Don't play in the street at the protests tomorrow. Remember the first rule of winning a gunfight: don't be there. Don't go to stupid places with stupid people doing stupid things.
I've posted this each President's Day for ten years but have found no reason to adjust the rankings.
It's
not a real President's birthday (Lincoln's was the 12th, Washington's
is the 22nd), but everyone wants a day off, so sorry Abe and George, but
we're taking it today. But in the spirit intended for the holiday, let
me offer up Borepatch's bestest and worstest lists for Presidents.
Top Five:
#5: Calvin Coolidge
Nothing To Reportis a fine epitaph for a President, in this day of unbridled expansion of Leviathan.
#4. Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson
is perhaps the last (and first) President who exercised
extra-Constitutional power in a manner that was unambiguously beneficial
for the Republic (the Louisiana Purchase). He repealed Adam's noxious
Alien and Sedition Acts and pardoned those convicted under them.
#3. Grover Cleveland*.
He
didn't like the pomp and circumstance of the office, and he hated the
payoffs so common then and now. He continually vetoed pork spending
(including for veterans of the War Between the States), so much so that
he was defeated for re-election, but unusually won a second term later.
This quote is priceless (would that Latter Day Presidents rise so
high), on vetoing a farm relief bill:"Federal
aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the
part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national
character."
#2. Ronald Reagan
He
at least tried to slow down the growth of Leviathan, the first
President to do so in over half a century (see entry #5, above). He
would have reduced it further, except that his opposition to the Soviet
fascist state and determination to end it cost boatloads of cash. It
also caused outrage among the home grown fascists in the Media and
Universities, but was wildly popular among the general population which
was (and hopefully still remains) sane.
#1. George Washington
Could have been King. Wasn't. Q.E.D.
Bottom Five:
#5. John Adams.
There's
no way to read the Alien and Sedition Acts as anything other than a
blatant violation of the First Amendment. It's a sad statement that the
first violation of a Presidential Oath of Office was with President #2.
#4. Woodrow Wilson.
Not
only did he revive the spirit of Adams' Sedition Acts, he caused a
Presidential opponent to be imprisoned under the terms of his grotesque
Sedition Act of 1918. He was Progressivism incarnate: he lied us into
war, he jailed the anti-war opposition, he instituted a draft, reinstituted segregation
in the Civil Service, and he was entirely soft-headed when it came to
foreign policy. The fact that Progressives love him (and hate Donald Trump) says all you need to know about them.
#3 Lyndon Johnson.
An
able legislator who was able to get bills passed without having any
real idea what they would do once enacted, he is responsible for more
Americans living in poverty and despair than any occupant of the White
House, and that says a lot.
#2. Franklin Roosevelt.
America's
Mussolini - ruling extra-Constitutionally fixing wages and prices,
packing the Supreme Court, and transforming the country into a bunch of
takers who would sell their votes for a trifle. He also rounded up a
bunch of Americans and sent them to Concentration Camps. But they were nice Concentration Camps - at least we're told that by his admirers. At least Mussolini met an honorable end.
#1. Abraham Lincoln.
There's
no doubt that the Constitution never would have been ratified if the
States hadn't thought they could leave if they needed to. Lincoln saw
to it that 10% of the military-age male population was killed or wounded
preventing that in an extra-Constitutional debacle unequaled in the
Republic's history. Along the way, he suspendedHabeas Corpus,
instituted the first ever draft on these shores, and jailed political
opponents as he saw fit. Needless to say, Progressives adore him.
So happy President's Day.
* I am currently reading A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland (recommended). I had not known that the very first First Lady to have Jackie Kennedy style glamor was his wife Frances, whom he wed in the White House itself. Here she is in her salad days (courtesy of Wikipedia):
Peter brings up a point I've been making for quite a while that is being highlighted by Elon's DOGE:
It doesn't give enough attention, IMHO, to the "poverty industry" of NGO's, consultants, therapists and others who make a good living out of "managing" or "addressing" the causes, effects and reality of poverty,without ever doing anything to resolve the issues they identify- because that would cut off their income, and nobody (at least, from their perspective) wants that.
Rich People's Leftismis one of the clearest explanations I've ever seen for the utter failure of government in Blue States:
With this new approach in mind, let me contrast Rich People’s Leftism (RPL) with Poor People’s Leftism (PPL).
RPL
thinks that its goal is to help poor people, while PPL thinks that
RPL’s primary goal is to ensure that wealthy leftists dominate and get
great jobs.
You really should
click through to read about Rich People's Leftism, which dates to 2010.
We've known about this for a long, long time. A different view is "red pill/blue pill":
...
an old post from Isegoria (you do read him every day, don't you?) gives
the best introduction to the topic, phrased in explicitly"Blue Pill"/"Red Pill" terminology:
The nature of the state
The state is established by citizens to serve their needs. Its actions are generally righteous.
The
state is just another giant corporation. Its actions generally advance
its own interests. Sometimes these interests coincide with ours,
sometimes they don’t.
You
should read Isegoria's post as well. Then think about the proposed
$3.5T spending bill that is before congress. Who will it help? Who are
we told that is is going to help, but won't? To ask the questions is
to answer them.
What is interesting about the opening moves of DOGE is that we are now getting names to put next to all the Rich People's Leftism projects.
I've been a bit startled by the unhinged reaction by so many Democrats to Trump's rather resounding victory. Probably I shouldn't be - after all the lesson of Facebook (and most social media) proves the old adage that it's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than it is to open it and remove all doubt.
Sure, I've been wrong all the time in the past (click on the tag for polls - often wrong but at least I showed my work). But when things didn't go my way it was a shrug and get on to what's next. That's not what we see at all.
Sure, the Democrats never really talked much about issues that most people care about - are you better off than you were four years ago, that sort of thing. Instead, for the last four years it's been OrangeManBad, and nothing but OrangeManBad. Now they are standing amidst the destruction of their hopes as the Great Orange Whale swims off to the White House.
Maybe it's time to reread that novel, and an exercise in understanding the broken political philosophy of the Democrats. But then again, I don't think that *I* need to reread it.
They do.
Absurdum est ut alios regat, qui seipsum regere nescit.
It is absurd that a man should rule over others, who cannot rule himself.
Only two Presidents have been elected to non-consecutive terms. The first was Grover Cleveland who served as 22nd (in 1884) and 24th (in 1892) Presidential terms (his two terms interrupted by Benjamin Harrison in 1888 even though Cleveland won the popular vote). Long time readers will know that Cleveland is very much a Friend of the Blog, being listed as one of the top US Presidents since forever.
The second, of course, is Donald Trump - Presidential terms 45 and (now) 47. We will see how history rates his two terms; 45 was pretty successful but with a lot of important stuff left undone. His great Presidential flaw was the people he appointed do implement his policies where they often submarined him.
We will see how much he learned from that. Glen Reynolds posts some interesting ideas (you should absolutely read the whole thing; it's certain that Trump's people have):
Last time around, Trump squandered his momentum. He passed the tax bill that the establishment GOP wanted, after which they didn’t need anything from him and turned to obstructing him. Here’ssomethingI wrote in 2017:
Like airplanes on a runway. Trump’s approach this time around should be what he should have done last time: Shock and awe. Shut down departments, fire bureaucrats, exercise emergency powers, all so fast that the establishment’s responses are saturated. Javier Millei’s whirlwind assault in Argentina should be the model, sometimes in specifics but also in general approach. Bureaucrats move slowly; Trump should move fast.
Elon Musk says he can cut $2 trillion easily; do it. Also, set bureaucrats competing with each other for what funds remain. Divide and conquer.
The interesting question here is how you scale this throughout all the
Federal Agencies. I think the answer is to use business-as-usual:
different offices play office politics against each other to get budget
and headcount. That's how the game is played. So set up an incentive
structure for Office A to rat our Office B's inefficiencies and
duplications to save their own skins. I expect that this would pay big
dividends.
So we shall see what we shall see. The results from last night were not the landslide I was sort of expecting (although it was a solid win). I expect there was some cheating but nothing like what we saw in 2020 - because as I've been saying, party apparatchiks saw the same Preference Cascade forming and a lot fewer were willing to risk jail to cheat for a loser.
But like Donald Trump, the USA dodged a bullet last night.
Well, and our precinct, at least. I'm not sure what that means - there's no way that Kamala Harris will win deep red Manatee County, Florida. But Republican voters seem eager to turn out and vote.
No, it's not because Harris is mad as a hatter on the Green New Deal or because Trump will kill all of this off - although both are entirely correct. No, this is thinking about the polling which shows the race to be neck and neck even though it is anything but.
Long time readers know how I bang on and on about the hideous data problems in today's Climate Science. I've been doing this for fifteen years - this post may not be the earliest where I delved into the problems in the climate databases, but it's one of the earliest. How To Create A Consensus On Global Warming:
We keep hearing people tell us that there is a "consensus" that the
planet is warming, because the "science is settled". Longtime readers
know my feelings on the latter, so there's no need to rehash old
arguments. Instead, I'd like to look at how one might go about
manufacturing a consensus. It's actually not hard.
Step 1: Change the data
[lots of details on data manipulation and shenanigans removed]
We see this in high fidelity in the polls for this election. There are a million ways to manipulate the polls to give you the results you want, such as estimates of Republican vs. Democrat turnout. In essence, I'm not objecting so much to the results of the polls, but rather to the assumptions that go into the sausage-making machine. Change the assumptions, change the output.
But my old post also highlights a key issue in play on today's polls:
Step 2. Fund only scientific research that confirms warming.
Who is paying for these polls, and what are their agendas? Quite frankly, we don't know either of these but the polls are acting in very close agreement. You could look at that as a measure of accuracy, or you could look at that as an outcome of the agendas - such as shaping public opinion and expectations.
Now I may just be nasty and suspicious but there is a way that we can test whether my suspicions hold water. It's the same thing we can do with Climate Science, to validate what we hear from the establishment scientists. All we have to do is ask a simple question: if the data are so settled, do we see lots of corroborating evidence or do we see a lot of evidence contradicting the establishment view?
In both cases, we see a lot of evidence contradicting the official narrative.
For example, for Global Warming, we see all sots of non-warming things:
You would think that if the science really were so settled that evidence for Global Warming would be falling off the trees. It's not.
And so with evidence for a "neck and neck election". If it were so settled - after all, essentially all polls say exactly that - then why all the evidence that says it's not?
Donald Trump campaigns for Arab-American vote in Detroit
LA Times, Washington Post, Gannet refuse to endorse Harris
All the betting sites have Trump not just ahead, but way ahead.
Even the crooked polls have Harris neck-and-neck, where both Hillary and Biden were up by 5 or 6
Barack Obama is trying to shame Black men to vote for Harris. And it's not working.
If it were a neck and neck race, you'd see a bunch of these on Harris' side, too. You don't.
Remember, we're in the middle of a preference cascade. Don't pay any attention to the polls which are trying to gaslight you. Pay attention to what you see with your own eyes. And as to the "margin of cheat" you can believe that a bunch of Democrat operatives are doing exactly that right now, and wondering if they want to risk 10 years in Club Fed to try to push a loser across the finish line. A bunch of them will take a hard pass on that.
A Preference Cascade is when a large portion of the population begins to realize - despite relentless government and/or media propaganda - that a lot of other folks think like they do and that the propaganda is, well propaganda. This is almost always catastrophic for The Powers That Be, because Preference Cascades tend to accelerate. As this progresses, formerly reliable underlings begin to think that TPTB are going to lose, and start to refuse to stick their necks out to protect the current order.
It's one thing to stuff ballot boxes when you think that everyone on your side is on board and your guy is going to win - and any potential investigation will be done in the most slipshod manner. It's quite a different thing when you wonder just how many of the guys on your side are actually going to go through with this, and if the other guy wins will you be facing 20 years in Club Fed.
At the extreme, the security services join the preference cascade. They smell an emerging winner and want to be on side when that happens. At this point, things get pretty grim for TPTB.
And so it turned out to be, with a Palace Coup that forced Slow Joe from the race and handed the nomination to Kamala Harris. She rode a carefully orchestrated media campaign to some level of acceptance for a while, but the last couple of weeks have been a disaster for her, and the next two look to be worse.
It's a Preference Cascade in action, with each day adding new evidence to the fact that the country is in the process of rejecting her. Consider:
All she knows is to play the race and gender card. It isn't working at all. Obama even came out lecturing Black men on how they were all misogynistic or something - and he got scorched for his trouble. Even The View disagreed with Obama on this.
Blogger Ann Althouse looks at the cries of misogyny from the New York Times and doesn't buy it:
If Kamala Harris were a man, she would not have been chosen for Joe Biden's Vice President, and if she were not Vice President, she would not have been the one that the nomination that was stolen from him got handed to. She wouldn't be anywhere near the presidency.
Everything is breaking Trump's way as the majority of the undecided voters decide that she's a Dimwit. This is a Preference Cascade in action - despite the media gaslighting, despite Google and Facebook pushing Harris and shadow banning Trump, despite deceptively edited TV interviews, people are deciding that their gut feeling is the same as millions of other people's. They're realizing that they're not alone - and in fact are in the obvious majority - and are now no longer afraid to say this.
And potential political allies are slowly moving away from her. If we can see high profile ones like Senators, there are a whole lot more in the party doing it too. The number of Democrats who will put their necks on the chopping blocks is dropping like a rock.
My sense is that the whole thing is over, and this will be a landslide as the country shows that you can't beat something with nothing. Sure there will be a cheat, but it won't be as big or as blatant as in 2020 because the people you need to pull that off are already second guessing their support for her. How many will be willing to go to jail to cheat for someone that literally nobody has ever voted for? Each day, that list gets shorter.
How did the would-be assassin know where and when to find Donald Trump? Was he just lucky like Gavrilo Princip? Or was he "lucky" like Thomas Matthew Crooks?
It's Labor Day, which means "It's the end of summer". It used to mean a lot more than that - a celebration of labor in general and the working man in particular. Just in my lifetime, this has been stood on it's head - literally, politics of labor is upside down from when I was a kid.
It used to be that the Democrats stood for the working guy, and the Republicans were the party of Wall Street and the Country Club. Man is that different now. I wrote almost a decade ago about the rise of Donald Trump is basically explicit Class terms.
Which seems weird, because it was the Democrats and their buddies the Socialists and Communists (and the University professors, but I repeat myself) who were always bringing up Marx' class theory about politics. You don't hear that anymore, either, which is really interesting - it's the Dog who Didn't Bark. An old post from Eric Raymond explains this completely:
Marx believed, and taught, that increasing exploitation of the proletariat would immiserate it, building up a counterpressure of rage that would bring on socialist revolution in a process as automatic as a steam engine.
Inconveniently, the only place this ever actually happened was in a Communist country – Poland – in 1981. I’m not going to get into the complicated historiography of how the Soviet Revolution itself failed to fit the causal sequence Marx expected; consult any decent history. What’s interesting for our purposes is that capitalism accidentally solved the immiseration problem well before then, by abolishing Marx’s proletariat through rising standards of living – reverse immiseration.
I wrote about that here. Even in the 19thm Century - maybe even during Marx' own lifetime - this was a realy problem for Marxist theorists.
The most forward-thinking Marxists had already figured out this was going to be a problem by around 1910. This began a century-long struggle to find a theoretical basis for socialism decoupled from Marxian class analysis.
Early, on, Lenin developed the theory of the revolutionary vanguard. In this telling, the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously respond to immiseration with socialist revolution but needed to be led to it by a vanguard of intellectuals and men of action which would, naturally, take a leading role in crafting the post-revolutionary paradise.
Hey Vladimir, maybe the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously responding to their immiseration because they were undergoing the most remarkable increase in their standard of living that the world had ever seen? No? Better to kill 10 million of them? Oooooh kaaay.
Only a few years later came one of the most virulent discoveries in this quest – Fascism. It is not simplifying much to say that Communists invented Fascism as an escape from the failure of class-warfare theory, then had to both fight their malignant offspring to death and gaslight everyone else into thinking that the second word in “National Socialism” meant anything but what it said.
And the walls of the US House of Representatives are adorned with fasces.
During its short lifetime, Fascism did exert quite a fascination on the emerging managerial-statist elite. Before WWII much of that elite viewed Mussolini and Hitler as super-managers who Got Things Done, models to be emulated rather than blood-soaked tyrants. But Fascism’s appeal did not long survive its defeat.
Hey, none of OUR Representatives are fascists! Don't look at the wall decorations! I mean, fascism is for losers - HEY, stop looking at the wall decorations!
Marxists had more success through replacing the Marxian economic class hierarchy with other ontologies of power in which some new victim group could be substituted for the vanished proletariat and plugged into the same drama of immiseration leading to inevitable revolution.
So the working class stiffs that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats all used to stand for were doing decently well, and might just start voting for the other guys. What to do, what to do?
Outsource all the good high paying hourly jobs. Use Environmentalism to justify this - I mean, you don't want your kid to drink dirty water or breathe dirty air, right? Better for them to grow up to be methheads because there's no jobs and no hope for the future.
Meanwhile, the government and associated white collar employment exploded, pretty much at the public's expense. These people voted in great numbers - and always for the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats, and big business found that they could really enhance their profits by getting in bed with the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats. Some new regulations to kill new upstart competitors is just what the doctor ordered.
And now people are mystified about the rise of Brexit/Donald Trump/Les gilots jaunes/Alternative fur Deutschland. And remember how the UK Labour party got wiped out five years ago? How voters in their heartland of formerly industrial Britain voted for Tory politicians for the first time in a century? Sure, Labour just won (in a very low turn out election); does anyone think that their voters from Sheffield will ever be back in the way they used to be?
Raymond discusses at length this inversion of politics around Labor, using the UK as an example:
This is the Great Inversion – in Great Britain, Marxist-derived Left politics has become the signature of the overclass even as the working class has abandoned it. Indeed, an increasingly important feature of Left politics in Britain is a visceral and loudly expressed loathing of the working class.
To today’s British leftist, the worst thing you can be is a “gammon”. The word literally means “ham”, but is metaphorically an older white male with a choleric complexion. A working-class white male, vulgar and uneducated – the term is never used to refer to men in upper socio-economic strata. And, of course, all gammons are presumed to be reactionary bigots; that’s the payload of the insult.
Catch any Labor talking head on video in the first days after the election and what you’d see is either tearful, disbelieving shock or a venomous rant about gammons and how racist, sexist, homophobic, and fascist they are. They haven’t recovered yet as I write, eleven days later.
Observe what has occurred: the working class are now reactionaries. New Labor is entirely composed of what an old Leninist would have called “the revolutionary vanguard” and their immigrant clients. Is it any wonder that some Laborites now speak openly of demographic replacement, of swamping the gammons with brown immigrants?
Is it any wonder that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats are bleeding support and desperately trying to import a whole new voting class of unassimilated immigrants? Interestingly, Donald Trump is doing very well here among Latino Americans - and so Biden/Harris opened the border and Nancy Pelosi is pushing amnesty. Parliament is dissolving the People and electing another one.
This is all very weird for me, because this has all happened in my lifetime. I used to be a Democrat - a real one, a strong supporter of the party - because they stood for the Little Guy against Wall Street. Now Wall Street is the party of Bill Clinton and Hunter Biden, not of Youngstown or Akron or Toledo or Fitchburg. Those places are all going to vote for Donald Trump (yes, even Fitchburg in deep blue Massachusetts).
It's all upside down. And it's upside down all over the Western World, for exactly the same reason. On this Labor Day, ponder what it would take to get a bunch of political parties to sell out their strongest supporters - to stab them in the back, really. They sure must have had some powerful motivation.
I do so wonder what that motivation might have been.
So some self-important English Plod said he was going to criminally charge and extradite US citizens for exercising their first amendment rights on US soil. Interesting.
Quite frankly, this seems like a golden opportunity for political candidates here to get a "gimmie" issue. Sticking up for the first amendment seems like a layup. And if as I suspect the Democrats are institutionally incapable of sticking up for free speech, then this is a gold plated opportunity to paint them as the party of censorship - not to mention being weak on foreign policy.
Like I said, this issue looks like it's 100% upside.
Exhibit A: the firing of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle. Sure, it was the Right Thing to do, but when has anyone in Washington DC done the Right Thing? Instead, let's look at coalitions and their current dynamics.
Cheatle was firmly in Biden's coalition, seemingly close to "Doctor" Jill herself. But now Sleepy Joe is gone and doesn't have the stroke to protect his coalition members. It seems that Kamala was key in pressuring Cheatle to resign - Kamala is constructing her own coalition and needs to show the world that she's the one with stroke. Also, she needs the assassination story off the front pages, so this kills two birds with one stone. Plus, it opens up a position in the bureaucracy that she can dangle in front of people she wants to join her coalition. It's a threefer.
Exhibit B: The Far Left coalition is throwing its weight around, rioting in Washington's Union Station and the Capitol, and tearing down and burning American flags:
Sansour was direct. She warned the Democratic Party might lose the Muslim and Far Left votes in November. “Let us be clear. Our votes are still to be earned.”
The dynamic here will be familiar to Europeans, looking at smallish but influential partieslike the Greens. Sarsour is looking after her own coalition, trying to maintain the money and plum positions she can offer to supporters in return for their support.
I think I need to update my list of the coalitions in the Democratic Party's ongoing civil war:
The Bidens (fading fast)
The Clintons
Nancy Pelosi/Gavin Newsom
The Obamas
The Far Left
All of these are jockeying for power right now. We will see a lot of seemingly random events transpiring between now and at least the Democratic Convention that are anything but random. They are about power and coalition building - and tearing down an opponent's coalition.
Quite frankly, that last is the Democrat's biggest problem - none of these factions really like each other very much. The best that you can say is that they see the other factions as useful to their goal to get and keep power. As more and more backstabbing occurs (as it must, there's only a month to the Convention and the time to strike is now or never), there will be less and less loyalty that they can count on from other factions after the convention. 90 days from then to the election doesn't give a lot of time to rig the results.
That will take a deep level of commitment, which will be really, really hard for them to achieve.So enjoy the infighting. It will be going on for a while yet.
UPDATE 25 JULY 2024 11:53: This would be inexplicable without thinking about rival factions jockeying for position inside the Democratic Party:
House Republicans and six Democrats voted on a resolution condemning President Joe Biden and his border czar,Vice President Kamala Harris, for failing to secure the border.
Which faction(s) do they support? Well, not Biden's or Harris'.
Well, they can't in time for the election, anyway. There's an old saying in politics that "personnel is policy" which refers to a lot more than just having someone competent in the job. It's a reflection that politics is about coalitions - building them and maintaining them. The coalition members get their cut of the government largess, and pay for it with loyalty to the guy at the top. If they're not loyal, he gives them their pick slip and they lose the largess.
This was actually Trump's biggest mistake when he was president, not filling the Federal Government with his coalition. In his defense, he was in the middle of a Republican civil war, where there were multiple factions and multiple coalitions.
That's exactly what the Democrats face now, and why they can't put Humpty-Dumpty back together. Because there are multiple coalitions, whoever emerges on top won't know if he (she?) can trust these coalitions because they aren't his coalitions. They might be able to be integrated into his coalition, given time, but time is exactly what the Democrats do not have right now.
It takes time to forge a governing coalition - just look at any parliamentary system: when the government is stable it is because the governing coalition is solid. Ministers can issue policy with a reasonable expectation that it will be supported and carried out by the coalition members. When the governing coalition is unstable, chaos results. Orders get ignored or slow walked or subverted because the Minister no longer has the loyalty of the coalition members.
Eventually a leader emerges who can attract key talent from outside coalitions and integrate it into his. This will involve rewards like positions in the bureaucracy or some such - featherbedding is the name of this game. But until this all gets sorted out and the new coalition is filled with people who think they're better off with the new leader than without, nothing is going anywhere.
Even worse, there will always be serious back stabbing between different coalitions. Trust is not a virtue most politicians hew to, and quite frankly until they are in a position to remove perks as well as give them, they would be a fool to trust just about anybody.
Some day a leader will emerge to stitch together the various coalitions that make up the Democratic party. It won't happen in the next 100 days, sure as God made little green apples.
The biggest implication of this is that it will be much more difficult for the Democrats to "fortify" the upcoming election via 2020-style shenanigans. Sure, the party bosses will want to, but how much do they trust the other coalitions to support them? Would other coalitions even go so far as to rat them out (with plausible deniability, of course) - leading to various party elders behind bars. That certainly would make it easier for other party elders to construct a winning coalition once they've taken out some of the competition.
Like I said, these people would have to be fools to trust very many people, and an election cheating scheme requires a lot of people to pull off. When everyone is on-side you get the 2020 election. When lots of people are very much not on-side you get, well, the Italian government which has had something like 60 Prime Ministers in 80 years.
The best analogy I can think of is the scene from The Godfather where all the families get together to divide things up. Nobody trusts anybody. That's where the Democrats are right now.
I repeat: you can't put a coalition together overnight - heck, it's taken almost a decade for Donald Trump to put together a serious coalition and a lot of his party still hates him. I think that the Democrats will come more apart before they start to come together as the various factions start putting out mob hit style rumor whispers about their Democratic competitors. We will hear a lot about this in the next few weeks.
And this is why the only choice at all for them to to fall in behind Kamala and hope for the best in the down ticket races. But remember, while Kamala might have inherited Slow Joe's campaign cash, she was never really part of this coalition. It's not loyal to her at all. It may be that she's been so ineffective in office because Joe's coalition kept sabotaging her. She has to build a coalition, and right quick. The cash will help her there but coalition building takes time.
She doesn't have that. What she does have is a whole boatload of enemies in the Democratic party. Some of these think that their best bet to get to the top of the greasy pole is for her not to get there. They'd rather have Trump in the Oval Office because they will have 4 years to build a coalition. If Kamala is there, things are a lot trickier for them.
I almost feel sorry for the Democrats in general and Kamala in particular. Almost. It's ironic that all their short term tactical maneuvering has led them to this very spot. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of Mob Bosses.
A Preference Cascade is when a large portion of the population begins to realize - despite relentless government and/or media propaganda - that a lot of other folks think like they do and that the propaganda is, well propaganda. This is almost always catastrophic for The Powers That Be, because Preference Cascades tend to accelerate. As this progresses, formerly reliable underlings begin to think that TPTB are going to lose, and start to refuse to stick their necks out to protect the current order.
It's one thing to stuff ballot boxes when you think that everyone on your side is on board and your guy is going to win - and any potential investigation will be done in the most slipshod manner. It's quite a different thing when you wonder just how many of the guys on your side are actually going to go through with this, and if the other guy wins will you be facing 20 years in Club Fed.
At the extreme, the security services join the preference cascade. They smell an emerging winner and want to be on side when that happens. At this point, things get pretty grim for TPTB.
I think we're at that stage now - well, not the up against the wall shooting stage - but a cascading loss of confidence and loyalty in the Democratic Party itself for Joe Biden. This will shrink the Margin of Cheat except in the most blue of blue states, and given that it looks like New York and New Jersey may be in play, there may not really be a lot of blue left.
In other words, everyone is starting to realize that the propaganda was just that - propaganda.
Add in the drop in contributions to the Democratic Party (the preference cascade is hitting the donor class, who are realizing that this "investment" may not have a return, and hedge their bets by contributing to Trump).
Now add in the media, who start to see that they are better off trying to help the Democratic Party, rather than mean old Joe Biden.
The question is not whether Trump will win, but whether the Preference Cascade will give him coattails, and how long they will be.
My guess is that the Preference Cascade is in full swing in the Secret Service, as competent and dedicated agents there start to wonder when (not if) to throw their corrupt bosses under the bus. There's a lot coming out about this Charlie Foxtrot in the SS, so that suggests that the lack of loyalty to Joe Biden is advancing nicely there.
Once the Preference Cascade begins, TPTB have precious few tools to counter it. For example, cracking down on leaking from within the Secret Service will do nothing but convince the undecided there that TPTB are untrustworthy and have to go.