Remember “politics stops at the water’s edge”?

In the Trump era, that patriotic phrase isn’t only dead, it’s decomposed.

And ironically so, since the latest manifestation of this decomposition is over the termination of Qassem Soleimani, the terror mastermind who was, on analysis, even more dangerous to the United States and the world than Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, monumentally evil as they were.

Neither bin Laden nor al-Baghdadi ever had remotely the power at their disposals—even when the latter controlled his caliphate—that Soleimani did as the military leader of by far the greatest state sponsor of terrorism. They weren’t even close to the man who was head of Iran’s Quds force and the second most powerful person in that country of 80-plus million, with all its attendant weaponry and technology and ties to China and Russia.

"Perhaps nothing so accurately characterizes dysfunctional families as denial. The denial forces members to keep believing the myths and vital lies in spite of the facts, or to keep expecting that the same behaviors will have different outcomes." 

—John Bradshaw

As everyone knows, there are thousands of books, memoirs, and fiction, about dysfunctional families.  To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy families are generally the same, but unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way.

But to peruse the plethora of such books, it might be truer that unhappy families are unhappy in much the same ways, their differences a matter of degrees.  Young children know only what they know, how their own family functions.  Memoirs like Educated and The Glass Castle, for example, are shocking to those fortunate enough to have had loving, peaceful, and essentially normal childhoods if there is such a thing.

While dysfunctional homes can produce and have produced successful children who, as gradually exposed to the homes of other families and the outside world, saved themselves by sheer will and talent.  But most children of dysfunctional families are forever damaged, condemned to a life of misery and distorted reality.  They remain resistant to the facts of life that govern the world around them.  They are perpetually angry and unhappy.

[Note by JW:  TTP is pleased to follow the advice of Joe Katzman and Skye in requesting Yasuhiko Kimura’s Forum post as a TTP article.  As Joe comments: “This is, by far, the best and most consequential thing you [Yasuhiko] have ever posted here. TTPers need to read this over a couple of times, and consider how absolutely pervasive its implications are. It destroys the standard conservative notion of politics, and replaces it with a truthful construct that is of actual use in navigating modern politics.]

Looking at the human nature and the political games the humans play, we can observe the following:

Human beings are status-seeking beings. Ergo, most humans seek to achieve as high a social status as possible.

In order to achieve and maintain the highest social status possible for themselves, most humans would willingly sacrifice personal comfort, happiness, enjoyment—that is, they would willingly endure suffering.

Correlatively, human beings are power-seeking beings. Power is centripetal. Power tends to become concentric and concentrated. Ergo, power holders seek to concentrate power unto themselves.

Power holders seek to attract and then keep subordinates not on the basis of competency but on the basis of (blind) loyalty in order to maintain and concentrate power.  They do this by promulgating nonsense rather than reason.  Here is why.

[Note by JW:  This is an astounding essay strongly recommended by TTPers Joe Katzman and Yasuhiko Kimura.  It is definitely worth your reflecting deeply upon it.]

It’s 100 years now since the Russian Revolution. The Soviet Union. Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Leninism. It’s been 100 years already, but you realize how present the whole thing remains when you look at the press these days.

I’m not very interested in Lenin, the man; but I’m very interested in Leninism. Lenin is very dead (if not yet buried, I wonder what Putin is waiting for); but Leninism is quite alive. And the Western press has just realized that China, the second power in the world, in place to become the first in a few years, is a Leninist state.

The West is scared because Leninism is effective. Yes, sure, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991; but lasting 74 years is no mean feat. And at any rate, the very establishment of the Soviet Union was a superhuman feat. It was something amazing, and amazed was the whole intelligentsia of the Western world for many decades.

Marxism completely captured the intellectual classes of the whole world for over a century. In China it’s still the official orthodoxy, taught in schools. In the West it’s still with us, if in the morphed form of Cultural Marxism.  Which is why now we have gay marriage and black transexuals running for office.

The rhetoric about the so-called “War on Terror” has led us down the wrong path for 20 years. Terrorism is a tactic. We are not at war with terror.

Similarly, our fight is not against radical or extreme Islam. When it comes to the Middle East, particularly Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, it is imperative that we understand the true nature of the threat.

We are fighting Islamic Fascism—the political idea in which state actors or nonstate actors are using Islam to rule people through the use of violence. This is not about Islam itself, but rather about belligerents hijacking the religion for their own political purposes.

The ongoing war in Afghanistan has shown that we can’t win with just guns and money; we have to win the war of ideas. To permanently defeat the Islamic Fascists, we must first delegitimize their ideology.

The only way to do this is by ensuring the success of two areas being governed in the exact opposite manner, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and the proposed Nineveh Plains Province.

It is popular on the NeverTrump Right and everyone on the Left to claim that President Trump has “failed” as we head into an election year. But his supposed failures are instructive.  Like Fake News, they are Fake Failures.

Take the wall.  After three years of mockery insisting Trump has not built his wall, he nonetheless has attempted almost every imaginable method to do it. And now the invective over the last few months has begun to alter.

If Trump between 2017 and 2019 was mocked as an obsessive Ahab pathetically and in vain chasing his Great White Wall, he now is being redefined as a dangerous xenophobe, whose American version of the Maginot Line may soon become dangerously reified.

The same ambiguity is true of many of Trump’s other “failures.”

2024? What? Don’t we have the 2020 presidential election to deal with first? Has the fat lady already sung?

Yes, maybe she has.

Just look at the booming economy with lowest-ever unemployment, the utter failure of the Mueller Russia investigation (with severe punishments for the investigators themselves possibly ahead), the embarrassing, ludicrously partisan impeachment – plus Trump’s extraordinarily well-organized, high-tech 2020 campaign under the management of Brad Parscale and Jared Kushner that even the devoutly liberal Axios couldn’t help but admire.

So, on to 2024.

Many wise pundits and political commentators keep saying Nancy Pelosi didn't want to do this impeachment... that she's smarter than this, that she was forced into it by the ridiculous, ignorant women who call themselves the Squad.

These same pundits claim that the Squad is now running the Democrat party.  But this does not make any sense, since Pelosi admitted a week or so ago, when asked why she was rushing impeachment, that the Democrats had been at this for twenty-two months!

Of course they have, for even longer than that.  As several Democrats have admitted, the plan to impeach began while Trump was still a candidate.  The plan is Nancy’s and still is.

From the first years of a century already one-fifth completed, we’ve been told that a new, “ascendant America” — more nonwhite, more culturally liberal, more feminist — was going to dominate our politics for years to come.

But President Trump’s victory in 2016 has made a mockery of the predictions. He wasn’t ascendant America’s choice.

Demographics, it turns out, don’t automatically turn into destiny. Ascendant groups’ triumphalism can coalesce those with opposite values into unaccustomed unity and enthusiasm. Ascendant leaders, not cautioned by sympathetic media, can concoct extreme policies (Green New Deal, anyone?) unsellable to most voters.

Rep. Alexandria O-C (D-NY) (aka Alexandria Occasional-Cortex, herein abbreviated “O-C” may have anticipated a long and prosperous career in Congress, but if the Democrats in New York’s state legislature have their way, the freshman Member may be out of a job as soon as 2022.

According to pollster Frank Luntz, New York is likely to lose a seat in Congress after the 2020 census and Democrats in the state legislature will have to redraw the state’s Congressional districts as a result.

Although there are plenty of places to cut, New York Dems are reportedly eyeing O-C’s Bronx district for elimination because she’s been out of sync with state-level Democrats who control the process.  They really, really don’t like her.