I’m not a black piller by any stretch, but it’s useful to read smart, iconoclastic black pill takes on Trump’s presidency to date, by people who have an affinity for Trumpism. Too much optimism or cheerleading can trap one into a dangerous complacency.
Complacency can lead to terrible outcomes like this one described by Butch Deadlift:
It’s not clear that the GOPe really minds a Dem wave in 2018.
They can win by losing, blame Trump-ism, claim it was tested and found to be unpopular, and that we need a Rubio-like candidate to win. Create ambiguity.
Meanwhile the Demographic clock is ticking.
Trump-ism needed a smart strategy to avoid this fate, doesn’t seem forthcoming.
Too much blind faith in Trump risks election losses that feed Uniparty delusions and will mean the next Trump, if he comes, won’t just chip away at the status quo. He’ll swing a sledgehammer.
So a little black pill every now and then helps unclog egoistic gunk. Just don’t get addicted to the pessimistic thrill. Not all black pills are created equal. Mendo had the best take on Black Pill taxonomy:
There are “the sky is falling” black pills and then there are “let me question some things” black pills.
Then again there are “ain’t I a-stinker” black pills, some of whom just love to post dour shit.
On the topic of reasonable skeptic black pills, Agnostic has been a good source (until recently…he too seems to have succumbed to the siren call of black pill overdosing). For instance, I don’t endorse this latest Agnostic thesis (too glib with the historical comparisons), but it’s interesting nonetheless: Is Trump the new Carter, and Bernie the next Reagan?
The triumph of the pure examples of the new zeitgeist will come as vindication to candidates who had previously run in their party’s primary (and when it was incumbent) but lost to a business-as-usual candidate. Reagan ran in the ’76 primary but lost to conventional Ford, and Bernie ran in the ’16 primary but lost to conventional Hillary. They were both just a little bit ahead of their time.
Why doesn’t the natural party for the new zeitgeist go with it right away? Probably because a major change is more likely to come from a party that is more desperate for a win, especially its voters. They’re more willing to take a high-risk high-reward gamble — Democrats on Carter in ’76, and Republicans on Trump in ’16. After being jolted awake from their laurel-resting complacency by these shock victories, the more natural party learns which way the winds are clearly blowing, and takes over its comparative advantage issue.
[…]
Like Carter — or at least, Carter’s administration — Trump, or at least his administration, will probably be remembered as one of the worst due to the schizophrenia, paralysis, and general malaise that comes during the necessary initial shifting of gears during re-alignment. Neither will get credit from the general public for giving the first push in the new direction, although historians will point that out.
Agnostic analyzes elections from a traditional economics angle. Who votes for whom is based entirely on personal economic well-being. The problem with this analytical premise is that it can miss big paradigmatic shifts in electorate behavior.
Polls and quadrennial elections are largely unaffected by slow demographic change, and therefore can be successfully analyzed from a purely “economic self-interest” angle even as demography (aka racial electoral power) churns the electorate from underneath. But eventually demographic tsunamis smash the old algorithms to smithereens. What worth is the White working class vote when Whites are a minority and US politics has descended into a third world theater of tribal gibs-jockeying?
Will Bernie win in 2020? The possibility is not remote, and Trump supporters should act now to prevent the election of a soft-headed commie with a love for open borders and Diversity that he got far away from when he moved to Vermont.
Bernie will be 79 by 2020, but I’ve no doubt that Trump fears a Bernie candidacy more than any other opponent. Trump has internals; he must know that Bernie eats into Trump’s White working class base like no other Dem. Thecunt won’t be around then to steal the nom from exotic sports car-driving Bernie. (she’ll be in jail)
All of which is to say, if Trump wants a second term, he had better get back to fulfilling his populist campaign promises instead of gloating over a tax cut and a roaring (for now) stock market. The afterglow of these old school conservative GOP initiatives has left Trump’s base muttering “meh”.
The reason a booming stock market (or for that matter a booming economy) doesn’t galvanize Trump’s support beyond his base to include independents and party-switching Dems is because the US has bifurcated into a dual economy. Forty years of stagnant wages and insane housing costs should have been a wake up call to CoC Congressional Republicans.
This is where Bernie, or a Bernie clone, can chip away at Trump’s support and win in 2020.
Bernie’s actual policy proposals are dumb as shit commie prescriptions like “free education for everyone”, but he talks a storm about fat cats and corporate malfeasance, and does so with apparent sincerity, so that alone will call back those White gaymulatto-voting Dems from their flirtation with Trump.
The risk of a Bernie-populist Dem winning in 2020 is that it’s a devil’s bargain that could sufficiently dupe the White working class into switching over from Trump and not realizing that the torn-up trade deals, tariffs, antitrust, and higher taxes on the wealthy come included with a poison pill: open borders and amnesty.
The counter to this scenario is that it’s a new era of White wokeness, and the White working class won’t nominate a populist from either party who wasn’t loudly opposed to mass shitholie immigration. Bernie would have to do a 180 — or rather a 360, back to the views he had before the BernieBro era — on immigration and borders to reinvigorate his chances in 2020.
Addendum: Take Agnostic’s black pilling with a dash of salt. As with all aggro-contrarians of Agnostic’s strand (hi pman!), you take the insight with the petulant refusal to vacate dead end lines of thought. (His “conservatives are cat people, liberals are dog people” was his most inane theory to date, and perfectly illustrates how try-hard he is about bucking conventional wisdom.) Agnostic is deep in his own kool-aid when he isn’t even giving a perfunctory nod to the obvious shitlib fanfiction that is Wolff’s book. FFS some of (((Wolff’s))) passages read like blue tickmark Twatter timelines of deranged conspiratorial celebs. All Agnostic has to do is listen to recent gloats by Wolff that he wished his book would “take down President Trump” to know that most of the book’s content is low grade lib wish fulfillment.
(Why Trump let that slimy reptile anywhere near the White House is a mystery for the ages. One look at Wolff’s liver-lipped physiognomy is enough to convince anyone with working vision to keep him at a million arms’ length.)
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There’s plenty of time before the 2020 election, so here’s a ray of hope for shitlibs on the brink of a mental breakdown from all of Trump’s winning: