The Lumpenproletariat And Class Consciousness

I was doing some research into the Weimar Republic (Germany 1919-1933) and ran into this passage at Britannica:

Because of the hopes aroused in 1918–19, the fact that no far-reaching plan for securing public control over industry or for breaking up the big landed estates was carried through had two consequences. First, although the German working class undoubtedly improved its political and economic status under the republic, a considerable portion of it was embittered by the failure to effect drastic reform of the social and economic systems. This disenchantment was to provide the left-wing opposition with strong working-class support, which weakened both the Social Democratic Party and the republic.

This brought to mind Whittaker Chambers's observation that as of the 1920s, German was in fact the language of international socialism, and Germany was the locus of the movement. My takeaway from the link above is that the German working class at the time had clearly articulated interests that it systematically pursued, if utterly without success.

I was looking up Weimar because I've been seeing references to a contemporary "Weimar America", but a few minutes' thought brings me to the conclusion that any parallels are superficial at best. Consider that the class interests that have been advanced most visibly since 2020 are those of the Lumpenproletariat, the urban underclass, not the working class, whose interests have been more clearly bourgeois and Republican at least since Nixon's 1972 landslide defeat of George McGovern.

But now let's look at the puzzling case of the SUV that crashed into a Waukesha, WI Christmas parade yesterday evening. The circumstances so far aren't completely clear, but the SUV driver appears to have been identified:

Darrell Brooks Jr. is the man who was taken into custody in connection with the Waukesha Christmas parade tragedy on November 21, 2021, according to police. When Brooks was detained, police found a Ford key on him, according to scanner audio obtained by Heavy.

His social media accounts and online court records show that he is an aspiring rap singer with a lengthy criminal history and two open felony cases for which he was released on $500 and $1,000 bail, the latter just days before the parade deaths.

At 39, he's had a lifetime career as a petty criminal, which places him clearly in the Marxist Lumpenproletariat. But Waukesha and Kenosha, although both in Wisconsin, aren't all that close at about 55 miles distant. It's hard to conclude that the attack, if that's what it was, had any connection with the Rittenhouse trial, in which the defendant was acquitted in charges relating to the deaths and injury of three white Lumpenproletariat:

The motive is not clear. David Begnaud of CBS News tweeted that, according to a law enforcement official, the parade suspect was “fleeing another scene – possibly a knife fight” before injuring 40 people in the parade. “Several LE sources say preliminary: Wisconsin incident appears to be vehicle fleeing a separate crime scene (stabbing) when it plowed into parade. One person in custody. Investigation ongoing but so far no initial link to terror or the recent Rittenhouse verdict w/@tom_winter,” NBC reporter Jonathan Dienst wrote on Twitter.

This strikes me as, if anything, confirmation of the Marxist theory that the Lumpenproletariat, unlike the working class, lacks class consciousness and is not a reliable ally -- Brooks, as far as we can tell so far, was fleeing his personal demons and not acting for or against anyone else's interest. That he should plow through a Christmas parade in Waukesha was unplanned, undirected, and has no similarity to, say, the 2016 Islamist truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market.

This raises the open question of why US elites have allied themsleves with the Lumpenproletariat, who are unreliable, disorganized, and not capable of returning favors even if they wanted to. It's been wealthy elites, from George Soros to Laurene Powell Jobs, who have sponsored ballot measures to raise the felony threshold for crimes like shoplifting, supported the election of district attorneys who decline to prosecute career criminal offenses, and abolish cash bail. The criminals themselves can't organize and pursue that agenda themselves.

In fact, the most organization the criminals themselves can undertake is planning mass smash-and-grab attacks, three of which occurred in the San Francisco area over the weekend. This helps only the criminals on a short term basis, but it hurts the working and middle classes when the stores they patronize close in response, and indeed it hurts the shareholders and managers of those stores as well. The only benefit is to the wealthiest, who are insulated from the effects of their policies and feel virtuous in enabling the Lumpenproletariat.

This is an odd alliance. I'm not sure if it has any historical parallel.

Allen Guelzo, Reconstruction, And The Rittenhouse Case

Last week I ran into a 2018 paper by the Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo, Reconstruction as a Pure Bourgeois Revolution, in which I found a stimulating perspective on the current political situation, which I think represents a counterrevolution by the elites allied with the Lumpenproletariat, white climate activists, and pansexualists, against "Trumpism" a populist alliance of the working and middle classes that is in fact multiracial. (These are precisely the people David Brooks sneers at, though he also finds them "terrifying".)

Guelzo's paper has also appeared on YouTube as "Reconstruction: The Last Bourgeois Revolution":

After last year's election, my attention was drawn to the US presidential election of 1876, that was disputed and resolved by an electoral commission that produced the Compromise of 1877, which awarded the election to the Republican Rutherford Hayes while effectively ending Reconstruction by withdrawing Union troops from the southern states. Guelzo has little to say about the compromise itself, but he deals with Reconstruction as a historiographical phenomenon. In doing so, he circles around to the central issue, that whatever the good or bad of Reconstruction itself, it was ended by an alliance of northern capital, northern philanthropy, and southern segregationists.

This is a view clearly reflected in Frank Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man, and it's a major part of the protagonist's dilemma. Jim Crow was an institution supported by the national Democrats and the do-gooder elites., but a revisionist historical narrative has also emerged that even as all right-thinking people disavowed it in the 1960s, actual social policy after that continues to enforce segregation and suppression of African-Americans via urban ghettos and the eugenic measure of widespread abortion.

Guelzo hiself favors a related historical "revisionist" interpretation of Reconstruction:

The great Republican goal of abolishing slavery was not seen by Republicans, as we are tempted to see it, as a crusade to right a racial injustice; abolishing slavery was not, to them, much of a racial question at all but rather an economic one. . . . The Union “represents the principles of free labor,” declared William Cullen Bryant, and only when “the victory of the Northern society of free labor over the landed monopoly of the Southern aristocracy” was complete would the war be over. . . In the most basic sense, free labor was simply shorthand for liberal economic democracy. It was the Enlightenment’s school of economics, and like the Enlightenment, it predicted that “democratic, bourgeois freedom and the supremacy of economics would one day lead to the salvation of all mankind.” (pp 56-57)

Guelzo in fact doesn't go much farther than to support what he calls this "revisionist" historiographic view of reconstruction, but it raises a number of productive questions. It's generally accepted that northern capital and philanthropy allied with southern segregationists to halt Reconstruction and establish Jim Crow. It's hard to tell at this remove how or why this was done, but it clearly had the approval of the industrial elites of the time.

Guelzo cites the hard Marxist theory that fully freeing the slaves was undesirable in that the northern capitalists wanted to avoid a full proletarian revolution, and there may be some merit to that view. But you don't have to be Marxist to think it was in northern capital's continued interest to have a supply of cheap labor, although slavery actually proved less efficient economically than at-will employment. George Washington's own plantation ran at a loss.

But if we follow the broader revisionist theory of the post-Martin Luther King civil rights movement as effectively a Democrat-led extension of the 1877 compromise, an urban re-segregation and re-formation of African-Americans as a new underclass, we get results that can provide insight into the Rittenhouse case and its outcome.

The first has been, especially since the 2020 BLM riots, a near-universal tendency to equate African-Americsn's with the Lumpenproletariat, the Marxist unreliable underclass of career petty criminals, addicts, prostitutes, and street people. George Floyd was one of these, but because he was African-American, his class identity was minimized in favor of his racial identity, but his treatment was actually an outcome of his class, not his race.

We can then move to the strange incongruities of the Rittenhouse case: Kyle Rittenohuse himself, a bourgeois aspiring college student of mixed race, naively got himself into a situation during a BLM riot where he was attacked by at least four white men (Jump Kick Man included) with criminal records, effectively members of the Lumpenproletariat, who were allied with and agitating in protest at the killing of another violent petty criminal by police, this one African-American.

So far, the Rittenohuse outcome has brought a collective sigh of relief from bourgeois supporters of law, reason, and social order, and so far, there's been no large renewal of BLM style riots from the Lumpenrpoletariat and their elite allies in the media and politics. But this case is a clear indication of the actual fault lines that have existed since Reconstuction, and to which we still await a remedy.

David Brooks On Religion

I ran into a couple of almost comical passages in the current Atlantic piece by David Brooks that I linked yesterday. He disparages

the intellectual Catholics and the Orthodox Jews who have been studying Hobbes and de Tocqueville at the various young conservative fellowship programs that stretch along Acela-land.

(It should be just "Toqueville, not "de Toqueville", by the way, unless you have "Alexis" in front of it. There. That's off my chest.) Later, he says,

Evangelical Christianity has lost many millions of believers across recent decades. Secularism is surging, and white Christianity is shrinking into a rump presence in American life. America is becoming more religiously diverse every day. Christians are in no position to impose their values—regarding same-sex marriage or anything else—on the public square. Self-aware Christians know this.

The first observation to be made here is that Brooks is at best fuzzy on Christian taxonomy and isn't up on current events. According to Christianity Today,

Evangelicals in the United States are holding steady at just under a quarter of the population, according to the latest biennial figures from the General Social Survey (GSS), one of the longest-running measures of religion in America.

According to Wikipedia, "Anywhere from 6 percent to 35 percent of the United States population is evangelical, depending on how 'evangelical' is defined." Definition is a problem, because evangelicals for instance may identify as "born again" without bothering to attend church. Nevertheless, nearly every discussion of the movement says it's either holding steady or growing. On the other hand, the consensus is that mainline Protestants are the group that's declining. According to this site,

In the 1970s, the GSS indicates that over 30% of all Americans could be classified into a mainline denomination. But that quickly changed. By the late 1980s, the share of the mainline dropped below 20%. . . . [T]here’s general agreement in these surveys - mainline Protestants have declined over time and are probably between 10-13% of the population today.

So what's puzzling is that Brooks, who is supposedly a respected commentator on contemporary culture, is oblivious to a major long-term US religious trend (which is also reflected in the decline of Reform and Conservative Judaism), the sharp decline of mainline Protestant denominations. His use of the term "Evangelical" in the passage above is simply incorrect. It also says a lot about The Atlantic that his editor didn't catch this.

So, who are the "self-aware Christians" who know they're in no position to impose their values on the public square? I assume they're the right-thinking Episcopalians, Methodists, and Lutherans whose numbers are approaching insignificance. We might assume they're in no position to impose their thinking becuase there are so few of them that they can't, and Brooks is cool with this, and presumably they are, too.

In the first passage above, he takes an indirect swipe at Catholics via the young conservative ones in fellowship programs, whatever that means. But the US Bishops themselves have become more conservative in recent decades. Abp Gómez, the President of the USCCB, recently made this point in an address to the Congress of Catholics and Public Life in Madrid:

“With the breakdown of the Judeo-Christian worldview and the rise of secularism, political belief systems based on social justice or personal identity have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied,” Gomez said.

. . . “We recognize that often what is being canceled and corrected are perspectives rooted in Christian beliefs — about human life and the human person, about marriage, the family, and more,” he said in the address.

In other words, Abp Gómez is determined that Catholics reassert their place in the public square over precisely the issues Brooks thinks Christians are in no position to argue. It's intriguing that Brooks is irritated specifically with Catholics and Orthodox Jews, when these are the groups that pursued successful legal action that lifted government restrictions on religious service attendance as a result of last year's lockdowns.

The odd thing is that Brooks regularly disparages working and middle class people in a straw-man argument that says they want to return to the 1950s, when he himself so publicly underwent a mid-life crisis of wife dumping and pseudo-religious third wave awakening so reminiscent of the me-decade 1970s.

Revisiting David Brooks

My wife and I were late adopters of cable, and in fact we must have been among the last people ever to have a rabbit ear antenna on top of a tube TV. This meant we mostly watched PBS, The News Hour, and thus inevitably David Brooks. When we finally got cable ten years ago, we quit watching any news, and we forgot about David Brooks. The last I heard of him, he was admiring the crease of Obama's trousers, and Obama was courting him and George Will as influential conservatives whom he could coax over to his side.

Somewhere yesterday I saw a link to an essay by him in the Atlantic, "The Terrifying Future of the American Right". I went to look at it and discovered he's a contributing writer who publishes there regularly. I guess this says something about The Atlantic, the New York Times, and PBS. I guess it also says something that I'd been ignoring him all this time and don't feel like I've missed a thing.

I did read his Bobos in Paradise when it came out, and my memory of it is a troubling cognitive dissonance -- how could someone who, about the year 2000, was so respected, write such a silly book? For those who haven't read it, its premise is that after World War II, elite universities dropped their Jewish quotas, began using the SATs. adopted selective admissions, and became true meritocracies, which they continue to be today. As evidence of this, we need look no farther than Brooks himself, from a Jewish family, who made it into the University of Chicago on merit.

This is a self-congratullatory premise that also flatters its audience, the Ivy-educated book buying public. Brooks makes it plain that by bobos -- bourgeois bohemians -- he means principally suburban Jews. But this contradicts Alan Dershowitz, a much more prominent figure, who maintained in Chutzpah that Jewish quotas still exist, along with more recent quotas for Asians, that serve to limit the rise of talented and hard-working groups in favor of -- wait for it -- existing elites.

Indeed, admission of "Episcopalian Jews" into upper-crust society was a phenomenon that took place decades before the postwar period, and families like the Guggenheims worked in close colaboration with the Morgans. They were elites and had full admission to elite schools on that basis. Quotas always apply to a different group.

Last August, Brooks revisited Bobos in Paradise in The Atlantic, "How the Bobos Broke America".

“The educated class is in no danger of becoming a self-contained caste,” I wrote in 2000. “Anybody with the right degree, job, and cultural competencies can join.” That turned out to be one of the most naive sentences I have ever written.

. . . [W]e’ve come to hoard spots in the competitive meritocracy that produced us. , , , the test-score gap between high- and low-income students has grown by 40 to 50 percent. The children of well-off, well-educated meritocrats are thus perfectly situated to predominate at the elite colleges that produced their parents’ social standing in the first place. Roughly 72 percent of students at these colleges come from the richest quarter of families, whereas only 3 percent come from the poorest quarter. A 2017 study found that 38 schools—including Princeton, Yale, Penn, Dartmouth, Colgate, and Middlebury—draw more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent.

In other words, nothing changed, the bobos as some sort of new creative class that rose on its merits is a chimera. But Brooks clings to his theory and sees the Trump phenomenon as primarily a reflexive working-class rebellion against the bobo meritocacy:

The working class today vehemently rejects not just the creative class but the epistemic regime that it controls. In revolt, populist Trump voters sometimes create their own reality, inventing absurd conspiracy theories and alternative facts about pedophile rings among the elites who they believe disdain them.

At the start of his essay, he cites boat parades of Trump supporters as a key indicator:

During the summer and fall of 2020, a series of boat parades—Trumptillas—cruised American waters in support of Donald Trump. The participants gathered rowdily in great clusters. They festooned their boats with flags—American flags, but also message flags: don’t tread on me, no more bullshit, images of Trump as Rambo.

. . . How could people with high-end powerboats possibly think of themselves as the downtrodden?

He clearly views such people with contempt. And his essay just published in the current Atlantic expands on this:

Over the past few decades there have been various efforts to replace the Reagan Paradigm: the national-greatness conservatism of John McCain; the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush; the Reformicon conservatism of the D.C. think tanks in the 21st century. But the Trumpian onslaught succeeded where these movements have so far fizzled because Trump understood better than they did the coalescence of the new American cultural/corporate elite and the potency of populist anger against it.

This is what Brooks finds "terrifying": the fact that Trump hasn't gone away. The specter Brooks sees is what commentators are slowly recognizing: the Biden counter-revolution against Trump has been a disaster, and Trump is still hovering in the wings. Brooks is effectively acknowledging that the new elite is the old elite, and now they're frightened.

"The Speaker Is Burning Down The House On Her Way Out The Door"

These remarks by Leader McCarthy on the occasion of the House censuring Rep Gosar for posting an anime indicate that at least some people are beginning to catch on to what's happening. The Speaker's world is effectively coming to an end. This ties in with another guiding principle I've been relying on in recent weeks, Stein's Law, That Which Cannot Continue Must Stop.

If we begin with the question of Speaker Pelosi's future, we've inevitably got to come to the question of President Biden's plans. My view continues to be that he isn't suffering from dementia, and thus he must have some understanding of his political predicament. This story gives some suggestion of what that predicament is and what must be effective cooperation with his handlers:

We reported Wednesday on the embarrassing story of how President Joe Biden’s handlers had scrapped a so-called “Three Amigos” press conference that had been scheduled to take place today between him, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador after meetings in Washington, D.C.

That traditional press conference would be scrapped in favor of allowing the reporters to shout questions that the president might or might not answer. Speculation followed a question from a Bloomberg reporter on Tuesday, ". . . you guys had to clean up not only this Olympic comment but his comment on the timing for the Fed and his Taiwan comment, is the worry that you don’t want the President taking questions?"

Unfortunately, the update to this story just makes it all so much worse. CBS News White House reporter Kathryn Watson, who has criticized the White House in the past over accessibility issues involving Biden, noted on her Twitter feed this morning that unlike Biden, Trudeau would be holding a presser later this afternoon[.]

. . . And in a report she filed, Watson noted that Biden bailing on the scheduled presser would mean he would get to avoid some potentially uncomfortable questions about the border crisis and his handling of it[.]

If Biden didn't want to go along with this, he wouldn't. And if he didn't have some clear idea of what the program was, he wouldn't be following his cues -- he'd just be wandering around the room holding disjointed conversations with whomever, visible or not. That's not the big guy, at least not so far. He functions, just not very well. This goes again to my view that he's impaired, not senile.

The question is how much longer this can go on. Has he lost the New York Times?

His crumbling public approval rating must be troubling to President Joe Biden. But can it possibly compare to learning that the liberal mainstream media is turning on him as well?

On Tuesday, the New York Times sent an email to its morning update subscribers with the headline: “Who’s to blame for inflation?”

“It is dragging down President Biden’s approval ratings and fueling discontent among Americans,” writes senior economics correspondent Neil Irwin. “How did we get here? Who is to blame?”

We fully expected the Times to make excuses for Biden. And at first, it looks as though that is what Irwin is going to do, writing that “presidents have less control over the economy than headlines might suggest.” But then he adds that “the current situation is an exception to the rule.”

. . . But the fact that any one of these “news” outlets is willing to blame Biden for the inflation spiral is a truly stunning development, given they’d spent months blasting out “fact checks” that aggressively slapped down any such claim.

I note that over the past few days, the conventional wisdom has been shifting from "Biden plans to run in 2024" to "Despite what he's said, he may not run in 2024". I think it's increasingly likely that he may not even make it to then. The problem is that he isn't senile, so the 25th Amendment probably can't be used to get him out. I would imagine that his closets are full of Agnew-style skeletons, but impeachment has been reduced to a feckless exercise, and he's a very stubborn guy who won't easily be led into a Nixon style resignation, especially if Harris can't be eased out herself.

The difficulty I continue to see is that as the border, inflation, and COVID continue as very serious problems that Biden can't solve, something worse is sure to come along. But if this happens, finding some way to put a different, competent handler behind the scenes or directly forcing both Biden and Harris out a la Nixon-Agnew would require a major change in political alignment following the 2022 midterms, still a year away. We have challenging times ahead.

Yeah, Don't Rule Out The Agnew Scenario

Via Gateway Pundit, which I don't normally trust, I nevertheless found a transcription of a Fox reporter's remarks on Bret Baier's podcast:

Just to kinda let you guys in on a little secret here. I was told, you know, about two to three weeks ago–maybe this pertains to the Supreme Court, maybe this pertains to, you know, changing the ticket before you get into 2024. You know, FDR, seemingly, he burned through a vice president almost every, every time he was up for office. But I got an email from somebody who really knows this place very well who said, “Chad, start to familiarize yourself with the confirmation process just not in the Senate but the House for a vice president.” Of course, we’ve not gone through that since, you know, President Ford picked Nelson Rockefeller. Again, as you know, Bret, I’m always playing defense and preparing for things like that, but I was very surprised to get that very cryptic email just a couple of weeks ago.

Chad Pegram's bio appears here, which suggests he's neither a conspiracy theorist, nor a fabulist, nor a flake. The only correction I would make to his account is that it's not "we’ve not gone through that since"; we simply never went through that before then, since the 25th Amendment was ratified only in 1967. Before that, there was no provision for filling a vacancy in the vice president's office.

While Kennedy's assassination was the clear impetus for adopting the amendment, when it was envisioned that a president could lie in an indefinite coma under some circumstances, Agnew's resignation has been the only non-trivial invocation of its provisions. Most vice presidents since Agnew have had enough substance that nobody's seriously contemplated edging them out before their term expires, and in fact it's hard to think any veep ever has been so without sin (possibly excepting Coolidge) that some hidden flaw couldn't be found in his record to warrant removal should this become convenient.

Indeed, had circumstances been otherwise, nobody would have bothered with Agnew's Baltimore baksheesh, and he would have stayed in office until 1977. Certainly this was Agnew's own belief, and it's hard to fault. Agnew was caught up in Nixon's dilemma, and it was simply convenient to remove him in order to facilitate removing Nixon. I can't imagine that Gerald Ford had no similar blemishes; it just wasn't convenient to go looking for them at the time.

By trhe same token, I don't think such discussion would be taking place about Harris, even on a completley unofficial, without-attribution basis, if the actual problem were not with Biden. And despite vague speculation a year ago that the 25th might be invoked against Biden, I think it's significant that the only non-trivial historical use of it was with Section 2 and the vice presidential succession, the same one being mooted now, if even not quite seriously.

As with Agnew, Vice President Harris is simply a surrogate for President Biden. I've been saying here that Biden's lack of coherence and engagement is simply not the result of a medical condition other than chronic alcoholism, and he's not the first to suffer fom it without being removed. If you ask me, Biden's problem is neither his own polls nor Harris's; the problem right now is Trump's polls. At minimum, the lizard people are figuring the 2024 ticket needs a makeover well before campaign season.

So far, this leaves aside the problem of 2022 and the bigger problem that the issues that are hurting Biden now on one hand aren't likely to go away, and on the other, aren't likely to be the worst he, and we, will need to face before the lizard people can ease him out. I have a sense that the lizard people are still working this through, but the Agnew scenario has clearly at least reached the spitball stage.

What's Happening ToThe Götterdämmerung?

There's a lot of gossip about a rift between the White House and Vice President Harris, to the extent that a trial balloon is being floated about kicking Harris over to the Supreme Court, to replace her under the 25th Amendment. Up to last weekend, of course, the 25th Amendment scenario had been intended for the big guy himself, not Kamala, who in the received scenario would replace him.

To me, this says we're edging closer to the Spiro Agnew solution, the two-shoe drop, where the non-entity veep is replaced under the 25th Amendment by someone with gravitas who can credibly succeed a Nixon once he's forced out. Nixon, recall, simply resigned. Nobody needed either impeachment or the 25th.

The only remotely perceptive commentary I've seen on the developing situation is from Chris Cillizza:

Remember that when Biden ran for president, he purposely cast himself as a sort of bridge candidate for Democrats -- holding the office until some of the party's younger stars, several of whom ran against him, were ready to take on the mantle of leadership.

"Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else," Biden said in March 2020 as he campaigned with Harris, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. "There's an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country."

When Biden picked Harris as his vice president, the message was clear: She was the future of the party.

This was the upbeat, happy talk version of the agenda. After Biden's win in November, an initial progressive laundry list was quickly added to the pre-election happy talk: statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, packing the Supreme Court, ending the filibuster. No matter this would need to be done with a four-vote Democrat margin in the House and a tied Senate, Harris as veep would break the tie. By early 2021, these all quietly disappeared, with only Harris remaining as a sort of aspirational totem. Except that her public crediblity over the course of the subsequent year has self-immolated.

What replaced that extreme Great Reset agenda was what became the BBB, although exactly what the BBB comprised has never been completely clear, and as of now, it's more uncertain than ever. As a practical matter, this was put together by an alliance of the House progressives, Sen Sanders, Speaker Pelosi, and President Biden. At this remove, it's plain that it had the opposition of Senate centrists of both parties, who put together and passed the the bipsrtisan infrastructurre bill, BIF, in the Senate.

I think this was from the start intended as an option to head off the BBB. Sen Sanders and the House progressives recognized this for what it was and intended from the start to hold the BIF hostage to the BBB. The argument in favor of the BBB was always Götterdämmerung, the Democrats would inevitably lose their majority in the 2022 midterms, the only effective strategy would be to run up the credit cards before the world ended.

Sen Manchin tacitly allied with the Republican leadership in both houses, and by November 5 with the passage of the BIF individually in the House, he was able to pry the Götterdämmerung agenda loose from Speaker Pelosi's hands, effectively turning her into a lame duck. There's been a lot of criticism of Leader McConnell and the moderate House Republicans for enabling Manchin's strategy, but I think it's proven an effective rope-a-dope, especially given the lack of other Republican options.

The other factor now in play is the effect of rhe Virginia election and subsequent polling. The idea of a Democrat loss in the 2022 midterms up to now had been mostly a vague talking point and little more than an argument in favor of the BBB and Götterdämmerung. But post-Virginia, Trump doesn't seem to be fading in the polls -- to the contrary, he's so far favored in primaries, he's beating Biden in a head-to-head 2024 matchup, and he's looking like a 2022 kingmaker as well.

Meanwhile, Biden appears to be stuck on Götterdämmerung. He's stubbornly sticking with policies deliberately intended to increase gas prices. The best he can say about inflation is it's actually good for you, suck it up. The border is still out of control. He now seems to be sending up smoke signals that he may not run in 2024, but this would basically mean three years of passive-aggressiveness, Biden stubbornly refusing to change course while saying as little as possible. This isn't how things were supposed to turn out a year ago last March.

Worse, this scenario assumes nothing else bad, or indeed worse, happens over the next three years. Biden is proving he can't handle what's come up so far. I don't want to think about how anything new will turn out. I doubt if I'm the only one who feels this way.

The problem there is that even some Democrats don't believe the world is simply going to end a year from now, and they'd like to have lives to live past that date. They haven't figured out a clear strategy yet, but if they can pull the Agnew move on Harris, they're at least a step ahead. Stay tuned.