Differences between Trump 1 and Trump 2
As I was listening to the discussion between CBD, J.J. Sefton and Michael Walsh on this week's CutJimNewsletter Speaks podcast, I was impressed by Walsh's feeling of a great difference in the country as he returned from overseas after the election.
Do you have a similar feeling that something big has changed? One thing I noticed was that the typical lefty activist types on my social media mostly seemed to be on sort of a delayed response. They seem to have been caught by surprise by the rapid-fire actions of the President.
What reactions have you noticed? Do you have any personal reactions to share?
Have there been ideological developments since Trump 1?
This week, Powerline put up a piece from The Free Press by Matthew Continetti in its daily reading suggestions: The Prophet of Trump's Second Term
In 2000, columnist Patrick J. Buchanan defeated Donald Trump for the Reform Party nomination. But it was the property developer and television star who, more than a decade later, brought Buchanan’s populist views on trade, immigration, and nonintervention into the White House. “The ideas made it, but I didn’t,” Buchanan told journalist Tim Alberta in 2017. Such are the wages of political prophecy.
If Buchanan prefigured President Trump’s first-term nationalism, another thinker anticipated Trump’s second-term war against the administrative state and sweeping revision of American foreign policy: international relations professor Angelo Codevilla.
Codevilla died in 2021, but his ideas endure. His core insight, developed in a 2010 essay and in subsequent books and publications, was that a progressive ruling class based on a sense of social superiority had captured government and academia and large parts of the business sector and waged war against ordinary Americans to maintain and expand its power. The result, Codevilla said, was an increasingly oppressive centralized bureaucracy immune to supervision, and an American empire that failed to keep Americans safe.
Today’s political vocabulary—“ruling class,” “administrative state,” “Deep State,” “cold civil war,” “uniparty”—comes from Codevilla’s pen. One sees Codevilla’s influence everywhere, from Trump’s reversal of DEI and affirmative action to DOGE’s unspooling of USAID to reductions in the federal workforce to the foreign-policy pivot toward our own hemisphere. Friends and participants in his seminars, such as Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, State Department director of policy planning Michael Anton, and State Department counselor Michael Needham, serve in the administration. They are busy enacting his critique of America, with unpredictable consequences.
What do you think? Are there other ideas which are shaping the new administration?
The piece above is behind a paywall, but Powerline later posted a link to the fascinating long interview in Tablet in 2019 between Codevilla, a conservative Catholic, and a liberal Jew (especially appropriate today, I think).
A fun read, even if you have read it before. The author and interviewer, David Samuels, seems to be closer to "classical liberal" than to "leftist" and he prefaces his interview with Codevilla with his own theory that the American Empire is falling apart.
In the interview itself, Samuels' questions and comments are in boldface:
THE RULING ELITE
David Samuels: In 2010, you wrote an article, which then became a book, in which you predicted the rise of someone like Donald Trump as well as the political chaos and stripping away of institutional authority that we’ve lived through since. Did you think your prediction would come true so quickly?
Angelo Codevilla: I didn’t predict anything. I described a situation which had already come into existence. Namely, that the United States has developed a ruling class that sees itself as distinct from the raw masses of the rest of America. That the distinction that they saw, and which had come to exist, between these classes, comprised tastes and habits as well as ideas. Above all, that it had to do with the relative attachment, or lack thereof, of each of these classes to government.
One of the things that struck me about your original piece was your portrait of the American elite as a single class that seamlessly spans both the Democratic and Republican parties.
Of course, yes. Not in exactly the same way, though; what I said was that the Democrats were the senior partners in the ruling class. The Republicans are the junior partners.
The reason being that the American ruling class was built by or under the Democratic Party. First, under Woodrow Wilson and then later under Franklin Roosevelt. It was a ruling class that prized above all its intellectual superiority over the ruled. And that saw itself as the natural carriers of scientific knowledge, as the class that was naturally best able to run society and was therefore entitled to run society.
The Republican members of the ruling class aspire to that sort of intellectual status or reputation. And they have shared a taste of this ruling class. But they are not part of the same party, and as such, are constantly trying to get closer to the senior partners. As the junior members of the ruling class, they are not nearly as tied to government as the Democrats are. And therefore, their elite prerogatives are not safe.
You get the idea. Both men are paying attention to what the other says. Uncommon these days.
Deplorables.
Deplorables, yes. But we’re not stakeholders, we who are neither regulators nor regulated entities, but rather ordinary people. We are not parties to this covenant.
There’s a lecture given by James Wilson, the signer of the Declaration of Independence and the head of the first American law school, about the difference between American law and law everywhere else in the Western world. Elsewhere, law came from power. In America, positive law will be valid only if it was in accordance with the laws of nature and nature’s god.
But that’s not the basis of the revolt of the deplorables, or the country party, as you call it.
The basis of the revolt is simple. We realize that you hate us and therefore we hate you back. And we will take anybody, not that we found this man who fits our description, because Donald Trump didn’t fit anybody’s description of what they wanted. But we will take anybody who’ll take a swing at you.
Which is why I originally wrote at the back of that essay, that this revolution would be for the better or the worse. Because of the urgency that the country class felt. For getting out of all of this.
Here is the famous 2010 essay by Codevilla,
Americas Ruling Class
And the perils of revolution.
People who were wrong about Trump
David Strom says he was wrong about Trump's willingness to share the spotlight, and about his capacity to take on the Deep State. Read his confession.
Have there been other confessions?
The less virulent lefties on my social media are starting to catching up on DOGE with this general idea:
while the hard-core types are demanding detailed CPA accountant-type audits RIGHT NOW from DOGE, rather than a focus on money trails.
For the Weekend
In support of J.D. Vance's speech in Europe:
Post-colonial education threatens our way of life
I have run across a young woman I knew years ago who has turned hard left as a result of this kind of education. Sometimes she flips out of her rebel mode around family. It's odd.
From Michael Smith:
It is not a coincidence that increase in the number of federal agencies (currently over 450) and the subsequent rise in the amount of administrative law (90,000 pages or so in the Federal Register) is inversely proportional to the will of Congress to actually do its job.
The mind boggles when you add in the NGOs and lobbyist for, say, every city and little town in the country.
A couple of quotes which are very pertinent to this moment
(translation not verified), h/t Michael Smith
Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all."
~ Frederic Bastiat (or attributed to Bastiat)
How did politicians ever come to believe this weird idea that the law could be made to produce what it does not contain — the wealth, science, and religion that, in a positive sense, constitute prosperity?
~ Frederic Bastiat (or attributed to Bastiat)
Music
Vivaldi's Four Seasons: Winter
Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.
This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.
Links to Past Threads: I've been out of commission for a while. Thanks to the COBS who filled in.
January 25, President Trump Goes to Hollywood
February 1, Chuck Schumer POS Extraordinaire (Your Thread Before The Garden Puttering Thread) (Misanthropic Humanitarian)
February 8, Fusion Energy Hustlers Keep Seducing Southern Governors (Buck Throckmorton)
Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.