Find all blog entries at A Commoner Manifesto Substack.
What Do the Augurs Say About Haley Stevens?
All of our Democratic friends are enraged at the betrayal of the Party by Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) who broke with Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and cuddled up with the Republican candidate Mike Rogers.
But really, isn’t it about time for the Democrats to split apart?
I mean, if you are a semi-moderate that’s all in for all the welfare state programs from FDR to LBJ, but you feel a bit queasy about the end letters on LGBTQ and men in the women’s bathroom and kids being transitioned by their public school administrators without parental notification, let along consent, and Gaza genocide and hate the Jews and women in hijabs and full-on socialism with the DSA? Wouldn’t you be getting ready to head for the exits?
I affect to understand what is going on, because I believe in Crane Brinton’s narrative in The Anatomy of Revolution. As a revolution fails, the moderates get ejected — or guillotined — by the extremists. Until Thermidor and eventually Napoleon.
Here’s one of my takes on Brinton’s theory.
But our story is written on a larger canvas, going back no later than the 1880s and the birth of the administrative state in the US with the Pendleton Act. Ever since, the educated experts have proposed one administrative government program after another. But here we are, 150 years later, and anyone with half a brain would be asking “what’s the point?” And the rest of America would be instinctively feeling that something was wrong.
But the logic of war and the logic of politics is that you don’t ever give up. You always rally the troops for one more Big Push.
That’s because of Clausewitz and “war is the mere continuation of politics by other means” and my corollary that “politics is the mere continuation of war by other means.”
Until the regime collapses and a new set of rascals rises to power.
Another of my ideas is that while people in politics use a moral agenda to justify their political power — such as “fight for the workers” or “fight for the victim du jour” — it all ends up as politicians taxing the rest of us to reward their supporters. Right now, my beloved Rep. Primila Jayapal (D-WA) is raging on X for Medicare For All. So that everyone can afford health care. Ultimately it comes down to taxing everyone to give money to everyone. Except that government programs never work, because Science.
And so we get to the revolutionary moment where half the country is yelling Off With Their Heads and the other half is yelling Don’t You Dare Touch My Benefits.
I understand our DSA friends and the youngsters all excited about socialism as a moral feeling in the young generation that They Was Robbed by the old geezers.
Of course they were. It’s in the jeans of politics, which is always and everywhere about allies and enemies. Enemies? Billionaires, racists, transphobes. Allies? Vote for me and you will get free stuff.
That is all.
But the problem is that the DSA kids are going to need to tap into the benefits now being handed out to moderate Democratic voters. And at some point the moderate Democratic voters will head for the exits.
What’s a nice moderate Democrat, like Haley Stevens, to do? Well, she starts by being concerned about the wild and crazy DSAers. Then, at some point, she has to decide whether she belongs in the DSA camp or whether she should sneak away in the middle of the night and show up at the GOP tents and ask if they have room.
Meanwhile, there is the minor problem that you can’t run the economy from the government with taxes and spending and rules and regulations and handouts. The economy just doesn’t work like a slave plantation where everyone sits around until the overseer with the cowskin whip tells them what to do for the day and hands out their meager rations. You need a market economy with businesses and prices and wages and investing and lots of people with crazy ideas and a few people with crazy ideas that work. Unless you prefer to live as a slave.
And there is the other problem that politicians and bureaucrats and administrators and activists have absolutely no idea how to run the economy.
Yep, no doubt a whole bunch of moderate Democrats are in the process of heading out into the political wilderness, and maybe start to vote Republican. And maybe the Democratic party will be the party of hard-left educated activists and Muslim fraudsters.
Or maybe not.
| Tue, 03 Nov 2026 22:56:15 GMT |
Lefty Radicals Didn’t Like Israel in the 1960s
Here’s a conundrum. How come the lefty terrorists of West Germany in the 1960s were so anti-semitic? How come, after the post-World War II shame of Auschwitz, did the Red Army Faction (RAF) bond with the anti-Israel terrorists of the Middle East and make Israel and the Jews the enemy?
That’s what I’m struggling with after reading a review of Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists by Susie Linfield.
Three countries developed significant terrorist movements of the left in the late 1960s: Italy, Japan, and Germany. These were, of course, the defeated nations of World War Two.
And they all hated the Jews. The Italians:
The Italian Communist Party, and then its extraparliamentary Left, were strongly anti-Zionist; in 1972, Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle) accused Israel of launching a ‘Zionist genocide.’
The Japanese:
It was the Japanese Red Army, in coordination with the PFLP, who massacred travellers in Lod (now Ben Gurion) Airport in 1972, killing 26 and wounding 80.
The Germans. The Red Army Faction (RAF) believed that West Germany was “an imperialist, fascist dictatorship – Nazi Germany 2.0 – that was on the road to building another Auschwitz.”
thus the RAF accused Israel of murdering the Israeli athletes in Munich – of ‘“burning its athletes like the Nazis burned the Jews, as fuel for an imperialist policy of extermination”.’
We have come to experience the Left in the US and Europe as now allied with Islamists both in domestic politics and also in the war against Israel on the premise of the “genocide in Gaza.”
But what on Earth did the German radicals think they were doing railing against the Jews a couple of decades after Auschwitz? There’s Hans Kundnani’s Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust. He wrote:
some young people who belonged to the first generation of Germans that did not bear any direct responsibility for the Nazi era had come to see Jews themselves as the enemy.
…
The terrorists’ wish-list included plans to kill the Jewish owner of London’s Marks & Spencer chain, assassinate Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, kill Jewish community leaders in West Germany, bomb a Jewish community centre on Kristallnacht’s anniversary (a bizarre anti-commemoration), attack a Jewish kindergarten, and machine-gun diners in a Jewish restaurant in Paris.
Susie Linfield asks the agonizing question:
But why, one wonders, would cosmopolitan young Germans – only one generation removed from the Shoah – describe the state of the Jewish people with a vitriol that would have pleased Joseph Goebbels?
Of course, as always, I have the answer in my Four Wars concept.
Unite the country against a small country for a quick win; unite the country against a big country for a world war; unite half the country against the other half for a civil war; unite most of the country against a small minority for a witch-hunt.
The reason the lefty radicals are anti-Semitic and anti-Israel is because they don’t pay a price for railing against small enemies. I don’t say that they know this; I only say that instinctively they get it.
It always pays to unite the country against the Jews, or unite the Muslim Middle East against Israel. Just don’t get into a world war, and don’t get into a civil war. You never know how they will end up.
Also, don’t forget, the whole point of activism and mostly peaceful protest is to cos-play revolution — without actually risking your life or your cozy academic sinecure.
| Mon, 02 Nov 2026 23:15:18 GMT |
Switch to Substack for more blog posts
Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
The world is full of opposing forces... International life, like life in general, is a battle — Charles de Gaulle
Nietzsche was “the Nazis’ favorite intellectual:” butcher’s bill 50 million. Marx is the left’s favorite intellectual: butcher’s bill 100 million. Explain.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Experiencing the Financial Panic of 2008
