"Holy smokes… Whoa… We're living in A Different World…"
— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) February 10, 2025
Trump's had a net positive approval rating for all 21 days of his 2nd term vs. just 11 days during his entire 1st term!
Big reason? 70% say he's doing what he promised vs. just 46% who felt that way by April 2017. pic.twitter.com/Tj3jSAv0rL
It is Year Zero in Washington.
The New Deal era liberal order is being aggressively dismantled.
WSJ:
“I saw a broad and growing sense in Washington that American domestic politics, or at least that part of its politics that comes from Washington, is at a similar inflection point. That the second rise of Donald Trump is a total break with the past—that stable order, healthy expectations, the honoring of a certain old moderation, and strict adherence to form and the law aren’t being “traduced”; they are ending. That something new has begun. People aren’t sure they’re right about this and no one has a name for the big break, but they know we have entered something different—something more emotional, more tribal and visceral.
There is the strong man, and the cult of personality, and the leg-breakers back home who keep the congressional troops in line. In 2017, a lot of people who watch closely and think deeply, thought: We’re having an odd moment, but we’ll snap back into place. Now they are thinking something new has begun. American politics was a broad avenue with opposing lanes for a very long time, at least a century, and now we have turned and are on a different avenue, on a different slope, with different shadows.
There’s a sense we’re living through times we’ll understand only in retrospect. But the collapse of the old international order and the break in America’s old domestic order are shaping this young century. …”
Apparently, I am not alone in thinking what we are witnessing is the death of the old liberal regime created during the Great Depression and World War II, and the construction of its replacement.
“Americans are prone to venerate our Constitution, mythologizing the founding generation as uniquely wise, and our subsequent constitutional history as a process of evolution toward an ever more perfect union.
But American constitutional history is far more fraught, its evolution a kind of punctuated equilibrium marked by mass extinction of prior forms and precedents. Each of these moments has reshaped the way our Constitution works in fundamental ways, providing a new framework for normal politics for a new era.
The scope of President Trump’s challenge to the existing constitutional order — largely through a blitzkrieg of executive orders, many of them in blatant disregard of established precedent and legislation — suggests we may be in the process of another such discontinuous and disruptive moment.
The question is whether it will transform our constitutional order fruitfully yet again, or accelerate a final degeneration into Caesarism. …
Mr. Trump’s challenge is strikingly different. He aims to unbind the executive from constraints imposed by the other branches and the normal process of administrative lawmaking. To stand, these changes will require the other players in our constitutional order to accept that the president by himself can make changes of such magnitude. That would be a fourth constitutional revolution. …”
Liberals are screaming about authoritarianism, but the public doesn’t seem to be listening.
“With the leader of a failed coup back in the White House and pursuing an unprecedented assault on the constitutional order, many Americans are starting to wrap their mind around what authoritarianism could look like in America. If they have a hard time imagining something like the single-party or military regimes of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, or more modern regimes like those in China or Russia, that is with good reason. A full-scale dictatorship in which elections are meaningless and regime opponents are locked up, exiled, or killed remains highly unlikely in America.
But that doesn’t mean the country won’t experience authoritarianism in some form. Rather than fascism or single-party dictatorship, the United States is sliding toward a more 21st-century model of autocracy: competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbent abuse of power systematically tilts the playing field against the opposition. In his first weeks back in office, Donald Trump has already moved strongly in this direction. He is attempting to purge the civil service and directing politicized investigations against rivals. He has pardoned violent paramilitary supporters and is seeking to unilaterally seize control over spending from Congress. This is a coordinated effort to dig in, cement power, and weaken rivals. …”
More on the “constitutional crisis.”
“There is no universally accepted definition of a constitutional crisis, but legal scholars agree about some of its characteristics. It is generally the product of presidential defiance of laws and judicial rulings. It is not binary: It is a slope, not a switch. It can be cumulative, and once one starts, it can get much worse.
It can also be obvious, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.
“We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis right now,” he said on Friday. “There have been so many unconstitutional and illegal actions in the first 18 days of the Trump presidency. We never have seen anything like this.” …”
Joe Biden’s handlers tried and failed to do something similar from the Left.
There are two major differences though: the first is that Republicans have a supermajority on the Supreme Court, which means that any attempt at regime change from Trump and the Right is much more likely to be ratified by the federal courts, and the second is that there is no comparison between the dynamic and aggressive leadership of Trump and his cult of personality and the frailty of Joe Biden.
Note: Lincoln and FDR’s regime changes were ratified by the Supreme Court. Like his predecessors, Trump changed the balance of power on the Supreme Court in his first term.
Nazis and Russians lurk behind every router.
Moscow by spring, Beijing by summer.
When Trump makes Gazavegas, you’ll get a cut.
All clowny aside did ya hear about Josh Shapiro in on the PA Trump assassination attempt?
Yea, the Marxist/Jacobin faction of ZOG is having a fight with the Zionist wing, but at least you aren’t auntie semitic.
Yes, if Shapiro was in on the assassination attempt I can’t imagine that Trump is not going to get revenge. One can’t blame him for that, irrespective of his jewfellations.
I would agree with some of what Trump is doing, deport every damn wetback that can be found, should have been done a long time ago. A fag isn’t a girl because he says he is. If Trump wanted to fire the FBI people who raided his home, tried to destroy him politically and embarrass him in front of wife, I have no problem. The same thing with those CIA sobs and the Russian dossier. But firing every federal employee, and shutting whole agencies because you don’t like them, is not the same thing. Presidents don’t have that kind of authority, and they shouldn’t. He’s the President, not the emperor of the United States.
Democrats should be fighting back against this, but they don’t seem to be able to do anything except defend criminals in the country illegally and promote perversion.
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Whitney Webb
@_whitneywebb
If you think the “deep state” was defeated and all you had to do was pull a lever for the right team and you can just watch as everything is made magically better and do nothing but “trust the plan” and “enjoy the show”, you probably confused what “deep state” actually means with the wing of the uniparty that lost last year’s election.
Mass complacency at a time of drastic, disruptive change is not a recipe for success. Vigilance and scrutiny matter, as does taking responsibility for your own life and community instead of placing all of your hope for a better life and world in the government. Many of the people who used to distrust the system the most (and who also have most of the citizen-held weapons) have been led to believe that they can fully trust everything happening and can let their guard down against tyranny.
They may not physically come for your guns, but they can still attempt to cognitively disarm the American people.
4:48 PM · Feb 10, 2025
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Whitney Webb
@_whitneywebb
I also find the narratives that deviating from the “trust the plan” stance is deemed “blackpilling” and as peddling “paralytic” “hopelessness” very telling, as it frames “trusting the plan” as the only solution for facing the problems of today.
Even though I do offer solutions that I think are helpful, I am still often told I offer none because “trust the plan” is not one of them. If “trusting the plan” is the only way to be considered an optimist or solution-minded person to you, the scope of solutions you are willing to consider is both extremely myopic and q-flavored.
4:48 PM · Feb 10, 2025
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Whitney Webb
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6h
If you think the “deep state” was defeated and all you had to do was pull a lever for the right team and you can just watch as everything is made magically better and do nothing but “trust the plan” and “enjoy the show”, you probably confused what “deep state” actually means with
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The Macro Explorer
@macroexplorer_
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6h
A part of the human condition is this savior complex. Humans need a ‘savior,’ and politicians (along with religions) tap into that.
It’s ultimately about control though.
And to get people to abdicate responsibility. Learned helplessness.
Whitney Webb
@_whitneywebb
i think really it is that people have been culturally conditioned to want and feel that they need a savior and to outsource their power to others for centuries. if people could feel empowered to change things, they would change, but many people feel that the only way to change things is to work within a corrupt system and vote for 1 of 2 parties every 4 years. that is culturally induced, not a part of the original human condition imo
4:52 PM · Feb 10, 2025
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She’s correct, as she often is. There are already too many declarations of victory in this battle – assuming its even a real battle. She and others are correct in their efforts to sift reality from created fantasies. For example, regardless of the fact that USAID was created by EO and should therefore be abolished by same, it has not actually been abolished but moved to become a section of the State Dept. This enabled blackrobes to issue rulings that Trump could not turn off the spigot and fire the entrenched employees at will.
Likewise catch and release has not be stopped. As I have mentioned numerous times before, rounding up masses of people is inefficient. Yes it has to be done for the violent criminals, but the best method is to cut off their payments. This is done by going after not only the many NGOs funding the invasion, but the corporations who hire the invaders – including companies owned by Elon Musk. To do this one must first shovel out the DOJ – a vast swamp inhabited by enemies top to bottom all on its own. It’s still too soon to make a firm determination of the actual motives and actions of Trump et al. Best we can hope for is that he wants revenge and the revenge will involve considerable destruction of our enemies. That does not mean he’s the savior. Such notions are frankly blasphemous.
What a shame that more White women, and Whites in general, are not like her. Most let others do their thinking for them.
I misread that title as “..Constitutional Rapture”. Though given what I’m reading about the religious beliefs of this administration’s key figures, that might actually be more accurate. It’s not authoritarianism I’m worried about with Trump 2.0, it’s messianism.
Constitutional crisis?
Authoritarianism?
That’s what the Left calls an administration that’s actually doing what the people voted for.
Just for once, the public have a government that’s both serving them, and showing up the Democrats for how impotent and useless they really were.
Many on the Right outside of America have pulled up their chairs, opened the popcorn, and are enjoying the show. They’re praying the Trump phenomenon rubs off throughout the West.
Trump must go in 2029, but hopefully his ideas and influence will live on in future leaders.
All governments are oligarchies.
This isn’t to say they’re all exactly the same, just that at their core they’re all exactly the same.
Governments are people farms, they primarily exist to serve the ruling class, to manage and extract resources from the people, whether they’re ‘autocracies’, overt oligarchies or ‘democracies’.
In a ‘democracy’, the people get to elect a government, but only within the parameters established by the ruling class.
So don’t kid yourself about Trump and the deep state or whatever.
Government will always be largely opaque.
You will never have rights and freedoms, mere privileges.
The interests of the ruling class will always be prioritized well above yours.
Now that all that’s out of the way, yes there are differences between liberal and conservative orders.
Did the liberal order that you could argue began in the 1930s or perhaps even earlier with the first Roosevelt Teddy and his Square Deal just die?
I guess you could make the case for that.
That said, liberalism and conservatism are relative, especially in our modern world, not absolute.
There’s a lot of things that’re very liberal about our God emperor Trump, the guy is very pro-LGBs for example, he just has some reservations about the Ts, like most people do, and I could go on and on.
He’s also very pro-mass immigration from nonwhite NonChristian countries, etcetera.
Even before the Roosevelts, America itself was founded on classical liberal principles in addition to republican and conservative ones, but the new liberalism which was a compromise between classical liberalism and leftism/progressivism/socialism came later in the 20th century.
This new liberalism or the liberal-left isn’t dead, but it has been defeated, it’s at its weakest point arguably since the new deal.
I think the liberal-left peaked in the 60s and 70s when they had control of both the economy and the culture largely.
They lost the economy in the 80s and now they just lost the culture in the 2020s.
Woke or at least this incarnation of it was too extreme for the culture, at least for the time being.
So conservatism or what passes for conservatism nowadays has the reigns for now, but for how long will they keep them?
These things go back and forth.
Conservatism or the contemporary iteration of it may be about to enjoy its turn in the sun, but for how long, a few years or decades?
Eventually it will peak, decline and we will likely see a resurgence of the liberal-left, and possibly other political movements outside the conservative/liberal-left framework.
But the liberal-left has to do some digging and searching first, because this variant of it was a total failure with the people.
But yea, I mean I think it’s silly to think the liberal-left are dead, that we are returning to 19th century conservatism, classical liberalism and republicanism or something, this is a fantasy of yours, but you could make the case the liberal-left ha never been this defeated, at least in recent memory.
I would aim for more nuance in your narratives.
Yea, the liberal-left lost the economic war in the 80s.
They lost because taxes on the middleclass and the lower tiers of the upper class became too high for most people (of course the upper tiers of the upper class pay little-no tax in any case, but that’s an aside).
In the late 70s and 80s people’s concerns shifted, they were more eager to make money than afraid of poverty.
Now the liberal-left just lost the culture war with the Donald’s re-election.
They lost because they got too extreme, the mass sexual mutilation of boys and girls among other demented things they were pushing are lines few cultures would cross.
It reminds me of the Roman emperor Elagabalus, the Romans put up with his debauchery including his homosexuality but once he decided to have his testicles removed and declared himself to be empress, that was the line in the sand and they assassinated him and his family.
Whether they did it on purpose or not, the liberal-left basically shot themselves in the foot with this kind of crap, they committed political suicide.
It’s not so much that the culture got way more conservative as the liberal-left got extremely out of touch with the concerns of the vast majority of people and drove off a cliff.
They were basically exclusively catering to the concerns of upper middleclass and upperclass overeducated cat ladies, a very niche group.
I mean basically all republicans had to do was just show up and not act like complete morons to win.
So the liberal-left has a lot of soul searching to do, but they seem to have no interest in doing it right now, so that’s that.
As they continue to become more politically marginalized, this may force them to reassess things eventually, at some point, what went wrong, why shouting racism, sexism and Russians while clutching your pearls a gazillion times a day wasn’t enough to get the people on board?
Like them or not, conservatives know how to talk to Joe and Jane average, the liberal-left either has no clue, or they don’t care, probably some combination of both.