Majorityrights Central > Category: Conservatism

As has been widely reported since Thursday, the Prime Minister’s chief advisor, one Dominic Mckenzie Cummings, has left Downing Street for the last time, according to reports (at the time of writing).  Along with Michael Gove, Cummings has functioned as the ideological driving force behind the Brexit strategy.  He masterminded Boris Johnson’s December 2019 General Election campaign, and has since been instrumental in the lockdown and test-and-trace strategies.  He also initiated the war on civil service culture and on the BBC’s liberal-left bias.  He is an inveterate upsetter of apple carts and an anti-Establishmentarian par excellence.  But it is his dedication to the small band of Vote Leave activists who followed him into government which has angered Tory MPs as much as his abrasive personality and helter-skelter methods.

The capture of the leadership by Johnson and the excision of the europhile old guard did not signify a sea-change in the rest of the parliamentary party - not least because Central Office controls candidate selection, and the 29% of Tories who are new are not all ideological ERGers and closet Farageists giving voice to the people and challenging the power of the Establishment.  They are what Tories have been for almost two centuries: accommodationists and corporate servants.  As such, the second lockdown has brought unrest in the parliamentary party over covid strategy and the epic failure of test-and-trace to a head.  Rather than attack the Prime Minister whose electoral feat gave them their place in the Westminster sun they have allied with the group within and without the Downing Street machine who are “friends of Carrie Symonds” and gone after the head of communications Lee Cain, to whom Johnson had offered the job of Downing Street’s Chief of Staff.

Aside from being a Vote Leaver, Cain’s crimes included a clash with Symonds over his handling of her row with Johnson at their south London home in June last year, which led to vin rouge all over the sofa and a call to 999.  He also earned the antipathy of another Downing Street insider, Allegra Stratten who, despite arriving in post only a month ago, took an instant dislike to Cain and wouldn’t speak to him.  The witches coven was completed by another wonk Munira Murza, who directs the No.10 Policy Unit, and Home Secretary Priti Patel; albeit in their case most likely because Cain had boycotted the BBC and upset the press lobby by opening access to the new media.  We should not run away with the idea that Cain is entirely a victim here.  The Daily Telegraph has reported that he and the Vote Leavers have taken to calling Symonds “Princess Nut Nuts” behind her back; their reasons, apparently, being that she acts the princess, is of questionable sanity, and bears some facial resemblance to a squirrel.  Naturally, Downing Street firmly denies any such suggestion.  But imagine, while this blokish humour might have been safe from consequences in the last millennium, it probably wouldn’t work so well in this one.  It may also not be terribly clever, given that Symonds is Johnson’s fiancee and the mother of his child.

In any event, Cain has been forced out, and now the whole Vote Leave house of cards is falling.  Cummings was meant to move on by Christmas to create an organisation to parallel the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency in the USA.  This is his real ambition, not being holed up in Downing Street fighting political fires all day.  Johnson, meanwhile, is already adjusting to his new situation and signalling to the press that Symonds’ green, badger-friendly agenda will now influence his vision for a “global Britain” with his own foundationally liberal values.  The culture war against the civil service and the BBC will end.  It is rumoured that for Northern Ireland an extension to the transition period might be agreed with Brussels.

Most interestingly, Johnson will be “less dogmatic” than past Tory administrations in his approach to Scottish independence, replacing the denialist policy of Cameron and May with a policy of positive argument for Union.  Fat chance that has.  Anyway, denialism isn’t exactly dead.  It’s just that, to quote Johnson, “We’ve got to make it more than just about saying no to another referendum.”  Alister Jack, the Scottish Secretary, still says no; re-confirming that for this government any second Scottish independence referendum is some twenty years away.  Nobody really believes that.  On 6th May next year, and in the months after, that theory will be put to the sternest of tests. 

The immediate signs are a bit more hopeful for the London government.  SNP support has been declining steadily among Scottish voters since its peak in August of this year.  But it is doing so for clear reasons, among which only a general exhaustion with the SNP, after so many years of power at Holyrood, is helpful to London.  Public dissatisfaction with the Scottish government’s handling of the covid crisis will be resolved, politically at least, by the availability of a vaccine by the year’s end.  The Starmer honeymoon will come to an end.  What will really make or break the issue is the reality of the Brexit settlement and its reception north of the border.  If ... and it is a fairly sure if ... the settlement respects the British government insistence on our sovereign nationhood, and if in consequence all suggestion of legal oversight by Brussels and its institutions is forever banished, then the Scots will have to get used to a future in which only London dwells.  That probability is already driving support for independence higher.  One poll last month put it at 58%.  Nicola Sturgeon stated in 2015 that she would not seek a second referendum until support is above 60% for a period of a whole year.  It is reasonable to expect that if (a) the SNP achieves a majority representation at Holyrood in May and (b) IndyRef 2 support hits 60% just once, the press will be on. 

Both are within easy reach, which means that the meaning of Boris Johnson’s new policy of engagement can easily be turned against him.  What, after all, is the point of keeping the Scots in the Union if that is truly not the wish of the people of Scotland?  What is the point of talking up the Union if polling support for independence just continues as it is?  Th only advantage of denialism for London is if support falls as the Scots become more accepting of their junior status in the Union; and they won’t.  Denialism will only generate its opposite.  There is no happy, shared future to be had, only discontent, recrimination, protest.  London will not be able to hold the line for even two years, never mind twenty.

Now, I will explain why this is all so important for us, as nationalists.  Dealing first with the Scottish Independence question ...

The Union, the London government and its dismissal of the West Lothian Question, the great emphasis that both the Union and the London government place on the civic over the ethnic ... these all weigh against the freedom of the English, in particular, to develop a politics of self-expression and representation.  We labour under a heavy political yoke in which our identity is unrecognised and our natural right on the soil, our natural interests as a people are not just neglected but actively demonised.  It is made a hundred times easier for the British Establishment when we elect only a British government, and are fed only the politics of that government, with its totalistic global-corporate, neoliberal and neo-Marxist bias.  But what happens to Westminster if the Holyrood government secures and wins a second referendum?

If and when Scottish independence becomes a reality the Union will still be a Union of Crowns but it will comprise only England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.  The Northern Irish Unionists are ethnically Scottish, not English, and may one day lose the numbers or the will to maintain their union with us.  But for the purposes of this paper it is not the future of Northern Ireland which interests us but the future of England after Scottish independence.  The West Lothian question would be no more.  The Barnett Formula would be a thing of the past.  With 533 of the remaining 591 seats and, a further seven (at present) Sinn Feiners who do no sit, Westminster would become effectively an English parliament.

Conventionally speaking, the English electorate is predominantly right-of-centre but not economistic and not socially liberal.  The immigrant peoples, obviously, are left-of-centre. A political realignment with different and perhaps interesting points of tension beckons.  The tendency prevalent among the English to consider themselves British, which has been in decline since devolution, would collapse, and with a rising sense of Englishness should come some detachment from the foreign populations (who cannot claim our ethnicity, and who cannot switch overnight from being “black British, “Asian British” and so forth to English, though some may try).

The ground on which we fight, therefore, will be massively more favourable towards us.  Every one of us, if he or she is at all clear-minded, ought really to be a firm supporter of Scottish independence.  It would take us forward further than Brexit ever could.

In conclusion, let us quickly look at the other two post-Cummings signs and portents that Boris Johnson is communicating through the media.  Pulling back from the culture war which Cummings started will certainly benefit Laurence Fox’s new party, Reclaim.  As the race madness and the tranny madness and all the rest of the coercive, abusive neo-Marxist agenda will inevitable pursue its dizzy path to an absolute standard of social pathology, so the voices of commonsensical protest will be raised; first this one man Fox, then a handful of others, then an armful.  Whether the armfuls burgeon into a political movement is perhaps doubtful.  But a counter-weight has been placed on the wildly out-of-true cultural scale, and that is a start.  It behoves us not to be too churlish about it merely because Fox, like Farage, will not stand beside our people.  All work to level the political ground will benefit us too.

Thirdly, Johnson’s greener, more liberal global “vision”, with its infamous “Build Back Better” slogan, has more than an echo of Klaus Schwab’s plans for a totally toxic globalist hell of the commons beneath his paradise of the rich.  One looks at the outlines of the one and then of the other, and wonders.  But surely not?  It’s inconceivable, no?  Until one remembers Johnson’s liberal ideas about immigration and his coming destruction of the planning laws to sate the construction industry that helps to finance his party.  As usual with Tories it is hard to know where the corporate whoring stops and the ideology of The Globality begins.  No degree of corruption surprises the observer of British politics any more.  But, of course, if that is the journey on which Johnson and his party want to take us, even though we are out of Brussels’ grasp with its crystal clear pursuit of a globalised future and of the new-made globalised beings which will stand where once did Europe’s beautiful and creative peoples, then so be it.  Nationalists will have another clear target on the fat behind of the British Establishment.

The excellent website Conservative Woman carried an article today on a speech given last week to the Polish parliament by the leading conservative philosopher of our time, Roger Scruton.  The article ran to printing out Scruton’s words.  It is a fine speech made to a majority conservative and traditionalist body of MPs, and I don’t want to detract from it.  But, of course, there are things which Scruton will not say.  He speaks of Catholicism as indigenous religion, and though he will use the term European peoples, in the crucial passages he never makes the final step to defending our blood as a matter of simple human necessity. Likewise, he never goes deeper than Enlightenment thinking in tracing the cause of our crisis.  Neither does he address that crisis as properly existential, preferring to retire to the safety of cultural and religious decline.

This is what makes him a conservative and traditionalist thinker rather than a nationalist one; and, again, that failing does not detract from the service the man has given.  It is what it is, and he has paid a price even for that.  But, of course, as a nationalist one endeavours to offer some correction to Scruton’s elegant professional reticence; and I am happy to say that a serial commenter on conservative websites, one John Piggott ... someone of whom I have a very close working knowledge and with whom I can honestly say I share all my opinions ... did manage to post the following brief invitation to further thought on the CW thread.  How long it will stay on the page is anyone’s guess.

At its barest level, when all contingent philosophical, religious, cultural and political products are stripped away, and when only the foundation ... the historiographical first cause ... remains, the conflict is that between the Judaic struggle for Olam Ha-ba and the native European struggle to live free.

This bare and terrifying truth has been buried out of sight of serious thinkers for over a hundred years. The last such English thinker to explore it was probably Goldwin Smith in the late 19th century. It was made completely radio-active, obviously, by the competing Aryan supremacism of National Socialism and the murderous actions of its adherents from 1941 to 1945. Yet it permeates everything ... the Christian model of a soul seeking salvation, Catholic humanism, liberal universalism and the dicta of human rights, internationalism, and the elitist struggle for a new global order on the one hand, and on the other, in reply, an insistent statement of the normally quietist common instinct for life and that simple, precious freedom which abides not in choice but in being.

The European cognitive elites who pursue the universalist abstraction today may themselves be the historiographical progeny of Plato’s Athenian just man. But the form of their guiding philosophy is not Platonic but Judaic in its origins. To escape its historical dynamic we do need to understand this. But more than that we need to understand our own existential truth, for it is from that understanding that our decision to be grows.

Press image for audio Part 1

Sex as Sacrament / Sex as Celebration…Sex as Natural Fact and other stories Part 1

“The whore of Babylon is drunk with the blood of the saints.”

Actually, the analogy is not far off from our present situation. In the disordered world, the anti-world, a “Babylon,” where YKW and liberal unconcern for our White class is the rule, sex disconfirms the worthy, destroys the precious and brings into being the vicious, the irresponsible at our expense.

It isn’t funny.

Anti-racism is anti-group classification. It is Cartesian. It is not innocent. It is prejudice. It is hurting and it is killing people.

Anti-racism is anti-group classification, in weaponized form, an Alinsky-like weaponization - using quote, our rules against us - specifically of Cartesianism on the empiricist end, the Lockeatine empiricist end in its prejudice against social classification, alleging them to be non-empirical fiction; thus, a prejudice against prejudice in favor of supposedly pure individual perception and rights thereof, as opposed to discriminatory accountability through posited social classification - a race being a social classification writ large.

Male and female remain the primary de facto classification in necessary pychological function of categorization to make coherent sense where racism, that is to say, where racial classification and discrimination thereupon is prohibited.

The pandering that results from all angles to our co-evolutionary young females and the increased one up position that they find themselves in as gate keepers in this situation disordered of White bounds exacerbates their inclination to incite genetic competition; as they are pandered to ad nauseum from all angles from males previously blocked. Further, the puerile female will be inclined to welcome this liberalism as it increases her power, if only in the short term.

How to counter these hate infested Mulatto-supremacists?

To begin we need to correct this violation of our people’s boundaries, the human ecological disaster and even genocide it implicates, practical matters of border and boundary control need to be addressed. We need to counter the stigmatization of ethnonationalism, to counter political rules given to liberalization of our boundaries and moreover, anti-racism which has gone so far as to criminalize our self defense as peoples.

Furthermore, to build our morale and facilitate loyalty to our people against this onslaught against us, provisions would be of great help that facilitate both free and careful assessment of partner selection, but also to know that our systems are responsible enough to ensure the institutionalization of these requirements - to facilitate optimal freedom in partner selection, border control is necessary - in that way, your people are free for a sufficiently natural liberalism with regard to sex with decreased risk, as your partners are fairly similar and accountable from an evolutionary standpoint; you are also free to mix with other races but you are risking your White group membership through such transgression, as you are not free to just impose that degree of liberalization upon the group boundaries; optimal freedom of choice will also be assured by the institutionalized provision, so to speak, for single sex partner for life hopefuls; with the added assistance therein, to help assess appropriateness in partner selection.

After setting about to establish our group(s) homeostasis, that is to say, systemic maintenance as European peoples, ranking perhaps only second in priority, but what will inevitably prove to be integral to border and boundary maintenance, will be a realistic negotiation of the issue of sex - part of which will account not just for its brute factual nature and sufficient freedom of more experimental expression, but that we as individuals and as a group require provision, a respected option for our human capacity of more careful recourse and accountability - viz., to justice to our genetic and human ecological capital not only in the broad scope of our national citizenship; but moreover, in option to treat sex and monogamy as sacred, recognized, institutionalized and normalized by society as a significant option, to provide for an even more careful selective process for those who wish; corresponding with the important transcendence of the episodic and momentary evaluation - that can fall down to superficial evaluative criteria resulting from a boundless, liberal free for all; corresponding typically with a scientistic take on sex, naturalistic fallacy; e.g., that it is nothing more than a normal bodily function; the kind of take on sex that can be liberating from insanely restrictive traditions and taboos; but all too prone to be overdone in the wake of Freud’s, the Frankfurt school, notably Marcuse’s project of unleashing “eros’ in polymorphous perversion”; and finally, within the disorder of modernity, of which the Frankfurt school was instrumental - to transcend a liberalism that would flout and even prohibit our human ecological border and bounds control.

Part 2

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White Ethnonational Left defined by our interests in distinction from liberal internationalism, Parts 1-14

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Prior to Kumiko having mentioned “the Sailer strategy” on the previous thread, I had planned to put up this post comparing “the Karl Rove strategy” with “the Steve Sailer strategy” in the Jewish playbook. Even though she would elaborate upon this far better than I could, I trust that she’ll recall that it was I who first brought “the Sailer strategy” to her attention; and allow me to go ahead without the charge of having jumped her train (in fact, I’ve wanted for her to do this article).

Obviously Netanayhu’s preferred candidate at the turn of the century was George W. Bush, as he could be manipulated by Wolfowitz to pursue the neo-con agenda in Operation Clean Break to secure the realm around Israel; a plan to use the US military to effect regime change in Israel’s threatening neighbors - Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to begin with. If playing to the Hispanic vote via the “Rove strategy” could gain W. the White House, then so be it. That was expedient for Jews. Anything to get Bush in there.

Having inserted Bush, the US military was used as planned to pursue Israeli interests to its disastrous ends. The neo-con agenda would continue to be squeezed for all it was worth through Obama’s Presidency - despite his resistance to antagonism of Iran as per Brzezinski’s mentorship, with Hillary in The State Department, regime change was effected in Libya and Egypt ..perhaps even the awkward campaign in Ukraine fit into that agenda under her State Department successor (((Kerry))) - it would seem so, given the campaign’s Jewish nature and initiators: The Ukrainian regime change spearhead was Victoria Nuland and her husband, Robert Kagan, was a Clean Break insider.

With the Neo-Con agenda of Levi-Strauss and the Kristols having been “solution enough” to make for increasing problems - that is, creating discontent enough among the goyim on the home front, it was time for Frank Meyer’s Paleocon movement to be re-branded, via Paul Gottfried as “the Alternative Right”, and slipped to White right wing reactionaries to the Neo-Con agenda and the “Rove strategy.” They were to adopt the oppositional “Sailer Strategy” of a unified voting block of White and Jewish paleoconservative interests, a Judeo-Christian union used as a nostalgic “conservative” tranquilizer while diverting any blame from Jews and right wingers onto Asians abroad and Hispanics domestically; further, the Sailer strategy rallied the so called Alternative Right coalition against them under a broader diversionary red cape of “enemies”, an over arching enemy called “The Left.”

Unz Review, “Will Trump be Good for the Jewish People? by Steve Sailer”, 7 Dec 2016:

Much of the hysteria sweeping the fraction of the country that voted for Hillary Clinton originates in understandable Jewish worries about whether the rising tide of populist nationalism will be good for Jewish people.

Note the disparate media treatment of Trump’s two Steves. The press has gone nuts baselessly tarring the working-class Irish-American Stephen Bannon, Trump’s strategist, as anti-Semitic (in reality, Bannon helped bankroll Seinfeld), while largely ignoring Jewish-American Stephen Miller, Trump’s brilliant speechwriter and warm-up act, because he doesn’t fit into the Narrative.

While unfair, it’s reasonable for Jews to feel uneasy about Donald Trump’s promises to bring change to a global system under which, whatever its failings, Jews have prospered more than any other ethnic group.

Burkean prudence advises the people on top to be cautious about proposed changes. After all, they have the most to lose.

You are beginning to see why my White Left Ethnonationalist platform is being resisted with every turn.

Now then, why do Regnery and Spencer take this position as “Alt-Right” against the quote “Left”? Well, you need to begin with their good fortune, the hubris that spawns in the wish to believe oneself a self made man, and put it together with the question of why Jewish interests would also want to take a position against the quote, “left.”

Jewish interests have had disproportionate power and hegemonic influence through seven key niches:

1) Media 2) Money and Finance 3) Academia 4) Politics 5) Religion 6) Law and Courts 7) Business and Industry - and with all of this, US military as well.

With the Alternative Right and Lite sufficiently hoodwinking people on behalf of Jewish interests against the “the left” they could also divert attention away from the immigration problems created by Jews and their right wing coalitions, and onto so called “social justice warriors” - to be otherwise called “leftists” in the media, these typically White liberals are trained in the collusion of Frankfurt school (cultural Marxist) guilt trips to attack and be annoying to Whites. But let us please move beyond such frivolous diversion, opposition to gay marriage and moldy locks, etc. and into the important substance of negotiating racial separatism despite Jewish imposition of integration and right wing complicity:

The best way to organize against the unaccountable hegemony of Jews, complicit right wingers, their black and Muslim thugs and compradors is in Left ethno-nationalism, not only for Asians and Amerindios, but also for Whites ..a coalition of the three would be most effective; and most fearful to Jews. Particularly the White ethnonationalist left and especially in coalition with the other two groups. Thus, they will put every obstacle in its way and silence it at every turn.

Operation Clean Break is not nearly completed. Trump’s campaign was initiated and made viable with his willingness to dismantle the Iran deal. Iran and its ally Syria being the next steps in Operation Clean Break. 

Having installed the new right wing Jewish functionary that is Trump largely for that aim and having diverted White dissent into a disorganizing, dehumanizing and ultimately misdirected demonization against “the left”, Jewish marketing interests have thus far been successful in silencing Left ethnonational opposition and have done their level best to rupture its coalition.

Right wing reactionaries have served their function by means of the re-branded paleoconservatism that is the Alternative Right against the demon organizing left. Alt-Rght functionaries are discarded where hapless, bought-off with celebrity where in/convenient - Kumiko cites an instrumental quid pro quo achieved through Kevin MacDonald and Sailer, which we found would reach Bannon and Steven Miller - Jews are free to pursue their agenda more than ever through Trump and his Jewish entourage that they put into power. Not only can they direct foreign campaigns against their chosen enemies, but they can also direct enemy lines at their discretion domestically as well; which is the special difference of the Jewish movement known as Paleoconservatism - it offers “conservatism” that consolidates Jewish jurisdiction - such as Christianity, but not only; it could be science (A Troublesome Inheritance), or the civic patriotism of Trump’s “make America great again movement”,  but it is a “conservatism” designed and promulgated to be conducive to Jewish interests.

With the Sailer strategy, Paleoconservatism re-garbed as the Alternative Right, the gimmicky marketing expertise of Jewish firms on Madison Ave., Alt Right celebrities have been equipped with “red pills” “black pills” “indigo pills” to go against “social justice warriors”, “the left” and to troll our would-be allies as “anti-White”, etc.; with this stuff, Jewish interests, duplicitous White right wingers or just plain White right wing dupes have largely mis/represented White interests as being somehow aligned, if not with Jewish interests in diaspora, then with the Jewish jurisdiction of Judeo-Christianity and Zionism.

There’s every reason to believe that Jews would like to divert White American animus strictly toward Amerindios and Asians, and ramp -up their hatred toward us. Just as they’d like to divert European animus strictly toward Islam and vis a versa. But there is a difference in the necessity to over-come the bullshit, and misdeeds of Jews and right wingers as best we can to establish harmonious if not cooperative and coordinated interests with Asians and Amerindios against our enemies; while alliance with Jews, Muslims and blacks is only a fool’s errand. It is Jews and right wingers, a.k.a. liberals, who’ve imposed blacks and Muslims upon us; and nobody needs that.

So this morning Theresa May has called a snap General Election for June 8th.  The immediate question is why.  The answers, we must believe, are somewhere here, in her brief statement to the waiting press:

“I have just chaired a meeting of the Cabinet, where we agreed that the Government should call a general election, to be held on June 8.

“I want to explain the reasons for that decision, what will happen next and the choice facing the British people when you come to vote in this election.

“Last summer, after the country voted to leave the European Union, Britain needed certainty, stability and strong leadership, and since I became Prime Minister the Government has delivered precisely that.

“Despite predictions of immediate financial and economic danger, since the referendum we have seen consumer confidence remain high, record numbers of jobs, and economic growth that has exceeded all expectations.

“We have also delivered on the mandate that we were handed by the referendum result.”

Well, she has a majority of a dozen in the Commons, and, in winning at Copeland in February she broke a 35-year run of failures by the governing party to win an opposition seat at a by-election.  She has defeated the Remain opposition in the Commons and the Lords.  She sits opposite the most ineffective leader of the opposition ever, and certainly the leader she wants to see across the Dispatch Box.  In fact, Tom Watson aside, there is no competent politician on the Labour benches, and an awful lot of highly incompetent ones.  The Party is at war with itself.  Momentum, which campaigns within the party to make it safe for the hard left, is intent on killing off Blairism (and good luck to it).  In short, there is nothing to indicate that allowing this parliament to run its full course until May 2020 would produce anything other than a Tory landslide at that time.  So why has she done it now?  Is the temptation to grab an easy 100 seat majority just too great?  A case of pleasure now or pleasure deferred, and the thought of pleasure now is just too pleasurable?  Difficult to believe of a dour vicar’s daughter.

The only two near-plausible answers are:

1. She knows full well that Remain is dead, and wants to enter the council chambers of Europe over the next two years of Brexit negotiations with a thumping parliamentary majority and the support of the country at her back.  Electoral popularity didn’t help Tsipras in facing down the Troika, but it would probably work out differently for May.

2. This is less about Brexit than about her own vision for the future, which is not that of David Cameron, as it was set out in the 2015 Manifesto.  May herself is notoriously difficult to read even by her cabinet colleagues.  She will be conscious that the public at large do not truly know who she is and what she believes, and have not expressly supported her post-EU political vision of a Britain managing its own destiny for the first time in four long decades.  The opportunity to do so has now been provided.

There might be a third political consideration for her, which is that UKIP is also much weaker now than it was in 2015; and may not make much of a fist of standing nationally at all.  As far as I am aware, it lacks the financial support to do so.

Anyway, there will now be weeks of speculation about all this, since the usual reportage of who will win the election is perfectly pointless.

Before you complain

An American once said to me that whenever they see me post an article about the United States now, they just have to brace for a total assault on their morale, and that “it is almost like seeing something like Tokyo Rose’s work in written form.”

I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not, since despite her best propaganda efforts, Iva Toguri D’Aquino was ultimately not able to convince the Americans to stop supporting the United States. Perhaps some of the Americans did have pause though, perhaps they did think occasionally, “You know, those things that Tokyo Rose is saying on the radio, could there be something to all that?”

But really, it’s not like I have to go out of my way to come up with these socio-economic angles against the ‘Make America Great Again’ concept. They present themselves to the world daily in such a high volume that it’s almost like trying to catch a cup of water from a firehose of negative developments. One has to be very selective about which part of the non-stop blast of negative news one is going to select, interpret, and develop a piece on, on any given day.

Today’s selection is going to really induce a feeling like when you’re sparring with someone and they forget to hold back, and next thing you know their foot is trying to tickle your kidneys or something, and it’s just like, “Oh wow, this pain is real.” It’s pretty bad. I apologise for the pain that you’re going to feel in advance.

True to the tradition I’ll get things started by putting the music on.

How things reached this stage

When Donald Trump was inaugurated on an overcast day about two months ago, he stood in front of the lectern and in a stern voice spoke the words that initiated a miserable new trade war:

TIME, ‘Trump Inauguration: Transcript of Donald Trump Speech’, 20 Jan 2017 (emphasis added):

We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first.

Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.

Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength. I will fight for you with every breath in my body and I will never ever let you down.

America will start winning again, winning like never before.

We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams.

It may seem on the face of it that Donald Trump was saying that all the decisions he would make would be based on whether they will benefit American workers and American families. His mouth said that somewhere in there, but is that what protectionism actually does in the longrun?

We know that it does not benefit ‘workers and families’ in the longrun. 

There is widely understood empirical evidence which shows that in the present era, free trade is what benefits the broad mass of the people, not protectionism. Free trade is what enables wider access to products at a cheaper price. Free trade enables this indirectly by facilitating regional division and specialisation of production to enhance productivity on a planetary basis. 

Broadly speaking, tariff and non-barrier barriers are mostly retrogressive, as it is low income consumers who spend a greater percentage of their income on food, clothing, consumer electronics and vehicles, which tend to be most highly protected under the kind of tariff regime proposed by Donald Trump’s White House and supported by his Alt-Lite and Alt-Right supporters.

So if American ‘workers and families’ do not really stand to benefit, does this mean that I am saying that Donald Trump is not putting America ‘first’? By no means. The misunderstanding that many have is that they conflate rhetoric about a country’s interest with the interest of the broad mass of the people. Trump essentially tailored his speech to exploit that misunderstanding.

In fact, America is indeed being ‘put first’ by Trump, but that is not a positive thing. The policies which he is advocating ensure that those who really stand to benefit are primarily the American financiers and the upper-bourgeoisie stratum of big and middle-sized manufacturers, who feel themselves to be under stiff competition from their counterparts in Europe and Asia. This scenario comes at the end of a long cycle of a widening pattern of global investment during and after the Cold War environment, which had led to the repair and economic rehabilitation of that section of the world that America had razed to the ground in the process of destroying Axis. 

The repair and rehabilitation was possible because the leaders of various European and Asian economies opted to play the longest of long games, accommodating the liberal global order that the American victors had maintained for their own diplomatic and geostrategic benefit (to economically contain their next opponent, the Soviet Union), but which were used by the former Axis countries and other Third World countries to build something again from the ashes of the Second World War and to take advantage of the mutual benefits that came from having the economic vitality and thus the military wherewithall to deter the Soviet Union. 

A hegemon’s dilemma

The flourishing of any world order in which a hegemon has to allow power to devolve into the hands of outsiders, is a world order which will eventually unravel itself as the hegemon will come to fear its own deputies. Much as the Greek Empire unravelled itself when each of the governors, tribes, and exarchates which had been permitted to accrue power so as to encircle common enemies, suddenly realised that they had reached a stage where they could bid for global power in their own right, so too the American liberal world order is coming to a close as this cycle of capital accumulation draws to a close.

The productive capacity which had been offshored from the United States and implanted into the European and Asian periphery so as to reinforce economic containment and encirclement against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, now becomes in 2017 the potential weapon which the American high-bourgeoisie fears will be turned against it in a multipolar world, the first chapter of which is now opening. America’s old Cold War gendarmes of capital, are now gendarmes that are increasingly operating autonomously, and the United States is struggling to chart a course to address that new reality.

The American high-bourgeoisie wants what it views as ‘its wealth’ back. But they are not the actual owners of it. The wealth, limited though it is, and not without imperfection in its distribution, which is presently enjoyed by the peoples of Europe and Asia was re-built through hard years of work by the generation of people who survived the Second World War, and who, seeing their ideals crushed by the Americans, resolved to build their countries again during the Cold War.

The American high-bourgeoisie knows that it cannot fight the world alone, since it is only a small class of people, and therefore it must assert leadership and bind the other American classes to itself. They do this by appealing to a form of populism, where people like Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, knowing that they cannot appeal to a class consciousness, instead appeal to a civic nationalist mantra: “Make America Great Again.”

What is America that anyone should want to make it ‘great’ again? That is the most astounding development in this whole sequence, particularly in the context of the Alt-Right and other nationalist opinion-formers such as David Duke, who largely made themselves responsible for having enabled all of this. For example, Hunter Wallace at Altright.com said late last month: 

Hunter Wallace / Altright.com, ‘We Are The Vanguard’, 24 Feb 2017 (emphasis added):

[...]

The primary reason the media is so interested in us is because it is our ideas that have entered the political mainstream. For years now, we have been the ones calling for an America First trade policy, an America First foreign policy, an American First immigration policy, rapprochement with Russia, scrapping the refugee resettlement program, stressing our interests as opposed to liberal ideology, strong borders and a crackdown on immigration, assaulting political correctness, making peace with the labor movement, etc., etc. [...] Now, we are living in the digital world of social media and young people are watching us on YouTube and Periscope. They are interacting with us on Twitter. We don’t need the “mainstream” to network or spread our ideas.

[...]

We are the vanguard now. The world has changed, the “mainstream” is dead and the media is trying to catch up with the times. Rich Lowry’s National Review and Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard are at the nadir of their influence over the Right. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if flyover country conservatives are familiar with Richard Spencer and the Alt-Right. If our ideas are triumphing over David Frum’s ideas and Bill Kristol’s ideas, it doesn’t matter. If our discourse triumphs over and displaces “mainstream” discourse, then we are having a massive impact whether the “mainstream” cartel acknowledges it or not.

The same kind of people who for years had operated under the suspicion that the United States was possibly falling under a ‘Zionist Occupation Government’, are now the very same kind of people who are actually trying in these days and hours to fight as hard as they can to attempt to defend and perpetuate the global reach of the United States government and its centrality as a manufacturing centre now that it is  transparently going into openly-verifiable overdrive in that regard. Now that the ‘occupation’ is openly parading itself in their faces from the White House in verifiable statements that have been reproduced in mainstream media outlets, they suddenly and magically cannot seem to see it.

Perhaps it may be that it is difficult to understand why that contradiction exists until you look at the socio-economic class dimension. Perhaps they choose not to notice the Zionism issue now, because it’s the case that it is inconvenient for them financially, given that most Trump voters are middle class and may believe that they stand to gain from the Trump administration’s budgetary, financial and economic policy direction. Or perhaps it is the case that they are just really bad at politics and aren’t paying attention to what is happening, and are more interested in identitarian form and signalling, than in actual policy. Or maybe it is the case that there is a kind of ongoing entryism which is usually not visible to the public but which only is revealed in short glimpses, such as, for example, when it emerged that Heritage Foundation analyst Jason Richwine had actually been writing for the old AlternativeRight.com website in 2010. Or it could be some combination of all of these things.

Whatever the case happens to be, for all those who ever believed in anything that those people previously said, these present developments can only be seen as a betrayal. If they are ‘the vanguard’ and this is what they have produced, then they have a considerable amount of explaining to do.

Unfortunately with the situation as it is, I am not expecting that an explanation will be coming from them, but I am expecting that the Alt-Right and Alt-Lite opinion-formers will continue to act as a kind of grassroots support for the Trump administration, one which will have a high resilience and effectiveness because it couples a tacit support with a consistent pseudo-denial of actually being on the same side as the administration. We hear on the one hand the Alt-Right continually saying that they are ‘not Trump’, but then on the other hand they like the specific actions the administration is doing and its overall direction which they see as a ‘stepping stone’ (to where?), they just wish that that those actions would be done with more intensity.

The effective function of the Alt-Right internet presence is basically that they remain engaged on social media as a ‘grassroots’ presence which continually presents narratives and arguments that serve to socially legitimate Trump administration spokespersons, supporters and key cabinet figures and their policy preferences in a way that is completely independent of the state, as it is done at arms length, behind a veil of denial and disavowal by the White House itself. The bonus that the White House receives in all of this is that there is no-one who has to be paid or instructed to do this for them. The Alt-Right doesn’t need to be paid, they do it for free.

Introduction

Getting started: This article is about one facet in the process of the Trump administration making its programme operational. The first operational step that the American high-bourgeoisie are taking is that they are seeking to enhance their structural power, or to turn a phrase, they are seeking to make themselves great again, by weakening the efficacy of checks or dissents against their power domestically. This would place them in the best command position imaginable, which would allow them the ability to then turn their focus to foreign policy and trade policy as their second step, with minimal interference at home. That second step is outside the scope of this article and will be covered at a later date. The first step is what will now be described here today.

Enhanced dictatorship of the high-bourgeoisie

There are four major actions that the Trump administration is carrying out right now which would allow the American high-bourgeoisie to enhance their structural power domestically. These actions are as follows:

1. H.R.985 - Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act of 2017.
2. H.R.720 - Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act.
3. The appointment of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of the United States.
4. The elimination of all federal funding for the Legal Services Corporation.

Let’s go through them in the order I’ve listed them. And in case you are trying to guess what the four items have in common, yes, what all of these things have in common is that they pertain to the ability to form a class so as to bring a class action lawsuit against companies or government agencies, and to raise funds to carry out that endeavour.

H.R.985

When people are facing systemic abuse from companies or from government agencies, class action lawsuits are a vital tool that is used to bring a halt to their behaviour. By bringing about a class action lawsuit, a few people can stand in for a larger number of people in a lawsuit against a perpetrator and seek either injunctive relief (where the perpetrator must cease a bad practice) or compensation (monetary damages).

The bill, H.R.985 which passed in the US House of Representatives by recorded vote 220 - 201 on Thursday 09 March 2017, and will next be placed before the US Senate, is a bill that makes it more difficult for people to bring class action lawsuits.

Bill H.R.985 makes it harder for people to form a ‘class’ by further restricting and constraining the criteria under which people may come together to bring a case, and placing various hurdles in the way of the collection of lawyers’ fees, thus decreasing the incentive for lawyers to take on class action lawsuits.

The net effect of this is that it will sharply reduce the ability of people to seek injunctive relief or compensation in any scenario where they are being harmed by a company or a government agency.

The architects of the bill and its proponents, such as Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), have tried to mask their intentions by presenting it to the media as a bill that is designed to prevent supposedly-existent ‘lawyer-driven litigation’, by which they mean a kind of ‘trolling’ litigation which is designed to enrich lawyers rather than address any actual grievance of the plaintiffs. By masking their intentions with such a cover story, the lawmakers have sought to conceal the actual reality of the attack which they themselves are conducting against working people and families.

The factor which exposes their cover story as a lie, is the simple fact that if they really thought that they needed to write a bill to prevent ‘lawyer-driven litigation’, then they wouldn’t have written a bill that attacks people’s ability to seek injunctive relief, in which money is not awarded but practices are changed, as well as compensation. However, that is precisely what they have done, and in doing so, their motive was revealed along with the effect.

On the issue of the hurdles placed in the way of the collection of lawyers’ fees, the bill deliberately limits lawyers’ fees in injunctive relief cases to “a reasonable percentage of the value” of the relief. This of course makes no sense, by design, because it is quite impossible for a court to determine what the monetary worth of a non-monetary action is, so as to calculate such a percentage. The effect is that lawyers would be disincentivised from taking the risk of bringing an injunctive class action case.

Furthermore, the bill also places a condition on the timing of the payment of lawyers’ fees to the date of full monetary recovery. This could even sometimes deny lawyers the ability to be paid their fees altogether, since some cases have a term of settlement that is longer than the remaining lifespan of the lawyers who are working on the case. For example, in a case where full settlement is expected to take fifty years, it would mean that the lawyers would not be paid until the end of those fifty years. Even with that potentially disastrous scenario aside, with regards to the duration of the litigation itself, the condition incentivises defendants to drag out and prolong litigation.

The possibility of never receiving lawyers’ fees or having to wait years to receive them, will act as an enormous deterrent for any law firm that absolutely requires those fees to pay their staff and keep their business running.

H.R.720

H.R.720 the so-called ‘Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act’ is a cunningly named bill which will actually require all federal judges to penalise any lawyer who brings what they consider to be a ‘frivolous lawsuit’. Up until now, it has up to the judge’s discretion to decide whether to do this.

The interesting thing about this is that for a lawsuit to actually make it to the point where it has come before a jury, it means that a judge clearly already considers it to be a valid lawsuit. Legislation like H.R.720, simply incentivises the behaviour where a defendant can continually protest that everything that is happening is ‘frivolous’, and it disincentivises lawyers from trying to bring a lawsuit to find out how it will be regarded.

In practice, this means that the legislative and executive branches of US government are seeking to attack lawyers for trying to help people to seek relief or compensation through the court system. After all, a corporate defendant would likely start out from the stance that any lawsuit brought against their esteemed selves is definitely ‘frivolous’.

The appointment of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the SCOTUS

An ‘originalist’ Judge Neil Gorsuch, having previously been nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit by George W. Bush on 08 August 2006, has been nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States by President Donald J. Trump. A decent summary of his background has been written at FiveThirtyEight.

Beltway conservatives immediately feted him as having come out of the mold of another now late ‘originalist’ Judge Antonin Scalia, or at least something close to that. Evangelicals celebrated Gorsuch’s statements about his belief in the ‘pro-life’ stance, as that is a pet issue of maximal all-consuming importance to them. 

The Alt-Lite and Alt-Right’s reaction to the nomination was in a sense no more sophisticated or diligent than that of any of the other groups. Hunter Wallace published a very strange article at Alt-Right.com which referred to Gorsuch as a “real American”, as though this were a reason for why he wanted to see Gorsuch nominated in and of itself. Richard Spencer produced an article which had a similarly strange central thrust, referring to Gorsuch as “America’s wise, WASPy dad—an avatar of the ruling class of days gone by.” Spencer’s view was echoed by James Edwards on the Political Cesspool, which carried Spencer’s article verbatim. 

In my view none of this matters anyway, but while ‘Gorsuch’ may be an old Anglo-Saxon name, the man himself is ancestrally Irish. Additionally, Gorsuch was raised as a Catholic, and then he converted to Episcopalianism later, so he is not a ‘WASP’. He’s also not America’s ‘dad’, he’s a nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States, for goodness sake.

Unfortunately no real analysis of Gorsuch’s views on class action lawsuits has been done by anyone in the nationalist sphere. If anyone had chosen to do so, then some extremely meaningful patterns, all of which are negative, would have emerged into view immediately.

SCOTUSblog gives us an interesting look in with the summary containing this excerpt:

Amy Howe / SCOTUSblog, ‘A closer look at Judge Neil Gorsuch and class actions’, 08 Mar 2017 (emphasis added):

[...]

Covering the Wal-Mart decision for this blog, Lyle Denniston described Scalia as the court’s “most dedicated skeptic about the class-action approach to litigation.” Whether Gorsuch, if confirmed, would follow in Scalia’s footsteps remains to be seen. During his decade on the bench, Gorsuch has participated in relatively few class action cases. In the cases involving class action issues in which he has participated, he has generally, but not always, ruled for the defense. Notably, both in cases in which he has ruled for the defense and those in which he has ruled for the plaintiffs, Gorsuch has emphasized the need for courts to stay in their lane, so to speak – that is, not to exceed their authority, particularly when it comes to decisions that are in his view best left to Congress.

[...]

The Bazelon Center has a review which also contains some example of cases that were not class action lawsuits, but seem to give some idea of how Gorsuch interprets civil rights law in general:

Bazelon Center, ‘Review of Disability Cases Involving Judge Neil Gorsuch’, 17 Feb 2017:

In Hwang v. Kansas State University, 753 F.3d 1159 (10th Cir. 2014), Judge Gorsuch wrote an opinion ruling against a longtime professor at a state university who had taken a six-month leave of absence to recover from her cancer treatment. At the end of that period, she requested a short period of additional leave at the advice of her doctor in order to avoid a severe flu outbreak on campus that could endanger her already compromised immune system. The university refused to grant additional leave. Judge Gorsuch began his analysis of Professor Hwang’s claim by asking: “Must an employer allow employees more than six months’ sick leave or face liability under the Rehabilitation Act? Unsurprisingly, the answer is almost always no.” Although the ADA and Rehabilitation Act say nothing about the length of leaves granted by employers and specifically require that that such accommodation requests be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, Judge Gorsuch held that a leave of absence as long as six months would “turn employers into safety net providers for those who cannot work.” He also described Professor Hwang as “a problem other forms of social security aim to address”—even though the professor was willing and able to resume her duties through online classes immediately, or through in-class teaching after the additional short leave. Judge Gorsuch also rejected her argument that the university’s inflexible six-month leave policy was discriminatory, instead reasoning that applying the same leave policies to all employees, without providing reasonable accommodations for qualified employees with a disability, would protect employees with disabilities from being “secretly singled out for discriminatory treatment.” Judge Gorsuch thus concluded that the six-month leave policy was “more than sufficient to comply” with the Rehabilitation Act. [...]

I’m sure everyone can guess where these examples are going. Here’s another:

Bazelon Center, ‘Review of Disability Cases Involving Judge Neil Gorsuch’, 17 Feb 2017:

In Wehrley v. American Family Mutual Insurance Company, 513 F. App’x 733 (10th Cir. 2013), a panel including Judge Gorsuch found that the plaintiff had not established that he had a disability that entitled him to the ADA’s protections. Wehrley, an insurance field claim adjuster, injured his knee and back in a workplace accident, and his employer fired him because of his inability to work on claims that involved going onto roofs. At trial, Wehrley introduced evidence of significant limitations in major life activities, including a medical report stating that he could not walk or stand for prolonged periods, that his pain disrupted his sleep, and that he had to change positions every 30 minutes while sitting. Judge Gorsuch and the panel concluded, however, that Wehrley had not shown that these impairments were substantial because the report did not say that he was unable to “walk or stand in the ordinary course of a day,” nor did it describe the extent or severity of the disruption to his sleep. Without sufficient evidence of a substantial impairment in a major life activity, the panel found that he did not meet the definition of a person with a disability.

And one more:

Bazelon Center, ‘Review of Disability Cases Involving Judge Neil Gorsuch’, 17 Feb 2017:

In Adair v. City of Muskogee, 823 F.3d 1297 (10th Cir. 2016), Judge Gorsuch joined an opinion affirming summary judgment against the plaintiff after finding that he was unable to perform an essential function of his position. The plaintiff, a firefighter who held the position of HazMat Director, injured his back during a training exercise. The city required that he complete a functional-capacity evaluation, which showed that he had some restrictions on his lifting ability. He sued the city under the ADA for disability discrimination, alleging that he was constructively discharged when the city encouraged him to retire rather than be terminated because it regarded him as disabled. The plaintiff argued that he was capable of performing the essential functions of the HazMat Director position even with the lifting restrictions, testifying that he did not need to lift in his position and had never performed regular firefighter duties during his four years as HazMat Director. However, Judge Gorsuch and the panel discounted the plaintiff’s testimony and instead deferred to a state law listing the ability to lift up to 200 pounds as an essential function for all firefighters, regardless of specialized roles. Since the plaintiff suggested no potential accommodations other than being relieved of the lifting duty, the panel concluded that he was not a qualified individual under the ADA.

Being an ‘originalist’ and a ‘textualist’ seems to involve being deliberately absurd in ways that happen to be generally convenient for the defence. The addition of Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of the United States meshes with the thrust of the pieces of legislation, H.R.985 and H.R.720, which were described earlier and which are presently making their way though the US Congress, in a way that enhances their effect.

The addition of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court returns it to the balance that existed when Judge Antonin Scalia was still alive. It is not beyond possibility that sometime in the next four years another judge will be replaced, and at that point Donald Trump may even be able to appoint an additional ‘originalist’ and ‘textualist’ to the court, such as for example Judge William Pryor.

But it is sad that no one is paying any attention to these developments. Choices made during the Trump administration will shape the character of the American system for a generation or longer.

The elimination of all federal funding for the Legal Services Corporation

They suggested that it was going to happen, and now they are moving toward doing it. See here:

New York Times, ‘Popular Domestic Programs Face Ax Under First Trump Budget’, 17 Feb 2017 (emphasis added):

WASHINGTON — The White House budget office has drafted a hit list of programs that President Trump could eliminate to trim domestic spending, including longstanding conservative targets like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Legal Services Corporation, AmeriCorps and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities.

Work on the first Trump administration budget has been delayed as the budget office awaited Senate confirmation of former Representative Mick Mulvaney, a spending hard-liner, as budget director. Now that he is in place, his office is ready to move ahead with a list of nine programs to eliminate, an opening salvo in the Trump administration’s effort to reorder the government and increase spending on defense and infrastructure.

[...]

Eliminating all funding for the Legal Services Corporation is the same thing as abolishing it. Some people may be wondering what it does, and such people would now be wondering about that at a time when it is too late to make a difference. Although the United States Constitution contains language that promises equality in the provision of justice, the language is operationally meaningless unless it can also be said that all people have the ability to access legal services and legal remedies.

Defendants in criminal cases are guaranteed the right to have a lawyer because of the outcome of the United States Supreme Court decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), but the same right to a lawyer does not actually exist for civil cases.

The beginning of the United States government’s effort to provide legal assistance Americans with low-income for civil cases, emerged during Lyndon B. Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’, which gave rise to the creation of the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1964. In 1965, the office created the Legal Services Program, which provided assistance all over the United States.

However, the Legal Services Program was up for White House review in 1969, and the Office of Economic Opportunity itself was in existence because of the Economic Opportunity Act which was scheduled to expire in 1970.

President Richard M. Nixon, who took office in January 1969, asked the US Congress in February 1969 to extend appropriations for the Office of Economic Opportunity. The Ash Commission, headed by former United States Army Air Corps Captain Roy Ash, found “virtual unanimity that organizational improvement of the Executive Office of the President is needed.” Among the recommendations made on this issue, the Ash Commission advocated that Nixon ought to create an independent corporation which would receive funds from the US Congress to disburse to local legal aid organisations.

Nixon made the memo public in February 1971 and in May 1971 he sent a special message to the US Congress proposing the establishment of the Legal Services Corporation.

On 25 July 1974, Richard M. Nixon signed the Legal Services Corporation Act.

The Legal Services Corporation has not been without controversy during its existence, and several unsuccessful attempts to abolish it have been attempted over the years. The most recent unsuccessful attempt to abolish it was in 2005:

TexasLawyersHelp.org, ‘Eliminate LSC and Other Programs, Says Republican Study Committee in “Operation Offset” Budget Report’, 30 Sep 2005 (emphasis added):

A recent report issued by the Republican Study Committee (RSC), a group of nearly 100 conservative House members, calls for the elimination of all federal funding for the Legal Services Corporation. U.S. Representatives Mike Pence (R-IN), RSC’s chairman, and Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), RSC’s budget and spending task force chairman, issued the 23-page report on September 21, 2005. The report—called “Operation Offset: RSC Budget Options 2005”—urges Congress and the President to eliminate federal expenditures as far-ranging as Medicaid and Medicare, graduate school student loan subsidies, foreign aid, the National Endowment for the Arts, matching grants for presidential candidates, and LSC. [...]

Yes, that is the same Mike Pence who is presently the Vice-President of the United States. It’s interesting how that has happened to work out.

Another interesting fact is that the Heritage Foundation which submitted the list from which Donald Trump selected Judge Neil Gorsuch’s name to nominate him to the United States Supreme Court, is also visibly active in crafting and giving legitimation to the budget which will abolish the Legal Services Corporation:

New York Times, ‘Popular Domestic Programs Face Ax Under First Trump Budget’, 17 Feb 2017:

[...]

Stephen Moore, another Heritage Foundation economist who advised Mr. Trump during his campaign, acknowledged that powerful constituencies were behind many of the programs that are on the chopping block. But he said now that Republicans are finally in control of the government, they must make a valiant effort to fulfill the promises they have been making to voters for years.

“I think it’s an important endeavor to try to get rid of things that are unnecessary,” Mr. Moore said. “The American public has a lot of contempt for how government is run in Washington, in no small part because there is so much waste.”

If you know anyone who seriously believes that the Heritage Foundation along with all the other personalities I’ve mentioned here are just innocently trying to ‘get rid of things that are unnecessary’, send that person to me, because I have a bridge to sell them — and it’s on the moon.

Conclusion

Particular factions among the American ruling class are seeking to enhance their structural power, or to turn a phrase, they are seeking to make themselves great again, by weakening the efficacy of checks or dissents against their power domestically in an environment in which they have total power over all branches of the government and are receiving virtually no criticism from their own constituency on any economic issues. This would place them in the best command position imaginable, which would allow them the ability to then turn their focus to foreign policy and trade policy.

Everything that the American ruling class is doing to pacify and constrict the power of their own constituents at home, is a preparation and a prerequisite for them being able to efficiently conduct a trade war against European, Asian, and Latin American states.

Enacting a tariff regime as a necessary centre-piece of the trade war is an action which will raise the cost of inputs for all American manufacturers. One of the ways that they will offset that cost will be to enable American companies to act in cost-cutting ways that disregard the interests of American workers and families without having to worry about being subjected to lawsuits brought by those workers and families.

Passing H.R.985 and H.R.720, as well as appointing Judge Neil Gorsuch to the United States Supreme Court and abolishing the Legal Services Corporation, are four key actions that are part of the process of them ‘moving the ball down the playing field’ in that regard.

Evidence has been presented here which illustrates that the entire edifice of ‘Make America Great Again’ is going to be constructed atop a foundation of socio-economic retrogression and misery.