Remember just a few short weeks ago: Donald Trump’s heroic defiance of an assassination attempt was grudgingly admired even by opponents, while the Democrats were in disarray over what to do about their demented president running for re-election — and, to compound their dilemma, his highly implausible replacement. Trump looked like a shoe-in as the next president. All the best commentators were saying so.
Yet now the Democrat left establishment — with the most cringeworthy candidate ever proposed by a major party — are back in the race. Even allowing for the bias of the opinion polls, the very notion that this ludicrous woman should be taken seriously by anyone is a damning indictment of America’s politics and where it is taking the world.
That intensive coaching prevented her from making a fool of herself in the recent debate is heralded as a remarkable achievement, which in a sense it was.
Recall that something similar happened in the midterm elections in 2022. Two years of disastrous and authoritarian policies by the Biden administration led to confident predictions that the Republicans would trounce them even more thoroughly than usually happens in midterms. In the event, they did not trounce them at all, and the blowback to the governing party was even milder than usual.
So what is going on here?
It is not that the Democrats are especially skillful at political maneuvering, nor that Republicans are politically incompetent (although…).
Something deeper lies beneath all this: changes in the social and especially the ideological make-up of America that enabled the left wing of the Democrat party to take control of the United States in the first place, changes that the conservative Republican establishment is still determined to ignore, and that are changing the Republican establishment itself.
This becomes clear by glancing at the constituency of “Kamala.” The very fact that everyone resists glancing confirms that we are terrified of an elephant in the room. Quite simply, she appeals to adolescent girls, including superannuated adolescent girls: fans of Taylor Swift and their elders who have grown into J.D. Vance’s “childless cat women.” What should disquiet all of us is not that Swift endorsed Kamala, but that such a fuss is being made about it and so many consider it important. Such voters do not worry overmuch about police-state methods and violated constitutional rights or millions of deaths from lethal “vaccines” and needless wars, so long as they can feel “joy.”
You can invoke all the conspiracy theories you wish, and they may well be true, but they definitely will be irrelevant. If we really want to get a handle on our current crisis, we must face the more daunting reality that what is decisive — what debilitates and leaves us incapable of decisive action against the machinations of powerful men — is not that our political system has fallen under the control of globalists, pharmaceutical companies, or defense contractors. No, what renders us impotent and helpless to stand against it is the far more formidable power wielded by people we used to call teenyboppers.
You can also level perennial complaints about the ignorance, apathy, gullibility, stupidity, etc. of the American voter. That might explain why they have long elected mediocrities to public office. The Republic can survive mediocrities, so long as they are accountable. This obvious misfit and variation on the Valley Girl thrives outside the previously known rules of electoral competition.
Enthralled as we all become by the grisly details of the latest Democrat outrage, we need to return to the underlying question of why our government now responds to the beck and call of giggly girls and what we can do about it. We know what the Republicans and professional conservative groups will do: lament and bemoan and deplore, nag us for money, spend it on pointless conferences and junkets, and then do nothing. For you certainly will find few conservative Republican honchos willing to offend adolescent girls. They are more likely to feature the prettiest among them in their latest video or conference, even if it is only to mouth clichés or air-headed drivel.
If we want to know who “empowered” the Swifties and their foremothers, we need only ask from whom they wrested this power. Here too the obvious answer presents itself: they displaced male heads of households. Conservative politicos couch this in innocuous phrases like “two-parent families,” making it plain whom they fear to offend.
Yes, numerous trends led us here. The cowardly right will be careful to offend no one and excuse their own inaction by invoking vague clichés about “the culture” and “the breakdown of the family,” and they will be right enough that many will nod their heads in agreement — and then shake their heads because the clichés offer no remedy, except more lamenting and bemoaning and deploring.
But the displacement of the fathers as our ruling authorities by little girls has specific, identifiable causes that are susceptible to straightforward remedies. The fathers were destroyed, first, by the welfare system, which furnished the blueprint and the machinery by emasculating low-income minority men. Then the job was taken up on a still more grand scale by the divorce courts, which were created for no other purpose. That is, the “patriarchy” was smashed by a purpose-built government machine created by radical ideologues.
This machine can be dismantled, and the legitimate citizenry will recover its strength. You might think this is a tall order.
But the biggest impediment is not the Swifties. It is the conservative political class, feminized into paralysis. In their impotence and frustration, they ingratiate themselves with the bimbos and kick low-income minority men who were their first victims, casting them instead as the victimizers. These are the men that Kamala built her career prosecuting.
In fact, dismantling the government machinery that cranks out rebellious adolescents could be accomplished fairly easily — certainly more easily than “changing the culture” or “reviving the family” or any of the other lame excuses Conservatism, Inc. invokes for its paralysis, while its operatives continue enjoying the good life on our donations. The point is they do not even try, and left to themselves, they never will.
It is now a matter of whether fathers and men generally can overcome their own ingrained feminization enough to stop relying on the honchos to rescue them from the railroad tracks and instead take the initiative to act.
Kamala’s victory will not be effected by election-rigging or intervention by the FBI, though those weapons may well be used. If it comes, it will result because of faint-hearted men we have trusted to defend our freedom in Washington and other capitals, with the rest of us failing to bypass and discard them and act on our own.
Men are already spontaneously abstaining from family life because government machinery encourages their children to rebel against them and everything else. Their boycott is on a scale serious enough that they are regularly scolded by the obligious advocates of “family values” from an ineffectual political class. These men will not be dissuaded, but some of them might well be persuaded to ignore the political class and its multiple defeats altogether and channel their feelings of alienation from our society’s radicalized terms of reproduction into truly effective change.
Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His most recent book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” — and What to Do about It, is published by Arktos.
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