Actions Have Consequences, Even When They Don't

Fragmentary Diatribes XVIII

There is a marvelous passion on Substack, that is dying as it is drowned by refugees of other web sites and tortured idiots and carnival freaks. That’s dramatic, but my mood will brook no other. Idiots like entertainment, and thinking gets in the way. When this place was a Place for Writing, it was full of thought and thoughtful encounters and deep consideration. Now it is Twitter+Medium, and in the ocean of newfags there will be the greater need to howl to be heard. So be it.

Competitive Racial Sump-Pumping

The trend of the season is the two races that colonized America throwing money at the lowest among them in an act of racial solidarity aimed at the other. As always, the black man must work harder. Karmelo Anthony had to stab a track athlete to get the same level of payout that Shiloh Hendrix got for saying a naughty word.¹ Everyone is angry and everyone feels like the real victim.

That Obama, he really crushed that whole ending racism thing, didn’t he?

In all seriousness, the collapse of the moral absolutism about race is a thing to behold. As it turns out, multiculturalism creates multicultural narratives, and therefore there really can be no consensus. It was only going to be so long being told by the po-mos that all truths are socially created that this would get turned on its head by the Right. If my truths are white and my narratives are white and my perceptions are white, well, okay then. I guess I’ll lean into that as hard as everyone else does.

Back in the early days of my Substack, I discussed this in richer detail.

I think all of it still holds up. What drives our animosity is fundamentally a lack of trust in the other’s goodwill. It doesn’t matter how keenly one argues that said distrust is irrational. St. Paul was not argued into faith, and neither will the rest of us be.

This should not be read as advocacy for any kind of racial reckoning. No one will enjoy that. But we cannot focus on the problem without naming it. Societies require trust, and trust requires honesty and accountability. Racial self-hatred is neither of those things, just a kabuki performance of them. Its days are hopefully numbered.

Trump is Necessary but Not Sufficient

I’m getting a lot of folk in my Notes feed freaking out about the results of tariffs. Because my study of economics is limited to 100-level undergrad courses, I’m not going to argue with them. This might very well suck.

And that might very well not matter.

Reagan is remembered as the Wizard of Rah-Rah 80’s Boom Times, who made it Morning in America with his Smile. But there was a recession for the first two years of his presidency. It started before he took over, sure, but it wasn’t great. In fact, it was W-shaped: with a brief period of growth in the middle of ‘81 that dropped back down again. Doesn’t matter: by the time Reagan was running for re-election, the economy was exploding. Reagan got the credit, and that’s all anyone remembers.

FDR may be the single greatest political operator this country has ever produced, and the absolute GOAT at winning elections. He won so many elections so effortlessly² that they had to change the Constitution to prevent this. And he presided over the single worst economy in American history. In fact, little he did improved upon it. Economic growth stayed slow, with another recession in 1937, and the unemployment rate was still 15% at the end of FDR’s second term. None of this mattered. He made the American people believe he was on their side, and they rewarded him.

Will Trump be so successful? I do not know. He may completely shit the bed, or in two years’ time we could be impressed at what he has wrought. In any case, the Presidents who break stuff tend to define their epochs, for good or ill. Andrew Jackson nuked the Second Bank of the United States, and a financial panic plagued his second term. Only history textbooks remember.

But even if Trump pulls it off, and we’re not in a worldwide depression by 2028, he’s not a magic man who’s going to fix all things. His time on the political stage is coming to its natural end.³ Expecting a single presidency, bisected by a rival’s term, to Make America Great Again is not realistic. He’s going to do what he can do, but the absurdity of our ruling class cannot be swept away in a season.

You read this correctly. One of the largest companies in the world is being subsidized by the government under the auspices of a program ostensibly intended to feed the poor. This has been going on for decades. The purpose of the system is what it does, and the system exists to funnel money into the pockets of those who have the political connections to make it happen. That is what our system is. Trump does not have the power to break that. He can underline it; he can prune it some, maybe, and even that will trigger the system’s immune response, as we have already seen. What results will be necessarily chaotic, just as the cultural shift prompted by the growth in Substack’s user base will be. Actions have Consequences, even when they don’t.

1. Lest this be unclear: yes, murder is worse than saying a racial slur. The only people who argue otherwise are people for whom the racial slur is aimed at them but the murder isn’t, or those who seek some kind of rhetorical grace thereby. “Woke” is never not a narrative of moral authority, and moral authority is never not a pathway to power.

2. The closest he came to losing, in 1944, he won by only 53%-45%, which would be considered an absolute landslide these days.

3. Even if amending the Constitution to give him a third term can come to pass, he’s going to be too old for it. I don’t see it happening.