and a myriad of other institutions control of which goes to the candidate who won the election for the presidency. It goes without saying that Biden's handlers will insert socialists, Marxists, communists, etc., into every key position, and these newly appointed nominees will seek a bloody retribution against all 'white supremacists' and 'Nazis', real or imagined. Center-right conservatives ('normiecons') and colour-blind civic nationalists can be expected to be caught up in the coming conflagration. (Indeed, the first shots in the war against 'normiecons' have already been fired: dozens of Republican and conservatives were struck off YouTube weeks before the election). 

The bottom line is: the Left seeks to control everything, and like some amorphous blob monster out of a horror film, it never stops until it has devoured everything in its path. Before the election, the Left ran Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, Hollywood, popular culture (DC, Disney, Marvel, etc.), nearly all the national news TV networks and newspapers; now it wants the government. It never stops. And sooner or later, it will come for you. The Left will not allow you, a dissident Rightist and freethinker, to have your corner of the Internet; it will not leave you unmolested; so long as you exist, it will attempt to destroy you. 

The second reason wanting a Trump second term is: immigration. As Kevin MacDonald notes in an article on the election, the Biden regime will usher in a massive wave of non-white immigration. That, combined with electoral cheating of the sort we saw in the four pivotal Democratic-run cities, will ensure that no Republican will be elected to the presidency for the next few decades. Many of the Trump's critics on the Right chide him with abandoning his white working-class base, and they point to the drop in white electoral support as proof of this; but I ask them, how do you think the white working-class (let alone the white middle-class) will fare under Biden? As it is, Trump has brought legal and illegal immigration to record lows, and not all of this reduction is attributable to covid. Name one other head of state in the West, or at least the Anglosphere, who has done as much to restrict immigration as Trump (as they say on 4Chan, 'Pro-tip: you can't). 

The third reason is: Marxist gradualism. Biden may not get control of the Senate, or even the House. But history shows that while a president does not always get the tax cuts he wants, he always gets the tax hikes, and this is despite his party's not having control of the legislature. Taxes on the supply of capital and labour will lead to less of it, and Americans can expect a gradual economic decline under Biden, a decline which will at first make itself felt only at the margins. The decline will proceed bit by bit and the inadequacy of capitalism compared to socialism will 'proven' over a period of time. This is important. Biden's handlers know that they cannot introduce Marxism all at once - e.g., Biden will not write an executive order to nationalise, overnight, all the companies in the S&P 500 - so they will avail themselves of salami tactics. We are seeing these gradualist methods at work already, and these recall those used during the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948. 

I do not want here to revisit the now-centuries old capitalism versus socialism debate; all I want is to ask the dissident Right to consider the politics of the matter. The fact is that millions of Americans, 'normies' all, will not stand for socialism; millions of Floridan Hispanic voters will not abide Biden. My question to you is, are you prepared to be outflanked from the Right by immigrant Cubans and Venezuelans? 

The fourth reason is: fairness. Democracy can be defined as a fair contest between two more or less evenly-matched opponents - something like a game of chess or soccer. MacDonald and other race realists have written volumes on how whites have produced high-trust societies, and while democracy has been adopted by many non-white nations since WWII, it was whites who invented it in its modern form and one could say that it was built upon white values. For democracy requires the following norms: a sense of fair play; the consent of the loser (which we have not seen from the Left since 2016); the abstention from the use of force and intimidation against one's political opponents (which again we have not seen from the Left since 2016)... All of this could be said to be white, and Anglo-Saxon. It is true that over the course of hundreds of years, British and American politicians seeking office have gone against these precepts and doing so, have won; but there has always been the awareness that these men broke the rules and thereby did a bad thing and put themselves outside the pale. Generations of whites have regarded electoral fraud not as business as usual, politics as usual, but as a deviation from norms. 

One should separate all this - the history of democracy in the West - from the question of its actual value. Hitler did not think much of democracy, but democracy, in the period of the Second Reich and even Weimar worked well enough - at least, in pre-WWII Germany, you can find little evidence of Chicago-style ballot-box stuffing, because Germans as a people are too scrupulous and honest for that. But the communist Left destroyed the democracy of the Second Reich and Weimar, because it knew, on an instinctive level at least, that it could not win a fair contest. In much the same way, Lenin abolished the Duma because the Bolsheviks did not win the elections held after the October Revolution. 

This brings us to America today. We can envisage the American election of 2020 as a chess match between a blue player and a red. The blue player, through an illegal move, checkmates his opponent. The red player brings this cheating to the attention of the referee. The blue player, defending his conduct, says that the illegal move should be overlooked as the red player is a disgrace to the game of chess, has brought it into disrepute, is a odious individual, etc. The referee is torn: on the one hand, the denunciations of the red player by the blue strike a sympathetic chord; on the other, rules are rules. At this point, everything depends on how the referee will act. Will he follow the rules, or will he look the other way? Will he follow his better or lesser angels? 

The consequences are tremendous if the referee chooses the latter course. MacDonald is not alone in predicting that the reputation and sanctity of democracy will be called into question, and that civil war may result. He writes, 'It’s going to be interesting... Perhaps too interesting'.

That 'interesting' civil war may come about simply because the Left, as Rush Limbaugh points out, not believe in following the rules - it believes that is for suckers. The smart people, the clever people, bend the rules and even cheat so as to win, because winning - by any means necessary - is the supreme value. (It is doubtful that the men who fixed the vote in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, will ever evince remorse for their crime once they emerge in years to come and brag about their role in toppling Trump in 2020). And this is all in keeping with Leninism. If you, like Lenin, put socialism on a pedestal, if you prize it before anything else, if you make it the core of your morality - then woe betide anything that gets in the way of socialism. All the Anglo-Saxon ideals of fair play, of decency, of free and fair contests, can be trampled upon. They are all 'bourgeois'. 

The stench of cheating will cling to Biden throughout his entire term. To the Left, that hardly matters - they won,  that is that, and now they have the mandate to fight against 'systemic racism'; but to the dissident Right, it should matter.

III.

To put aside for the moment the question of the worth of second Trump term , I shall look at the strengths and weaknesses of both the contestants - Trump and Biden. 

Biden has little free will of his own - he is the puppet of the amorphous Left. What is that Left in 2020? It is radical, it is Marxist, but it is not the same as sixty or seventy years ago. Then, the American Left consisted of the Communist Party of the USA (the CPUSA) and its splinter groups, some of which went over to Trotskyism, others to Maoism. The Far Left then was centralised, not diffuse, and it was small in number. Branches and cells met in dusty basements and belonged to a hierarchical and centralised organisation (a 'vanguard party') which was controlled by Moscow. Splinter groups did not receive their orders (or funding) from Moscow, but they did emulate the CPUSA's 'revolutionary vanguard' structure.

Now, in 2020, Marxism and leftism have broken with the 'old Left' model. They are diffuse and decentralised as a virus is; they are a virus inhabiting the minds of the public, not so much a mass movement as a mass psychosis. In it we can identify the following factions:

- Anarchists and Antifa;

- 'Woke' capital (or corporate Leninism, as I like to call it);

- Academic and cultural Marxism: Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, Black Studies, post-Colonial Studies, Queer Studies, etc.;

- Social Justice Warriors (SJWs);

- Black Lives Matter (BLM);

- Remnants of the old Marxist organisations: the CPUSA (which still exists), the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the old Trotskyite groups, the survivors of the New Communist Movement (NCM) groups.

All of these tend to cross over and overlap. A 'woke capitalist' could be found on the board of a big tech or media company who declares himself to be simultaneously a Marxist (without knowing a thing about Marxist theory), a crusader for social justice, a supporter of BLM and Antifa. 

How does this leftism manifest itself politically? As we know, the Left has spread itself into every nook and cranny of civil society, from churches to the TV and film studios. It sees the Democratic Party as its own, and the Party serves as the focal point for the Left's operations. 

The Democratic Party - and the grand cause of getting Trump - allows the Left to build bridges to the Right. This is how the Left has built an alliance with the Never Trump conservatives, who were present at the Transitional Integrity's Project's 'wargaming' of the anti-Trump coup. (The Never Trumpers represent the faction of the Republican Party which was ousted after Trump's hostile takeover of the party in the years 2015 and 2016. This is the faction of the conservative movement which is attempting at present to persuade Trump to 'do the right thing' and concede the election and acknowledge that he lost 'fair and square'; it is also placing pressure on the Republicans to distance themselves from Trump and any 'conspiracy theories' which say that the Democrats cheated). 

The Left has made a puppet of Biden (and Harris), and it is Biden who suffers from the same shortcoming as the Left and the Never Trumpers: a lack of popular support. No-one voted for Biden, at least not in the numbers claimed in Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan. In a democracy, this lack of electoral support translates into illegitimacy. One can be a cynic about this, one can sneer, one can quote Stalin approvingly to the effect that 'It matters not who wins the votes, but who counts them'; but this illegitimacy is a black mark against Biden, at least in the eyes of a large section of the American people. 

In contrast, Trump has his base which is extends both inside and outside the Republican Party. In addition, he possess great strength and fortitude. Even his enemies admit that he is not the type to go down quietly. It is for this reason that I believe that Trump will not give up. Those who say he will, I think, are projecting themselves onto Trump: they imagine that if they were in his shoes, they would have crumbled right now (I know I certainly would have). They simply do not believe in him. They show all the signs of having been taken in by the media anti-Trump propaganda, which is part of the massive psychological warfare campaign against Trump and his followers. But we should remember that only a week ago, the polls - and the betting markets - made the forecast that Trump would lose to Biden in a landslide (and the Republicans in the Senate and House as well). As of now, the betting markets indicate that Biden will be president. But why should we believe them? 

It is of course in Trump's personal interest to fight to the bitter end. The Left has vowed to arrest, convict and imprison Trump for his 'crimes' while in office (and needless to say, if it cannot find evidence of any criminal wrong-doing, it will manufacture it) the moment he departs from the White House; and they have vowed to go after his family as well. Trump is fighting for not only his own preservation but his children's as well. In this, the Left have made a mistake. Sun Tzu counsels that one must avoid encircling one's enemy completely: one must give him an avenue of escape, otherwise he will fight all the more harder. The Left, which is always overreaching, has not heeded Sun Tzu on this point. 

Another reason why Trump will not concede is that he sees himself as the winner of the election of 2020. History and tradition show that he is right. Out of the 31 elections since 1892, the state of Ohio has only gone with the loser twice - to Dewey in 1944 and Nixon in 1960. And in 30 out of 31 of those elections, the candidate who won Ohio and Florida together went on to win the office of presidency (and that includes George W. Bush in the extremely tight election of 2000). Nixon in 1960 is the exception which proves the rule: Nixon won Ohio, Florida and California and lost the popular vote to Kennedy by a narrow margin.  Viewed in the light of this history, Trump won in 2020.

In my last article, I looked at Helmut Norpoth's model in depth. Were we to ask him why Trump did not win 362 electoral votes as his model predicted, Norpoth would shrug and say, 'Biden cheated'. And he would be right. The electorate knows it, Trump's voters know it, and for this reason Trump's base at this point will not allow him to concede. 

One must fight while one has breath. One cannot allow the American democratic system (and by extension, all democratic systems) to be destroyed by a few ballot-box stuffers in Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Georgia. It is a matter of principle. Rush Limbaugh understands this and has vowed to keep on fighting, and he is dying of lung cancer. 

IV. 

Many on the dissident Right have given up on a Trump second term: they were pessimistic a few weeks ago, believing that Biden would win in a landslide (mistakenly, as it turns out), and are even more pessimistic now, believing that Biden has pulled off his coup. What if they are correct, and Biden and the Left have won? What must we do to prepare for a future in which no Republican, or at least no immigration restrictionist, will ever win the presidency in our lifetimes? 

Firstly, we must remove ourselves from the conventional Internet platforms - YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc. - before we are removed. (YouTube is no good anyway: its content is being marred by excessive advertising). We can find alternative platforms such as BitChute, but these are being targeted by the Left as we speak. When it comes to these battles, the Left always wins. But the Left can only control HTTP, which is not all there is to the Internet; it cannot control the platforms which existed before HTTP. On these one can distribute all the content - written, audio, visual - one wants.

Secondly, as a corollary to the above, we must boycott as much of the mainstream media and entertainment, etc., as  much as we can. In selecting what YouTuber to watch, what newspaper to read, we must go by the following criteria: what is the content creator's attitude towards leftism and to the American coup of 2020? 

Thirdly, we must become accustomed to two words - electoral fraud - and repeat them as much as possible in any discussion in relation to the election of 2020. The Left always projects - it thought that Trump somehow cheated his way to power in 2016 (that was what the whole Russian collusion narrative was about) - and it always accuses others of what itself is doing. Now, in 2020, Biden is doing what Trump is supposed to have done in 2016. It is at this point I propose that we take a leaf out of the Left's book. Following its defeat in 2016, the Left used the tactic in all places and all times of denying the Trump administration any legitimacy. We on the Right should do the same with the Biden / Harris regime. 

Someone on the dissident Right may object to this on the grounds that they do not like Trump; but how many leftists in 2016 liked Clinton? The Left went after Trump and sought to drive him out of office, not because he 'cucked' to the Jews or African-Americans or Hispanics, but because of his immigration restrictionism and nativism; the Left abominated him because of his calling all Mexicans rapists, because of his Muslim ban, because of his proposed wall... As MacDonald notes in his article, the Left will seek to destroy any candidate who is immigration restrictionist (and, for that matter, who has cultivated a large electoral base among white people). 

MacDonald concludes his piece with some uncharacteristic musings on the fall of democracy and the rise of Caesarism, and here he sounds like Spengler. In the long term, perhaps, Spengler will be proven correct, but in the short term, we are left with democracy - at least for a little while longer - and circumstances behoove us to fight for it in America in the year 2020. 

In that struggle, we must not let our judgement be clouded by dark thoughts; we must not mistake pessimism for realism. Trump himself is reputedly a follower of Norman Vincent Peale, the self-help priest who believed that positive thoughts can bring about positive outcomes. In the vein of Trump (and Peale), I declare the future to be still open.