I consider myself a libertarian (or did) and for me, it's not just that the non-enforcement of immigration laws is a challenge to legal order, it's the rapid addition of large numbers of people who have very different conceptions of what the legal order is.
One of the strengths of conservatism is that (properly understood) it recognizes the shallowness of democratic principles without the grounding of culture, education, and appreciation. To be more than a slogan, a population has to be educated and taught to live the rule of law. This is why the Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years. Of course, this isn't any new information, it's literally in one of the oldest books ever written. It's not a complicated political theory, it's just one that people don't want to believe, no matter the fact that it's proven true time after time.
I am used to no comfort zone as I am an eco-con; and I have been a conservative possibly longer than anyone else commenting here. How I came to be one - was perhaps different also.
I had a pretty viscerally negative reaction to the modern world as a teenager. I was maybe the youngest misanthrope ever, and nature was virtually all I cared about (then and now). Ed Abbey, David Brower, Aldo Leopoldo acolyte.
I did not connect this with politics as I had no politics. It was not discussed in my family. We were not big talkers. My father’s great passion in life has been the quest to pay as little taxes as possible and I knew that he and my mother voted Republican. The subject never came up otherwise. I imagine this would sound healthy to some, especially in the current climate, but together with my loathing of the GOP (surpassed only by my … well you get the picture) it has left me with a disdain for a politics (if it can be called that) so narrowly personal.
I then went off to college and managed to get knocked up by likely the only pro-life boy on campus.
He was not religious - had perhaps never been to church. He simply felt the world is better on balance if this life is brought into it.
He’d been raised by sorta-hippies. His father in particular was too smart to have ever been super-political but he wanted to have fun and quite naturally fell in with the Students for a Democratic Society types of the 60s youth quake. But he realized something. He realized that what went on on campus was not very real to him; what felt real, and worthwhile and “good” in some permanent way, was returning on weekends to his family’s land, where he liked to fish in the pond, which would eventually be an island amid a big lignite coal dig, and think. And he began to understand what he valued.
Life is to be preserved; life is better than no life; quite naturally he became an environmentalist and so they all did.
And in time they understood as few other conservationists did, that this was a deep cultural matter, to which politics is utterly subordinate - but for which politics will occasionally supply bright lines (which we are usually on the losing side of).
I didn’t learn anything during my brief time in college but I met the right people somehow. Not exactly joking when I say that if we all died in a car crash, there would be no conservatives left in my state.
There is a microcosm of the problem for the GOP I saw recently.
DeSantis, who has so far run a campaign that offers no vision of what he would do as president as far as I can tell, decided to strip voucher funding from four Florida schools for "ties to the Chinese Communist Party". The claim seems rather ridiculous (the evidence seems to be that a good number of Asians go there), but even if remotely true seems like the most asinine of things to do.
School Choice is DeSantis's singular accomplishment as governor (COVID is over). I would expect it to be the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. And yet he has placed in every parents mind that their kids voucher could be taken away from political culture war nonsense (a big reason they would want to leave the public schools) on a whim for a headline.
You could add other things (switching from a 15 week ban for a 6 week ban for no reason), but at least that has some important moral implications and is a long standing party interest. This voucher stuff is just childlish.
I don't think these people have a clue what they want to country to look like. Their focus groups give them some buzzwords and they regurgitate those buzzwords and that's it.
Don Surber, my go-to pro Trump news blogger, points out that the GOP Speaker fight is needed. To fight the frequent Republicans promise many conservative things but deliver almost none. Where is the release of the J6 tapes? Which will likely show mostly peaceful protests, plus instigators of violence like Roy Epps, who were not imprisoned nor charged nor even heavily investigated.
A lot liberal Dem parents are unhappy with the Dems, and senile Biden.
Most college educated Reps, including me, feel Trump the person is lousy. But so many, including Kling, refuse to compare Trump’s personal flaws against senile Biden, lying Hillary, or even narcissistic Obama. Trump’s not much worse. But his policies are much better.
AND, as did victorious Grant, he fights.
He’s rich enough so it’s quite difficult to economically destroy him with lawfare, but it’s increasingly clear the corrupt Dems are trying to. And, they are willing to do it to any America First patriot / nationalist. Similarly, it’s not Trump Derangement Syndrome, so much as Democrat Derangement Syndrome in opposition to any effective or popular Republican: Jordan, DeSantis, Kavanaugh, Pallin, or Bush, the first named. Derangement Syndrome target. Tho the Dem hatred was also directed T Reagan, Nixon (ousted by the FBI for lesser activities than Obama did) and even Goldwater, who opposed JimCrow law racism, but also opposed th 1964 Civil Rights Act … that ate the Constitution.
Republicans in power should declare Republicans a protected minority in academia, law schools, media, and NGOs, and cut Federal funds to the orgs that have been discriminating against Republicans. Diversity and Inclusion should mean Dems and Reps, like in Congress.
“Regardless of what speed limits are on the books, I am angered by the current lack of enforcement.” No. Rather, we should wink at the non-enforcement of bad laws.
"I believe that the institutional dominance of the left can be changed: we can turn the tide against chaotic immigration*, urban degeneracy, DEI, viewpoint suppression, and gender craziness. I do not believe that we can successfully retreat from globalization or innovation."
Well said, but "turning the tide" means having an actual position on issues. Merit based immigration + border enforcement and YINBY-friendly land use and building code reform are the easy ones. How we should treat non-cis gender people is still to be worked out. Excesses of and high cost means of achieving DEI are the vices; in moderation DEI are virtues. Nor should we retreat from our traditions of increasing openness to the world economy and "Promethean" innovation. And we certainly need to be more conservative about the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere; eventually we will need to reduce it.
Is the idea that standing at a fast food station, or standing around in Walmart, or running all day delivering packages - is a relative win compared to working “on an assembly line”?
A strange thing is we’re letting in all these people who supposedly will all go to work - and yet even in a city quite close to the border, there are all these shortages. Help wanted signs abound. You go in a restaurant, irrespective of quality, and are met with an empty counter, or apologies for not having enough staff. Sometimes there’s a sign saying they had to close temporarily for this reason.
I seldom eat out but have observed this when tagging along with my husband, who likes tacos and hamburgers.
The exceptions appear to have a certain cool “buzz” around working there, usually regional chains.
So why is this link between mass influx of immigrants, and labor, broken? Are those coming in - not coming for jobs?
You seem to assume that there are diminishing returns WTR "better life-ness." This would depend, I think, on how the immigrants are selected and in what numbers.
That's exactly the problem, no one is selecting any migrants or their numbers. Making my assumption true is precisely what open borders folks are advocating for.
Very good reaction to these pieces. I would add that none of these ideologies actually need more ideology creators. If you want more industrial activity, for example, there are lots of opportunities in the space, but they all require boring, hard, and technical work. Ideological blocks are not really the issue except at a higher level, and the defunct nature of Congress means that most of those "ideology" jobs are more than adequately fulfilled by, say, the people who wrote the amicus briefs for Loper Bright.
If you really want to ideology your way to industrial reform, we need a vast, teeming army of people applying to the jobs in the federal bureaucracy and excellent people in the field ready, willing, and able to lead each relevant federal bureaucracy (even if it is to dismantle or obstruct its operations). You don't need more article-writers; all the relevant articles and books on this topic have already been written. The left does this (but badly) and mistreats the majority of its bureaucratic foot soldiers, who wind up living miserable, pathetic, and unfulfilling lives. The few who live large are not representative of the masses who live puny.
Corralling large numbers of people who disagree and are not associated either formally or informally into vague "isms" and "ist" terms is unproductive. It's hard to generalize about, say, the Cato Institute or even AEI in a way that captured all the internal disagreement, even if you could create a reasonably accurate generalization of either think tank. Something like Compact, which collages together many writers of different ideologies, is not generalizable. You can try to trace a vector on the dots created by each individual author, but that vector is just an average of many disparate dots rather than a corporate direction. For example, it makes more sense to poke at Oren Cass and his work as an individual than to gesture vaguely at "restorationists." It's authorial passive-aggression to invent a group of guys and then to attack that vague association that does not exist.
"The left does this (but badly) and mistreats the majority of its bureaucratic foot soldiers, who wind up living miserable, pathetic, and unfulfilling lives."
I live among these people, they are my friends and neighbors.
Miserable, pathetic, unfulfilled?
Sure. Most of them at least 50% on at least one of those measures.
Mistreated? Hmm ... depends what you mean.
Do you mean being treated with the respect and dignity according to the most minimal standards of basic human decency? Oh, yeah, in that case, definite mistreatment as the rule with few exceptions.
Materially though? They are doing ok. Not so well lately, what with the inflation, and the housing prices, and the mortgage rates, and the obnoxious everything-tipping culture, and have you seen what they are billing you now to charge up both your Teslas?
Around Washington, a lot better, but at the state level, by many of those measures they are not doing so hot (thinking particularly of teachers and teacher-like creatures).
Arnold, the accommodationist* Libertarian supporting limited economic restoration, wanting more generous immigration but also better enforcement of whatever legal rules there are. (* withdrawalist with progressive friends/ neighbors/ synagogue and willing to denigrate Trump. Far more, over the last 3 years of lousy govt policy, than Biden, whose policies are causing such crises.)
While I share many similar dreams of economic restoration, it’s clear to me that we need more religious based morality focused on behavior, not sex or race. In the short term, nothing else comes close to Christian Nationalism, which is rejected by so many elite, in practice. Tho most elite, most of the time, support most Christian virtues in their own personal lives. Not so different from Jewish virtues.
Is Arnold willing to support the same immigration systems for the USA, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, Iran? I am, strict enforcement of whatever legal border rules are decided upon by democratically chosen Representatives. Trump is right that we don’t have this in America now.
Patriotic nationalism is somewhat needed as the motivation for sacrificing one’s own hyper-individualist desires for what is good for the local and national social good.
Good “Somewhere” people have strong feelings for their country; many or most “Anywhere” cosmopolitan folk don’t, and often are even against their own country’s faults.
Many cosmo Slovaks leave for the EU or … America. Few American critics (/haters) have left for anywhere else-because they don’t see a better life for themselves in any other country. I did, based on falling in love with a patriotic Slovak woman. We’ve often been asked why don’t we go to America? Because of family.
It might be that love of family is related to love of country, nationalism.
National aggression is the problem, the drunk like vice of too much nationalism. Too much alcohol is also a personal problem.
The fundamental tension I see is with the industrial base and tech. Marc Andreeson should be the conservative pied piper but tech has a problem beyond information control. The jobs it creates only go to highly educated people. In the end the winning candidate is going to fight wokeness, spend more on the military and industrial policy, engage in some currency controls, and refuse to raise taxes or cut entitlements. The best policy in my mind would be to raise taxes, cut entitlements at least mildly, engage in currency controls, and keep other spending pretty steady and of course fight wokeness.
Accomodationists are simply moral cowards- no other word suffices. Withdrawalists are a bit naive- the Left will never allow secession or any kind of national divorce, and the recalcitrant red states of today will be brought to heel within 10 years. Restorationists are hopeless because their voters are now outnumbered by immigrants and their progeny that have imported over the last 50 years. Nihilists recognize the problem, but they are vastly outnumbered, and will eventually end up in gulags inside of a generation.
A sketch of the next 20 years:
(1) Biden/Whatever Democrat wins next year's election, retaking the House and holding the Senate.
(2) The Supreme Court gets 3-5 new justices by 2026.
(3) The 2nd Amendment becomes null and void by 2030 as the federal government outlaws the purchase of firearms and begins the slower process of confiscating guns outstanding. This process is more or less complete by 2036.
(4) All cash transactions are outlawed and all money is electronic and under heavy government control.
(5) Large-scale infrastructure failures become more and more numerous as the human capital of the Boomers and GenExers dies off and is replaced by gender studies and journalism graduates.
The engineered transition from affordable and reliable energy based on fossil fuels to relatively expensive and intermittent low-density "Green Energy" (solar and wind power) will also contribute to large-scale infrastructure failures, as well as environmental degradation.
There is a fashionable play going around the elites-public high school called "The Trial" or something like that, about some dystopian future of the today's kids growing up and bringing today's adults up on criminal charges of felony climate change in the first degree and of leaving them to squeak out bare existence in the Mad Max Wastelands or whatever which was totally avoidable but which we intentionally decided to cause anyway because we figured it was a price worth them paying in the future just so we could play one extra hole of golf today.
Knowing it's pointless to discuss anything on the merits regarding the actual climate, I said, "They should also charge us with felony deficits in the first degree, where our guilt is much more certain because we cannot plausibly even pretend about uncertain future consequences, because those consequences are literally written in the form of clear text promises to repay with interest on all the debts we accumulated because we refused to cut our spending even in the good times!"
The reaction I got was that, apparently, the future inquisition will grant us a pardon for that, because, while a crime that harmed them just as much as anything else we did to them, it was done with the blessing of the progressives and with the best of intentions, and that's all that really matters.
You (and Arnold) are more charitable than I am. I go out of my way to trigger climate change cultists. I query them on what sacrifices in lifestyle they have made to reduce their carbon footprints, and then recommend that they forgo utilities and other benefits of civilization by emulating homeless folks who camp outdoors. I should think that approach would be very effective for this particular 'elite' target audience.
I consider myself a libertarian (or did) and for me, it's not just that the non-enforcement of immigration laws is a challenge to legal order, it's the rapid addition of large numbers of people who have very different conceptions of what the legal order is.
One of the strengths of conservatism is that (properly understood) it recognizes the shallowness of democratic principles without the grounding of culture, education, and appreciation. To be more than a slogan, a population has to be educated and taught to live the rule of law. This is why the Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years. Of course, this isn't any new information, it's literally in one of the oldest books ever written. It's not a complicated political theory, it's just one that people don't want to believe, no matter the fact that it's proven true time after time.
I am used to no comfort zone as I am an eco-con; and I have been a conservative possibly longer than anyone else commenting here. How I came to be one - was perhaps different also.
I had a pretty viscerally negative reaction to the modern world as a teenager. I was maybe the youngest misanthrope ever, and nature was virtually all I cared about (then and now). Ed Abbey, David Brower, Aldo Leopoldo acolyte.
I did not connect this with politics as I had no politics. It was not discussed in my family. We were not big talkers. My father’s great passion in life has been the quest to pay as little taxes as possible and I knew that he and my mother voted Republican. The subject never came up otherwise. I imagine this would sound healthy to some, especially in the current climate, but together with my loathing of the GOP (surpassed only by my … well you get the picture) it has left me with a disdain for a politics (if it can be called that) so narrowly personal.
I then went off to college and managed to get knocked up by likely the only pro-life boy on campus.
He was not religious - had perhaps never been to church. He simply felt the world is better on balance if this life is brought into it.
He’d been raised by sorta-hippies. His father in particular was too smart to have ever been super-political but he wanted to have fun and quite naturally fell in with the Students for a Democratic Society types of the 60s youth quake. But he realized something. He realized that what went on on campus was not very real to him; what felt real, and worthwhile and “good” in some permanent way, was returning on weekends to his family’s land, where he liked to fish in the pond, which would eventually be an island amid a big lignite coal dig, and think. And he began to understand what he valued.
Life is to be preserved; life is better than no life; quite naturally he became an environmentalist and so they all did.
And in time they understood as few other conservationists did, that this was a deep cultural matter, to which politics is utterly subordinate - but for which politics will occasionally supply bright lines (which we are usually on the losing side of).
I didn’t learn anything during my brief time in college but I met the right people somehow. Not exactly joking when I say that if we all died in a car crash, there would be no conservatives left in my state.
There is a microcosm of the problem for the GOP I saw recently.
DeSantis, who has so far run a campaign that offers no vision of what he would do as president as far as I can tell, decided to strip voucher funding from four Florida schools for "ties to the Chinese Communist Party". The claim seems rather ridiculous (the evidence seems to be that a good number of Asians go there), but even if remotely true seems like the most asinine of things to do.
School Choice is DeSantis's singular accomplishment as governor (COVID is over). I would expect it to be the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. And yet he has placed in every parents mind that their kids voucher could be taken away from political culture war nonsense (a big reason they would want to leave the public schools) on a whim for a headline.
You could add other things (switching from a 15 week ban for a 6 week ban for no reason), but at least that has some important moral implications and is a long standing party interest. This voucher stuff is just childlish.
I don't think these people have a clue what they want to country to look like. Their focus groups give them some buzzwords and they regurgitate those buzzwords and that's it.
"I don't think these people have a clue what they want to country to look like."
Do you mean the GOP candidates or the GOP voters? A strong case could be made for both.
Don Surber, my go-to pro Trump news blogger, points out that the GOP Speaker fight is needed. To fight the frequent Republicans promise many conservative things but deliver almost none. Where is the release of the J6 tapes? Which will likely show mostly peaceful protests, plus instigators of violence like Roy Epps, who were not imprisoned nor charged nor even heavily investigated.
A lot liberal Dem parents are unhappy with the Dems, and senile Biden.
https://donsurber.substack.com/p/speakership-is-the-fight-we-need
Most college educated Reps, including me, feel Trump the person is lousy. But so many, including Kling, refuse to compare Trump’s personal flaws against senile Biden, lying Hillary, or even narcissistic Obama. Trump’s not much worse. But his policies are much better.
AND, as did victorious Grant, he fights.
He’s rich enough so it’s quite difficult to economically destroy him with lawfare, but it’s increasingly clear the corrupt Dems are trying to. And, they are willing to do it to any America First patriot / nationalist. Similarly, it’s not Trump Derangement Syndrome, so much as Democrat Derangement Syndrome in opposition to any effective or popular Republican: Jordan, DeSantis, Kavanaugh, Pallin, or Bush, the first named. Derangement Syndrome target. Tho the Dem hatred was also directed T Reagan, Nixon (ousted by the FBI for lesser activities than Obama did) and even Goldwater, who opposed JimCrow law racism, but also opposed th 1964 Civil Rights Act … that ate the Constitution.
Republicans in power should declare Republicans a protected minority in academia, law schools, media, and NGOs, and cut Federal funds to the orgs that have been discriminating against Republicans. Diversity and Inclusion should mean Dems and Reps, like in Congress.
“Regardless of what speed limits are on the books, I am angered by the current lack of enforcement.” No. Rather, we should wink at the non-enforcement of bad laws.
"I believe that the institutional dominance of the left can be changed: we can turn the tide against chaotic immigration*, urban degeneracy, DEI, viewpoint suppression, and gender craziness. I do not believe that we can successfully retreat from globalization or innovation."
Well said, but "turning the tide" means having an actual position on issues. Merit based immigration + border enforcement and YINBY-friendly land use and building code reform are the easy ones. How we should treat non-cis gender people is still to be worked out. Excesses of and high cost means of achieving DEI are the vices; in moderation DEI are virtues. Nor should we retreat from our traditions of increasing openness to the world economy and "Promethean" innovation. And we certainly need to be more conservative about the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere; eventually we will need to reduce it.
Is the idea that standing at a fast food station, or standing around in Walmart, or running all day delivering packages - is a relative win compared to working “on an assembly line”?
A strange thing is we’re letting in all these people who supposedly will all go to work - and yet even in a city quite close to the border, there are all these shortages. Help wanted signs abound. You go in a restaurant, irrespective of quality, and are met with an empty counter, or apologies for not having enough staff. Sometimes there’s a sign saying they had to close temporarily for this reason.
I seldom eat out but have observed this when tagging along with my husband, who likes tacos and hamburgers.
The exceptions appear to have a certain cool “buzz” around working there, usually regional chains.
So why is this link between mass influx of immigrants, and labor, broken? Are those coming in - not coming for jobs?
"Are those coming in - not coming for jobs?"
Nope.
It's not jobs. There are jobs where they came from.
Econ-101.
But the pay is lousy, and the country is a mess.
They are coming in for "a better life". And if they can, they will keep coming in until life here is no better than where they come from.
Econ-101.
You seem to assume that there are diminishing returns WTR "better life-ness." This would depend, I think, on how the immigrants are selected and in what numbers.
That's exactly the problem, no one is selecting any migrants or their numbers. Making my assumption true is precisely what open borders folks are advocating for.
Very good reaction to these pieces. I would add that none of these ideologies actually need more ideology creators. If you want more industrial activity, for example, there are lots of opportunities in the space, but they all require boring, hard, and technical work. Ideological blocks are not really the issue except at a higher level, and the defunct nature of Congress means that most of those "ideology" jobs are more than adequately fulfilled by, say, the people who wrote the amicus briefs for Loper Bright.
If you really want to ideology your way to industrial reform, we need a vast, teeming army of people applying to the jobs in the federal bureaucracy and excellent people in the field ready, willing, and able to lead each relevant federal bureaucracy (even if it is to dismantle or obstruct its operations). You don't need more article-writers; all the relevant articles and books on this topic have already been written. The left does this (but badly) and mistreats the majority of its bureaucratic foot soldiers, who wind up living miserable, pathetic, and unfulfilling lives. The few who live large are not representative of the masses who live puny.
Corralling large numbers of people who disagree and are not associated either formally or informally into vague "isms" and "ist" terms is unproductive. It's hard to generalize about, say, the Cato Institute or even AEI in a way that captured all the internal disagreement, even if you could create a reasonably accurate generalization of either think tank. Something like Compact, which collages together many writers of different ideologies, is not generalizable. You can try to trace a vector on the dots created by each individual author, but that vector is just an average of many disparate dots rather than a corporate direction. For example, it makes more sense to poke at Oren Cass and his work as an individual than to gesture vaguely at "restorationists." It's authorial passive-aggression to invent a group of guys and then to attack that vague association that does not exist.
"The left does this (but badly) and mistreats the majority of its bureaucratic foot soldiers, who wind up living miserable, pathetic, and unfulfilling lives."
I live among these people, they are my friends and neighbors.
Miserable, pathetic, unfulfilled?
Sure. Most of them at least 50% on at least one of those measures.
Mistreated? Hmm ... depends what you mean.
Do you mean being treated with the respect and dignity according to the most minimal standards of basic human decency? Oh, yeah, in that case, definite mistreatment as the rule with few exceptions.
Materially though? They are doing ok. Not so well lately, what with the inflation, and the housing prices, and the mortgage rates, and the obnoxious everything-tipping culture, and have you seen what they are billing you now to charge up both your Teslas?
Around Washington, a lot better, but at the state level, by many of those measures they are not doing so hot (thinking particularly of teachers and teacher-like creatures).
Arnold, the accommodationist* Libertarian supporting limited economic restoration, wanting more generous immigration but also better enforcement of whatever legal rules there are. (* withdrawalist with progressive friends/ neighbors/ synagogue and willing to denigrate Trump. Far more, over the last 3 years of lousy govt policy, than Biden, whose policies are causing such crises.)
While I share many similar dreams of economic restoration, it’s clear to me that we need more religious based morality focused on behavior, not sex or race. In the short term, nothing else comes close to Christian Nationalism, which is rejected by so many elite, in practice. Tho most elite, most of the time, support most Christian virtues in their own personal lives. Not so different from Jewish virtues.
Is Arnold willing to support the same immigration systems for the USA, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, Iran? I am, strict enforcement of whatever legal border rules are decided upon by democratically chosen Representatives. Trump is right that we don’t have this in America now.
The Christian part is OK; its the "nationalism" that is problematic.
Patriotic nationalism is somewhat needed as the motivation for sacrificing one’s own hyper-individualist desires for what is good for the local and national social good.
Good “Somewhere” people have strong feelings for their country; many or most “Anywhere” cosmopolitan folk don’t, and often are even against their own country’s faults.
Many cosmo Slovaks leave for the EU or … America. Few American critics (/haters) have left for anywhere else-because they don’t see a better life for themselves in any other country. I did, based on falling in love with a patriotic Slovak woman. We’ve often been asked why don’t we go to America? Because of family.
It might be that love of family is related to love of country, nationalism.
National aggression is the problem, the drunk like vice of too much nationalism. Too much alcohol is also a personal problem.
The fundamental tension I see is with the industrial base and tech. Marc Andreeson should be the conservative pied piper but tech has a problem beyond information control. The jobs it creates only go to highly educated people. In the end the winning candidate is going to fight wokeness, spend more on the military and industrial policy, engage in some currency controls, and refuse to raise taxes or cut entitlements. The best policy in my mind would be to raise taxes, cut entitlements at least mildly, engage in currency controls, and keep other spending pretty steady and of course fight wokeness.
Accomodationists are simply moral cowards- no other word suffices. Withdrawalists are a bit naive- the Left will never allow secession or any kind of national divorce, and the recalcitrant red states of today will be brought to heel within 10 years. Restorationists are hopeless because their voters are now outnumbered by immigrants and their progeny that have imported over the last 50 years. Nihilists recognize the problem, but they are vastly outnumbered, and will eventually end up in gulags inside of a generation.
A sketch of the next 20 years:
(1) Biden/Whatever Democrat wins next year's election, retaking the House and holding the Senate.
(2) The Supreme Court gets 3-5 new justices by 2026.
(3) The 2nd Amendment becomes null and void by 2030 as the federal government outlaws the purchase of firearms and begins the slower process of confiscating guns outstanding. This process is more or less complete by 2036.
(4) All cash transactions are outlawed and all money is electronic and under heavy government control.
(5) Large-scale infrastructure failures become more and more numerous as the human capital of the Boomers and GenExers dies off and is replaced by gender studies and journalism graduates.
Have a nice day.
You forgot to add Have a Nice Day
Fixed it.
I'll settle for #1. :)
The engineered transition from affordable and reliable energy based on fossil fuels to relatively expensive and intermittent low-density "Green Energy" (solar and wind power) will also contribute to large-scale infrastructure failures, as well as environmental degradation.
If we don't tax net emissions of CO2, high-cost measure to reduce emissions will no doubt come about.
There is a fashionable play going around the elites-public high school called "The Trial" or something like that, about some dystopian future of the today's kids growing up and bringing today's adults up on criminal charges of felony climate change in the first degree and of leaving them to squeak out bare existence in the Mad Max Wastelands or whatever which was totally avoidable but which we intentionally decided to cause anyway because we figured it was a price worth them paying in the future just so we could play one extra hole of golf today.
Knowing it's pointless to discuss anything on the merits regarding the actual climate, I said, "They should also charge us with felony deficits in the first degree, where our guilt is much more certain because we cannot plausibly even pretend about uncertain future consequences, because those consequences are literally written in the form of clear text promises to repay with interest on all the debts we accumulated because we refused to cut our spending even in the good times!"
The reaction I got was that, apparently, the future inquisition will grant us a pardon for that, because, while a crime that harmed them just as much as anything else we did to them, it was done with the blessing of the progressives and with the best of intentions, and that's all that really matters.
You (and Arnold) are more charitable than I am. I go out of my way to trigger climate change cultists. I query them on what sacrifices in lifestyle they have made to reduce their carbon footprints, and then recommend that they forgo utilities and other benefits of civilization by emulating homeless folks who camp outdoors. I should think that approach would be very effective for this particular 'elite' target audience.