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A Flummoxed Political Veteran in 2026
Journalist Michael Barone, 81, has been around forever. And he seems flummoxed about the state of America in the current primary season:
This year’s primaries seem to be providing little in the way of good news for both parties’ futures. Both parties’ primary electorates seem focused on fighting the same old battles they have been fighting since Donald Trump clinched the Republican Party presidential nomination 121 months ago.
Then he recites a conventional-wisdom narrative on US politics since World War I, with the parties alternating in power as the seasons change. But what happens if the parties jump the tracks?
Barone seems to think that both parties are lost in a wilderness of Trump mirrors and blindly striking out against the perceived enemy. He thinks that the party that emerges from its frenzy to head off any “antidemocratic or anti-republican alternatives that may emerge” will own the future.
Maybe his view helps us explain the RINOs like Massie, Cassidy, Cornyn and Thune that have been sitting in the middle of the public lake trying not to rock the boat.
I still don’t understand what is driving them.
Of course, because I am so wise, I have a fairly simple understanding of the current political situation.
On the one hand we hard-right white racists finally found a leader worthy of the name, after the failed Nixon Silent Majority, the forgotten Reagan Democrats, and the marginalized Tea Party. President Trump promised to lead an American nation back to greatness. We fear that despite everything, the Trump era will end in failure.
On the other hand we have the end-of-a-dynasty Democratic Party that is seeing its century-long political and cultural hegemony challenged. Its operatives are doing everything they can imagine, legal and otherwise, to keep the old game going. But its one-size-fits-all programs are not delivering; its woke DEI stuff is in trouble; its supporters in government jobs want more money, and the Dems find that they need to cheat to stay in power. However, experts agree that the 2020 election was not stolen.
Is this so hard to figure out? Or does Michael Barone think that he’s not allowed to say what I just wrote above?
Let’s just say that in pre-revolutionary France and Russia, the rulers knew there was a problem, but didn’t have the moxie or the means to fix it. The result was not pretty.
And I understand that Michael Barone perceives a similar danger in today’s politics.
Still, one way or another we have to cross the river into the new world that is aborning. But which river? The Styx, river of hate; the Acheron, river of woe; the Cocytus, river of lamentation; the Phlegethon, river of fire; or the Lethe, river of forgetfulness? Your guess is as good as mine.
Whatever river it is, I am afraid that our liberal friends ain’t gonna like it.
| Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:57:53 GMT |
A Nietzschean Analysis of Lefty Politics
Elon started sending me posts of the passionate @grey4626 a month or so ago, and I’ve been a subscriber for a month. And a subscriber on her Substack.
One thing she likes to do is connect the political world to Nietzsche. Like today when she urged us all to self-overcome our ressentiment and get above hatred.
Do not waste your hatred trying to destroy people…
Turn that hatred into fuel. Become sharper. Stronger. Harder to deceive. The strongest revenge is not bitterness…it is becoming too powerful to be ruled by what hurt you.
Then in the middle:
The French Revolution did not produce liberty. It produced the Terror because the hatred of the old order remained reactive, creative only in destruction, incapable of building anything that did not require a permanent enemy.
The Bolsheviks inherited the same pathology and turned it into a century of corpses.
Every ideology that requires an eternal oppressor to justify its existence is ressentiment wearing a political mask.
How does that make you feel, wokies?
Never mind. It made me think.
Of course, in the official definition of Allyism, “we” are the Allies of the Oppressed Peoples in their fight against the White Male Oppressors.
OK. Let’s get the definition out of the way. Google AI:
Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment is a deep-seated, chronic feeling of powerlessness and envy that festers into a desire for revenge.
But don’t forget that the Allies are the educated elite. They do not feel powerless or envious of the White Oppressors. Not they.
And actually, I doubt if the Oppressed Peoples are feeling that oppressed. Typically if they have a job and three squares a day they feel OK. Unless there’s an economic downturn and they lose their jobs.
No, to quote Lt. Cable, “you have to be carefully taught / To hate and to fear”.
The Oppressed Peoples have to be carefully taught. And so do the nice liberal ladies and the scrollers on Bluesky.
Our liberal friends and woke Allies of the Oppressed are using the Oppressed Peoples as cannon fodder for their politics. “There is no politics without an enemy,” so the Woke Elite has to teach their followers to hate and to fight the enemy, the White Oppressors.
However, the Duke of Plaza Toro led his regiment from behind; he found it less exciting.
Do our liberal friends hate us, the White Oppressors? Probably not initially. But I suspect that as they get into the part of King Henry V urging his army “Once more unto the breach, dear friends” at Harfleur, they start to hate the enemy as well. Hate is infectious.
They descend into the pit of hatred.
Hatred that does not serve self-overcoming is self-betrayal wearing the mask of righteousness.
There is another way.
This is the difference between the reactive and the noble.
The reactive always needs something to push against.
The noble moves from abundance, from the overflow of a self that has integrated its own darkness and no longer requires external darkness to feel real.
Hatred, in the end, is a tool for those still in the process of becoming sovereign.
Once sovereignty is achieved, the tool is set down. The work continues… creation, defense, the perpetual self-overcoming…but it no longer requires the old venom as its engine.
Alas, I fear that our liberal friends belong in the ranks of the “reactive” rather than in the noble light of creation, perpetual self-overcoming.
It is a world where the venom of hatred has dissipated into thin air, left behind in the political binary of fighting the enemy and gifting the supporter.
| Fri, 05 Jun 2026 02:43:04 GMT |
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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
With phrases which on close examination dissolve into thin air, such as the defence of civilization, nothing tangible can be defined — Klemens von Metternich
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts — Richard Feynman
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: 1584 was the real "real" foundation of America, NHJ
