The up-beat thinking.
If you are on Twitter and have any interest in history, you know Dr Larry Schweikart, popular author of several histories, especially Patriot’s History of the United States, a New York Times best seller, which he co-wrote with Michael Allen in 2004. Dr Larry was also a drummer in a rock band from my day, Steppenwolf, of “Born to be Wild” fame, 1969. Retired from teaching now, he’s been very active in analyzing the Left’s campaign against American freedom at his Larry’sCommentary <larrys@substack.com>, which I invite you to subscribe.
What we share is a mutual up-beat attitude about America’s chances to not just weather this current storm, but to emerge from it even stronger…a process which may work itself out quickly (a year or two) or much longer (a generation or two). I like the lift in his step, and we both see America through not just from our own history as a nation, but as a unique piece of world history.
While Larry’s the consummate historian, I, on the other hand was an average criminal trial lawyer, but also, in the corporate world, a hands-on analyst of failed institutions, thanks to over 15-years inside the old Soviet Bloc, from Russia to the Balkans. I got to rub elbows with a lot of common folk, including gypsies, and learned first hand a lot of dark alley stuff they used to survive, that isn’t taught in books, and in many places wasn’t even legal. (E.g., in the USSR fixing other people’s cars for pay was a crime, and all financial crimes were considered “mafia”.) In both east Asia and the Soviet part of the world, I’d made studying the dynamics of wealth creation an avocation. So I know a lot about “how things work, and don’t, won’t and can’t work” and a little bit about causation, how “natural law” causes things to work or not work. I’ve been very blessed.
Larry’s far more clever with words than I am, and if you check his Twitter @WallsOther page you’ll see the clever (and irreverent) names he’s given to both Dems and RINO’s. Moreover, he sees through the Democrat’s false bravado and does a great job chastising members on our side who have already thrown in the towel, “giveinskis” or “surrenderniks”. His analysis notes the Left already knows they’re skating on thin ice and are operating more out of fear than confidence. False bravado.
My understanding as well, so we’re generally on the same page, andwe both agree this is not the time for our side to be clutching their pearls or stacking furniture in their front room to make that one last stand. We’d both like to see this end without the kinds of pitched battles fought in either our Revolution or Civil War, but to be honest, it’s the other side, the Left, the Democrats who will decide. And those armies of spoiled rich kids, the “bratlings” who “do no work today” (Shakesepeare) or any other day, (the Bureau of Labor Statistics), yet still seem keen on getting doped up on a full medley of drugs, before setting fire to public buildings, breaking into retail establishments, or pushing old people in wheelchairs (especially veterans with MAGA caps) down a flight of steps, will serve as their front ranks.
Today, that brood still wants to have their own way, and when and where they want it, without punishment. And, if you begin with Nancy Pelosi, (discussed below) they are now in their 6th generation, and their “type” has grown from a few thousand in 1964 to several million today.
You know the sort…and we’ve seen them often, going back to the Pink Hat march on Inauguration Day, 2017 and the subsequent Antifa riots.
These are the kids, now grown, who cause Dem’s the most grief, but who also represent their future, for they will one day represent the majority of the “New Democrat” Party once we Baby Boomers have died out… their battle cry still being “I want it, and I want it now!”
In view of this reality, if you’ll visit VassarBushmills.com, I’ve promoted two of my categories, “The Wahr” and “2022 Elections”, to front page status, which cover what I think may be about to happen this year, and which will determine what the Democrats and the Left will be able to do, or feel compelled to do leading up to November, 2024. 17 months.
Like most front office, top-down organizations, both the Democrat Party and their many private partners have been setting short term objectives for these youngsters, designed to allow them to graduate into bigger and bigger projects. In the interim they have been using very visible media stratagems to thwart the tide of Trump’s MAGA, which arguably was the largest mass turnout of American volunteers since the days after December, 8th, 1941.
In 2020 they knew a second Trump term would have derailed entirely their original plan for taking over America, hatched originally by Obama & Co, 2009-2016.
Hence the steal.
Still, they are not entirely back on-track a year and a half into Biden’s term. It’s been one muck-up after another, for they have been very ham-fisted in trying to keep their varied, and often at philosophical odds, constituencies on board, not to mention their teat-fit wing. They’ve lost a lot of grown-up voters just to placate the bratlings.
So Democrats are now traipsing through an almost endless array of self-made mudholes while still wearing bedroom slippers and now may be looking at a series of state nullifications, which may require federal troops. (The history on “nullification” has been that the Feds win when they have God on their side, as in school integration in the South, and the states win when they have God on their side, as with the repatriation of runaways slaves in the 1850s, when free states simply refused to send them back. Today, God wouldn’t go within spittin’ distance of this federal government, even grown-up Democrats not inside the Beltway, and not making a living off government, recognize this and are backing away, including Latinos and working class blacks. Worse, some states are beginning to feel very frisky about saying No, as in the 1774 Boston Tea Party-version of “No”.
Larry Schweikart has Democrats pegged about their hapless ground game. But still it’s true, they can still go “Doomsday” in the childish “if I can’t have it, then no one can” Strangelove thinking many of them share. This should give us cause for caution.
It is true, my BabyBoomer Generation will be but a memory by 2042, (me considerably sooner) but demographically Democrats’ policies designed to placate their bratlings’ is already in the process of alienating a majority of the aforementioned Latino community, as well as working class blacks who have traditionally voted Democratic since the 1960s. They aren’t gaining ground…with honest elections. And it is true, they can still go “Doomsday” in the childish “if I can’t have it, then no one can” Dr Strangelove thinking many of them share. This should give us cause for caution.
This worry may explain why Dem’s are concentrating on redefining “free and open elections”, for in a straight-up vote, even in blue states, their prospects will continue to diminish for a few more cycles until Gen Z and Gen Alpha are fully engaged in the voting process… but that assumes Dems will still be in charge of Public Education. Today it’s already not likely in at least 30 states.
So, instead of sending in troops to escort black students into southern schools, the Bidenistas may have to send in troops all over the country to rescue elitist school boards who have barricaded themselves from angry parents. (Expect these to be covered by media only if they are rescued, but not if they surrender, and come out with their hands in the air.)
Dems also probably haven’t considered that America may have yet another of its “Great Awakenings” in its loins. (Once again, see Dr Schweikart’s Patriot’s History Index as to how that has worked in our past). Great Awakenings, which move in mysterious ways, are religious in nature, and are driven by a kind of natural law that appears to be peculiar to America, again, because of its unique history and formation from the bottom-up. Religion had a major role to play then, and from my own observations GenX parents seem to be returning toward it. The elites despise religion. So stay tuned.)
So Democrats are already beginning to see that any chance to simply “ease into” autocracy, without really heavy-handed, jack-booted thuggery will be virtually impossible.
So somewhere in their inner sanctums that are drawing up, or have already drawn up, plans to accomplish this. Only how?
I’ll dedicate a few more pages to this as events develop.
So, can we rely on 1776 to give us any clues?
The Revolutionary War started out with British soldiers being sent out to take over a supply depot in Concord, Massachusetts, controlled by our militia-rebels in April, 1775. The first volleys were exchanged at Lexington when 700 British regulars encountered 77 rebels detailed to slow them down, killing 8 of ours, while losing only one. (This was when Paul Revere and his mates made their famous midnight rides, yelling “To Arms, To Arms!” Then they moved on toward Concord, looking for arms, to encounter the men Revere’s gang rousted out of bed. In that process, the British commander split his men, (and in Johnny Cash’s 1964 song about Custer splitting his men “Well, he won’t do that again”…)
…and the Americans sent them scurrying backed to Charleston, under withering fire. Then, once back our guys put them under siege.
“Game on” a few months later when the Continental Congress declared independence.
So, as Larry Schweikart says: “Be a Grant and quit acting like a McClellan” (who was a real woos.)
About Democrats and their generation problem.
Their top leaders are:
Silent Generation, 1928-1945, nearly 80-plus, Nancy Pelosi, Patrick Leahy and James Clyburn, 1940, Bernie Sanders, 1941, all over 80 and Joe Biden, 1942, Elizabeth Warren, 1943;
Baby Boomers: (1946-1964): Bill 1946 and Hillary, 1947, Chuck Schumer, 1950, Adam Schiff, 1960, Valerie Jarrett, 1956, Susan Rice, 1964;
GenXers: (1965-1980): Ayanna Pressly, 1974, Rashida Tlaib, 1976 (both senior members of The Squad)
Millennials:(1981-1996) Ilhan Omar, 1982 and Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez, 1989, junior members of the Squad.
Leaving drug and alcohol abuse aside, you can see the Democrat’s compass-bearings-drain (amongst others), by generation.
Of the oldest, everyone knows Nancy (Lady Nan), born and raised a debutante in Baltimore to a politically powerful family. She probably never had to mix her own martinis. She never stepped into the political limelight until she helped the Left’s takeover the 1976 Democratic Party Convention. She was just a California delegate at the time. (Had the American people known what she really believed, Jimmy Carter would never have won in ’76.) That was the date when “classical liberalism”, then a “pro-American” political viewpoint, officially died. Who knew that it’s replacement,”Modern Liberalism” as it was called, was diametrically the opposite? I learned this when Mary McGrory’s column appeared in the “Arizona Republic’ daily from Phoenix, that (from memory) “Modern Liberalism stands for the proposition that all human conduct should be subject to the political process.” I instantly quit being one, during my last year of a 5-year tour Army, in Cochise County, Arizona.
But digest that. Nancy Pelosi was 36 at the time. She never knew who Ayn Rand was in 1970, much less her book about her “type” in her exposition about the class-sets behind the Berkeley student takeovers in ’65, and then, in the same volume, in her description of the Comprachicos cult of the 17th century, who stole children then turned them into side-show freaks for sale to circuses. (Rand’s book was Return of the Primitive, the Anti-Industrial Revolution, written largely in 1970, and I strongly recommended it, though I’m still not an Ayn Rand political philosophy fan.) Miss Rand simply defined Pelosi (and thousands more from the 60s, as a type, never knowing what type type would morph into three generations later. I had seen this morphing from liberalism since Earth Day, which also happened in 1970 although at 25, how was I to recognize it, either? Rand simply defined the bratling sub-culture process in its infancy, first generation, never living to see it beyond GenX.
(Jim Clyburn is also of interest, too, because, since I’ve heard him speak, and knowing he is the son of fire-breathing preacher, and had only one wife, of 59 years, and was a big follower of Dr King, is probably still, down deep, a classical liberal, and only allowed himself to become the House Negro when all the lesser House Negroes had passed on. (The position does pay well.) Of the entire group of Democrat leadership he is likely the only one who believes there will be a Final Accounting, while Nancy Pelosi likely boozed that notion out of her mind decades ago.)
Next, of the Boomer branch of the Democrat Party, none had served in the military, nor had their fathers, excepting Hillary’s father, Hugh, who served in the Navy in WWII. The rest had no direct “patriot-connection” with America.
Note also the Baby Boomer Democrat Adam Schiff came from a family that never even started from the bottom, and had no incentive to ever “be American”. His family ancestors were bankers assigned here by a European bank to aide Woodrow Wilson in designing how best to spend all that great wealth our new industrial giants had begin to accumulate in the Gilded Age of the post-Civil War era. His line was always raised in an elevated class strata.
But of the larger American general population, some Silent Generation and almost all Baby Boomers were largely the children of World War II, so their fathers and mothers provided specially-molded shoulders to stand on, a Depression and a world war, having paid a high price for the benefit. So while, whether their fathers came home to use the GI Bill to go to college, as both my dad and father-in-law did, or simply got a job on the production line at the Chrysler plant near Detroit, and joined a union, or just went back the farm, they all shared a common bond about God and Country, and Family. So while labor voted Democrat and business voted Republican they still shared a common vision of who they were as Americans.
Then came the Gen X-ers, (my children) who, while not as numerous as the WWII generation, became the children of the Vietnam War generation…but more importantly, while their WWII generation grandparents were still alive. For the most part, in culture, family and God, the generational American handshake was still intact.
But Gen X-er’s too had their own Pearl Harbor, on 9/11 (I talked to both my sons on that day), but seemingly endless Middle Eastern wars followed with mission creep, losing their purpose and much of their patriotism. Even though wars were getting much smaller in terms of troops committed, both working class Gen X (1965-1980) and Millennials (1981-1996) have at their core a tough, pro-flag nucleus, albeit under-educated in terms of dinner table and school room history.
(I’ll get to the “Pop Culture Metric” at a later time, just know, it’s not by accident.)
The Democrats are putting their stock in Millennials, (1999-2012), much smaller in number because they’re not as interested in raising families (if it requires time, effort and personal commitment) and less than half are still old enough to vote, and Gen Alpha (2013—) still in grade school, some even getting to see their first orange and purple-haired teacher, and, if in Massachusetts or California, to be able to listen to a story being read by a over-painted cross-dresser.
I’m not sure what Democrats have planned for them.
These are the generations the Democrats must own. With enough power, they think all they have to do is wait for Gen X’ers to die out around 2055-2060, and they’ll have it made in the shade, a sea-to-shining sea” Comprachico circus.
What they don’t know is that the Natural Law of bureaucracies and Homo bureaucraticus, that their own autocracy will have been killed from within…by their own bureaucracies, aided and abetted by drug appetites and gross vanities.
We don’t have a guide book for how quickly socialist empires can fall apart when they are stoned all the time. So we are in new territory here. But is inevitable.
I prefer sooner than later.
