☕️ SYMBOLIC NITWITS ☙ Monday, December 16, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Post-election progressives eat crow, slowly recognizing what increasingly appears to be a lasting realignment; international diplomacy returns as the adults head back to the White House; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! I hope everyone enjoyed a festive weekend. The extended Childers clan baked cookies yesterday, leading to an unavoidable sugar hangover this morning. Our quick roundup today begins with a remarkable Van Jones clip and considers what it represents in the bigger picutre, and ends with the incredibly encouraging return of diplomacy, ushered in by an incoming Trump Administration that is negotiating at a handicap with one hand behind its back—but which is still outperforming Biden’s neocons.

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I’ll bet you never saw this coming. This weekend, the New Yorker ran a demoralized but very important political analytic headlined, “Have the Democrats Become the Party of the Élites?” We’ll start with a hilarious podcast clip making the rounds yesterday. In the short clip, Communist Obamaite Van Jones unironically and emphatically scolded a progressive ally, insisting that “Donald Trump is smarter than all of us.” The clip is amusing enough, but it represents something much bigger, a trend the New Yorker was getting at. Van Jones’ wry, self-deprecating comment manifested a disastrous, deep-ocean political current sweeping progressive confidence out to sea.

The clip began with the interviewer, whom I did not recognize, arrogantly asking Jones “How the hell did Donald Trump figure out the mainstream media had been replaced by fringe social media, when Trump doesn’t even know how to work a computer?”

Even setting aside the controversial parts of Trump’s bio, there are countless good potential answers, that are all, apparently, invisible to the shuttered progressive mind. First of all, Trump is no stranger to social media; he has been tweeting for years. Remember the mean tweets? Second, professionally he’s accomplished a LOT. Trump has built up an international business empire of vastly complicated, highly prominent real estate projects where the tiniest failures are immediately obvious. He built a hit reality TV show out of a tagline. He fixed New York’s beloved ice skating rink when no one else could.

On top of all that, or because of it, he became a bestselling author.

Allowing that it is unfair to compare any of the uniquely great men of American history to the others, Trump undeniably rubs historical shoulders with American business giants like Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie, as well as unparalleled political figures like Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt.

So when progressives sneer and dismissively call Trump “dumb,” all they achieve is underestimating him and highlighting how unmerited their own arrogance is. Unmerited arrogance, a default assumption of their own moral and intellectual superiority, neatly packaged as “pride,” is the defining characteristic of the modern, pompous progressive brand.

As they say, pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty something or other before a fall. Paging Dr. Nemesis.

🔥 The New Yorker article prominently featured progressive sociologist professor and intellectual author Musa Al-Garbi (a name he adopted after converting to Islam). To Al-Garbi, the problem is simple. “Democrats,” he explained, “have become the party of élites.” He coined the term “symbolic capitalists” to describe modern progressives: academics and professionals who feel intellectually superior to other classes.

Al-Garbi described the progressive identity as being founded in knowledge (i.e., “symbolic”) capital rather than founded in anything tangible like real-world achievements. He said, “We are valued—overvalued, I would say—for what we know, not for what we make or do in the physical world.”

Al-Garbi argued that, over the past three decades, the Democratic Party has been transformed from the party of non-symbolic workers to the party of symbolic élites. Worse, the élites find it hard to resist the temptation to sneering condescencion toward people who don’t agree with them. For example, Al-Garbi sarcastically asked, “What’s wrong with you, why can’t you get the pronouns thing right?”

Progressives are willing to try anything except treat other people as equals. After all, they spent four years earning credentials. “We’ve tried denouncing,” Al-Garbi noted, “we’ve tried coercing, we’ve tried shaming people and implying that they’re backward or pathological, and the modal response to that, unsurprisingly, has been backlash.”

🔥 Serving as the exception that proves the rule, Van Jones showed remarkable humility in responding to his interviewer’s unbearably arrogant question. As the interviewer waxed eloquent in developing his theme of “how could dumb old Trump do x,” Van visibly grew increasingly uncomfortable. Finally, he interrupted:

Look … Listen. So, so, so, everybody keeps … you have a framework in your mind that ‘how can Donald Trump, how can Donald Trump, how can Donald Trump.’ Guys, can we cut it out? Donald Trump is not an idiot. Let me just be very clear. Donald Trump is smarter than me, you, and all the critics.

You know how we know? Because he has the White House. The Senate. The House. The Supreme Court. The popular vote. A massive media ecosystem bigger than the mainstream built around him and for him. And a political fervor in a political movement around him.

And his best buddy is the richest person in the history of the world, and the most relevant Kennedy is with him.

This dude is a phenomenon! He is the most powerful human on Earth and in our lifetime. And we’re supposed to be saying, “how is this guy?” We look like idiots.

The interviewer responded simply, with uncharacteristic humility: “you’re totally right.”

Van Jones represents the leading edge of smart progressive thinking, which is collapsing in real time. Progressives sense something is different this time, which is one reason why the “resistance” has been so muted. But unlike in 2016, in 2024 the conservative victory was so definitive that progressives can’t convincingly dismiss it as luck, or chalk it up to transitory winds of temporary political change that happened to blow the wrong way at the right moment.

The fact is they got shellacked. Progressives, at least more intelligent ones like Jones, Al-Garbi, and the New Yorker’s editors, are grappling with the surreal, astonishing fact that President Trump beat them like a drum. And if he badly beat them, even running circles around them, then by definition he must be smarter than they are.

Here comes the critical point. Since the progressive brand, its identity, is founded in the arrogant assumption of moral and intellectual superiority, progressives are starting to unravel amidst an accelerating identity crisis.

Worryingly, democrat progressives used that arrogant brand identity to stitch together Frankenstein’s political party of dissociated victim groups under a unifying principle they proudly called “woke,” the term itself oozing with arrogance by suggesting woke progressives knew what was really going on while everyone else was intellectually sound asleep.

Al-Garbi thinks progressives are in denial, a dangerous location especially when politico-cultural events are rapidly evolving. They could get left behind. “When voters are seeing these very deep problems in our institutions,” Professor Al-Garbi asked tartly, “and there’s one party saying ‘I will burn those institutions down,’ and another party saying ‘Nope, the institutions are perfect, nothing to see here’—if those are the two choices, guess which one voters are going to pick?”

🔥 It takes little imagination to recognize how brittle the progressive monolith has become. Set to one side the inexplicable mystery of how normal black and Hispanic men can tolerate the progressive alphabet mafia or pronoun memorization drills. Rather, consider the barely contained conflict between splenetic trans activists and mulish lesbian activists, who the cross-dressers call TERFS. If the glue that keeps those head-butting groups voting together dries out even a little, then natural stress will take over and do the rest.

To give you an idea what I am talking about, here’s a random social media example of Trans-TERF conflict —progressive infighting— that appeared in my feed just this morning:

You might say all those people are crazy and there isn’t an ounce of sense among them. Let’s take one more example. Illegal Immigrants are another crazy, bolted-on group shaking apart the progressive coalition and crashing into other progressive factions, especially since they don’t know how to drive.

In this example clip, a former Democrat points to this election cycle’s primaries as the moment he realized he would never vote Democrat again:

CLIP: Former democrat explains the moment he left the progressives (1:49).

Van Jones’s estimation of Trump was right. Trump is unique, a force unlike anything living progressives have ever faced before. He is not just advancing conservative values. Trump is smashing apart the progressive brand, even its self-identity as a political group.

And it’s happening at a terrible time. Even worse for progressives, the Democrats have no clear leader, no anti-Trump to help craft a counter-narrative. Let’s say voters accepted progressive’s deranged claims that Trump is a fill-in-the-blank, whatever, but it’s definitely bad and definitely dangerous to democracy. Then who is the Democrats’ alternative?

Another far-left progressive quoted by the New Republic, Liza Featherstone, a columnist for Jacobin and The New Republic, was recently a panelist at a New York progressive think tank event. “Like a lot of you, I’m depressed about the election,” Liza began. But after researching the fundamentals and reading Al-Garbi’s latest book, “I came away even more depressed . . . convinced that we, as a class, were politically useless.”

Then Liza really poured on the dark predictions. She said as bad as things were, it was possible that they were about to get much worse. I think it is possible we may witness the complete collapse of progressive politics and a generation in the wilderness for Democrats.

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Given the stratospheric stakes, CBS ran a very encouraging story yesterday headlined, “Rep. Mike Waltz says Orbán "clearly has a good relationship" with Trump amid Russia-Ukraine discussions.” In other words, diplomacy as a tool of international relations is back.

Representative Mike Walz (R-Fl.), Trump’s nominee for National Security Advisor (to replace neocon Jake Sullivan), appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation yesterday to talk about the transition. During the interview, Walz reported the Trump team has been talking to Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, and then noted that Orbán has a great relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Without saying it, Walz said we’re dickering with the Russians through the Hungarians.

It told us two things. First, Trump’s team is being super careful not to give the Democrats any new impeachment arguments by ‘conducting foreign policy’ before Trump’s inauguration. Everyone remembers what happened last time. Russia, Russia Russia!

But second, and maybe more significant, Trump had dusted off and is using an archaic device of statecraft long discarded by the Biden Administration, a tool that some people used to call “diplomacy.”

In other words, rather than Trump directly negotiating with Putin, he’s negotiating indirectly through a mutually admired leader. The time-proven technique is not complicated.

Imagine you have an ongoing beef with your next-door neighbor. Say he has a nasty nude sunbathing habit, which he regularly exercises on the deck next to his raised outdoor pool. Due to baffling decisions made by the builder, who is long gone, the appalling spectacle is framed right in your dining room window and the show usually starts at dinnertime.

Now, you could be an adult. You could go over there and have a talk with your neighbor about putting some clothes on or something. But you aren’t sure. You worry. After all, you haven’t been on the best of terms with your neighbor ever since his “Love Lives Here” sign —which was, admittedly, encroaching on your mutual property line— mysteriously disappeared on trash day.

You think for some reason he might paranoically suspect that you were somehow involved in the sign-napping.

So, a conversation could get dicey. He might make wild accusations. Things could go sideways. He might overreact by nude sunbathing even more, to teach you a lesson. You think this situation is fraught with the worst kind of potential for disaster and lose sleep fretting about all these low-level conflicts being indelicately exposed at the next HOA meeting.

But then you remember that your free-spirited neighbor and the next neighbor down the street are drinking buddies who often play driveway pickleball together. And that guy owes you a big favor. Once, after he’d backed his new riding lawnmower into the garage door (mistakenly thinking it was open), you helped him quickly get the door back on its tracks before his wife got home, sparing him metric tons of embarrassment and some not insubstantial criticism over the mower purchase which his wife never liked in the first place. Not to mention reviving the barely buried argument about how they hardly have any lawn to mow anyway.

Aha, you think. I’ll use diplomacy! You ask your mower neighbor to talk to your sunbathing neighbor about making the nightly dinner show more G-rated. After all, he’s much less likely to turn down a request from his pickleball partner down than from you, the possible lawn sign stealer.

And that’s diplomacy.

But Joe Biden has always considered diplomacy to be old-fashioned. Biden’s neocons prefer cowardly, passive-aggressive hijinx instead of talking. Passive-aggressive hijinx like cutting our enemies’ undersea cables, running color revolutions on their smaller allies, or throwing their international yard signs away when they’re not looking.

But now that Trump has been elected, international relations are returning to a diplomatic status quo ante, where we can once again talk about our problems with our adversaries like adults. Diplomacy is much less likely to result in conflict resolution involving nuclear missiles, nude ones or otherwise, than is dynamiting their deep-sea gas lines and then childishly blaming it on them.

The adults aren’t back in the White House yet, but they are on their way, and they are already working on the most important stuff. Trump and his team are getting more done with one political arm tied behind their backs to achieve peace than Biden’s neocons have accomplished in four years.

Just wait till they are actually in office.

Have a magnificent Monday! I’ll be back again tomorrow with more delightful and delicious Coffee & Covid, extra espresso shots for free, along with all the essential news and commentary.

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