The Final Polls

 

The popularity of polls over fortnights

It is the eve of the US elections, and the polls are contradictory—Including polls from previously highly accurate pollsters. Just the other day, one highly reliable pollster showed Harris up by three in Iowa, and another that Trump will win by seven. That’s no margin of error.

I think polling is no longer a science; I guess because people no longer answer their phones or are prepared to tell a stranger how they will vote. It is hair-raising to hear a pollster talk about all the adjustments they make to the raw data. I also keep hearing them cite polls, even their own, and then say “but I can’t believe that’s right.” In the end, they are guessing.

We should have a clearer idea by this time tomorrow. 

Godwin's Law

 

It is grimly comic that the Harris campaign has in the dying days of the election whittled down their argument to the claim that Donald Trump is a Fascist.

For this is a perfecdt illustration of the popular misreading of Godwin’s Law: “the first party to mention Hitler has lost the argument.”

Either inadvertently or semi-consciously, they are conceding the election. They are telling us they know they have lost.

They are also projecting. Fascisim is indead among us once again, and a clear and present danger. But it is the Kamalites, wokes, and Democrats who are fascists.

What is fascism: at or near its essence, it is the collective over the individual. That is what the symbol of the fasces illustrates. This is the postmodern opinion, prevalent on the left: reality itself is a social construct. The individual exists only as part of the group. Hence the leftist/Democratic stress on ethnic identity, intersectionality, and group rights over individual rights.

As an economic system, fascism is a cartel formed by government in collusion with big business. Corporations become an arm of government, doing its bidding. Which has clearly happened under the Democrats over the last few years, with corporations enforcing censorship, enforcing vaccine mandates, while small businesses and competition are crushed by government policies.

Fascism is totalitarian: the government claims the right to dictate even the details of our lives. “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” as Mussolini put it. It is the left that demands more laws and regulations. It is the left that declares “the personal is political.” It is the left that wants to police even the pronouns we can use. 

Fascism believes that reality is a social construct. Mussolini said, “Fascism is relativism.” The state can invent reality. This is what the left believes today: it believes it can declare a man a woman, or invent new genders. This is why it believes so fiercely in censorship: saying a thing is so makes it so.

The state also gets to decide right and wrong. Fascism rejects “conventional morality.” The Nazis called it “slave morality.”  And the modern left rejects it. This frees them to do whatever they want in moral terms.

This suspends the “do unto others” principle, and frees those in power to abuse unfavoured groups. The latter have no rights; their existence does not serve the collective. In Nazi Germany, Roma, Slavs, and Jews. In leftist America, white “cis” males, Asians, increasingly white women.

And this leads to holocaust. In Germany, as we all know, the Jews, the Roma. In modern America, unborn children. Soon, if Canada’s model is followed, the poor and infirm. Their existence is inconvenient. 

Yes, fascism is here.

New Hampshire Prediction

 

New Hampshire is voting today. Lets me get my prediction in just in time to be proven wrong.

I predict Donald Trump gets over 55% in the Republican contest. I have seen a series of major last-minute endorsements; he has lots of media from the Iowa caucuses; and there have been a lot of vicious pundit attacks on Nikki Haley in the last few days. That looks like momentum in Trump’s direction. I don’t see a lot of Democrats crossing over to vote against Trump in the Republican primary, because him winning the nomination now looks like a foregone conclusion. So why waste your vote? And, strategically, would you rather run against Nikki Haley? Why? The same logic should dampen Hailey’s turnout among dissatisfied Republicans. So I expect Trump to outperform the most recent polls, which have him at 52.2%.

Rather than cross over, despite there being no delegates at stake, I can see Democrats wanting to vote in the Democratic poll in order to show their anger at the DNC for cancelling their first-in-the-nation primary and denying them a voice. And the way to do that is to vote, but to vote anybody but Biden. Biden’s campaign has also crippled itself by not having his name on the ballot; they are running a low-budget write-in campaign. So I think Biden will do worse in the Democratic poll than Trump does in the Republican.

Those will be the news stories: Trump triumph, Biden embarrassment.

Now go ahead and prove me wrong, Fates.

The American Apocalypse

Remember me?

To fill the time before their live feed of the presidential debate began, the YouTube channel I was watching played a rerun of the Carter - Ford debate from 1976. It was a reminder of how much the civic discourse has deteriorated. Despite the fresh wounds of Vietnam and Watergate, Ford and Carter were always polite with each other. There was no interrupting while the other spoke. There was no talk of sex or scandal. The general sense was that they were discussing matters on which reasonable people of good will could disagree.

We have obviously lost that level of social consensus. And not just in America. Even in unfailingly polite and decorous Canada, Justin Trudeau interrupted frequently at the recent leaders' debates. That would not have happened in his father's day. Even more striking is that the voters do not seem to punish politicians who behave this way. Trudeau won the election. So did Joe Biden, who behaved exceptionally badly in his debate with Paul Ryan. So, in the primaries, did Donald Trump, against a large field of ladies and gentlemen.

The problem is that nobody any longer believes that the other side is acting in good faith, or has the general good of the country at heart.

This is what comes when one side or the other starts disregarding the basic general principles that bind the nation together. We have seen this over the last thirty or forty years. And the left, frankly, is the side to blame.

Remember motherhood and apple pie? What is feminism if not a direct assault on motherhood? Or, more broadly, what else is the great complex of "gay pride"?

Religion, the traditional reservoir of shared values, is under sustained assault. Even science, its unsatisfactory modern substitute, is under assault by some branches of the left as patriarchal and racist. Liberalism and the doctrine of human rights, on which America was founded, is also under attack: not just the right to freedom of conscience, of association, of speech, but even the most fundamental right, the right to life. Postmodernism even rejects the rules of formal logic, or the possibility of knowing truth.

Granted, the immediate cause of the Trump phenomenon was apparently fear of immigration; this seems fundamental in Europe too. But is immigration just a symbol of something deeper, a sense that the culture is being widely and deliberately subverted by the ruling elite? Is it a symbol of the loss of social consensus?

The next question is, why has the left lost its commitment to moral right, logic, science, religion, the family, and anything else that might check its own power? For the move is itself ultimately self-defeating. Destroy the civilizaton, and you destroy your own part in it just as much as your opponent's: mutually-assured destruction.

It is, I submit, the action of the agitated human conscience. The left at some point knowingly did something morally wrong. Once you do that, and do not repent, you begin the downward path. As the gospel of John avers, those who have knowingly done wrong begin to fear the light as a general principle, for fear it will reveal their deeds. They become enemies of the light. It follows that they become inconsolable enemies of all who follow the light. To accept and believe in truth or moral right becomes intolerable. So much for any possibility of social consensus.

The obvious example of a previous time in American history when this happened was the Civil War. Slavery was such an issue. Nobody could in good conscience accept the institution of chattel slavery. And, no surprise, it was the South, not the North, that cut the social cord, that chose to separate, and it was the South, those in the moral wrong, who fired the first shot. Nor had the northern government proposed to outlaw slavery. Just the awareness of general disapproval was intolerable to a bad conscience.

This time, in the end, I believe that the issue on which the left made its bargain with the devil, for the sake of personal gain, was and is abortion. Abortion, in turn, became necessary in order to allow for free sex.

At such a time, it is folly to pretend nothing is happening, to remain the well-mannered Buchanan or Mitt Romney. There is no common ground left on which to build consent. The sad times demand a terrible swift sword. Trump may not be up to the job, but neither would Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, from all evidence, have been. We need another Lincoln, and none is to be seen.

Then again, at the time, nobody saw Lincoln as a Lincoln either. He had an extremely thin resume, and as not even the favourite for his own party's nomination.

It is in God's hands.