More reflections on the Kamala Koup

"Eventually Americans would find out that their country is just another country."

Americans are still reeling a little bit from the reality that their “democracy” is a place where an aging “leader” is hustled out the door like this:

“Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” said one Democrat familiar with private conversations who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.”

“The easy way or the hard way!” Don’t you keep getting this “am I in a movie?” vibe? You are not in a movie. It’s the opposite. You thought you were in a movie. But now, it turns out you’re not. You’re just in history.

What you are seeing is history breaking through the movie. Does all this make you feel like you are on drugs? You are not on drugs. You were on drugs. You are coming down. This is reality breaking through the trip. It’s painful, a little, but it’s a good feeling. Unfortunately, you may not have much choice but to learn to enjoy it.

You thought you weren’t in history—for reasons. You had reasons. They were good reasons. White was black, two plus two was five, and all men were created equal. History had ended. All power belonged to the workers and peasants. Democracy was the worst system of government, except all the others. Movie logic. Poetic logic. Empsonian ambiguity of the seventh type. Wonderful stuff. But—

But—guys, I gotta tell you—history is full of this stuff. And you’re definitely in history. Just roll with it a little. If it feels like you took a little too much acid—cut back on the Twitter a little—but first and foremost, you have to learn to relax and enjoy it. Later in our conversation, you’ll meet Jesus. I mean, not Jesus. Lewis. But—you’ll see.

Because my feeling is, it’s only starting to get weird. See: we still haven’t seen the President. That’s the one power a hustled-out frontman still controls. Now the tables are turned. Biden is a stubborn Irish bastard. He can be mean. Now, he is in a position to be mean.

Before that terrible debate, he had no reason to hurt them, and they had no reason to hurt him. Then someone spiked his Aricept-Dexedrine drip with saline, lost him the debate, and changed the world—because the incentives diverged between the Biden entourage and the rest of the Democratic Party.

After the debate, he could do nothing to hurt them—except do nothing. They could do everything to hurt him. Having started with the easy way, they were about to try it the hard way.

Evidently the hard way was too much. The President, earlier, had observed that God could get him to step down, but no one else could. Maybe it turned out that Nancy Pelosi could make that happen? That little chat with God? That conversation?

But now, they can do nothing to hurt him, except—well, we’ll get to that. But by doing nothing, he can still hurt them.

President Biden has to not only surrender to the Koup, but cooperate enthusiastically with it. Otherwise, things get weird. Things are already weird. But excuses time out. While I refuse to be drawn into the graphology debate on Biden’s supposed signature—a priori, I would not expect the Joe Biden I see on TV to be able to sign his name at all—sure. He has Covid. Okay. People get Covid. People get Parkinson’s…

There is simply no good reason for the President not to be able to talk to the press. Especially if he is staying President! But.. there are… plenty of weird reasons…

If they are ready to lie about his Parkinson’s, or whatever—could it become—long Covid? Could the President—die of Covid? People die of Covid… Could the President… die? Take a sudden turn for the worse? A tragedy! The thing is—people already feel a little… misinformed… about his health—why not be hanged for an ox? Weirder and weirder. Scalia’s pillow is already hanging on Chekhov’s wall…

The longer President Biden fails to appear, in person, not AI, in public, and explain—the weirder everything gets—the more real history, which is reality, starts breaking through your little movie. Who are these people, actually? They are human beings—they have parents—they come from somewhere—well—

“The easy way or the hard way.” No one ever talks about the fact that Nancy Pelosi is literally the Meadow Soprano of Baltimore—to be exact, the daughter of Thomas D’Alesandro, the old Mafia mayor of Baltimore.

See, before Baltimore, the—uh—(checks notes)—“Charm City”—was controlled by Black criminals, it was controlled by Italian criminals. (Thomas Aquinas used to call this the “Great Chain of Being.”) As Wikipedia explains:

FBI records released on January 6, 2021 showed D’Alesandro had been the subject of a Special Inquiry investigation in March and April 1961, revealing numerous unsubstantiated allegations of association with criminals in Baltimore.

Unsubstantiated! Here, John F. Kennedy gives Ms. Soprano a quick mammogram:

She seems unfazed. One suspects that growing up in the D’Alesandro household taught Nancy one or two things about doing things “the easy way or the hard way.”

And when you get these late-Soviet vibes, Americans (frens keep recommending Iannucci’s Death of Stalin, but I will have to wait for AI to dub it into Russian with English subtitles)—don’t be like, OMG, how bad is it, when did it start happening?

Guys: it never “started happening.” It was always happening. Your wife was cheating before she met you. You were her second date that night. That magical night! Not out of three. Out of four. When you write the new history of your marriage—it has to be a history in which this woman, this female person, who you thought you really knew, who you really, deeply, truly loved for many, many years, was—always a whore. Sorry. You don’t have to do it. You can choose to keep living in the black-and-white movie.

In good Alex Jones terms: what is happening is not that the system just started lying to you. What is happening is that the system’s system for lying to you is suffering a system error. The longer the current weirdness continues—the more damage is done to the system’s credibility.

That was the thing about the late Soviet Union—the post-Soviet period was not just the result of imposing the Western legal system on the East. It was—but it was also the result of the late Soviet period, in which security services and organized criminals were already becoming increasingly indistinguishable—portending the 21st-century Russian siloviki state. And yet that late Soviet state still had to flap its lips about the “workers and the peasants.” The Biden entourage makes the Clinton entourage look clean. Just wait for the Harris entourage! It, too, will flap its lips…

Here are the ugly stakes in the current Biden standoff. He has to cooperate. Or things get weird. Since he stepped down, they have no way to escalate—except punishing him.

How can they punish him? Well, they can prosecute his family. They can prosecute him. If the story isn’t that he stepped down like a wise old statesman—a statesman who is certainly not too busy with for one or two last fatherly chat with the American people, if not the straight-out Kampaigning for Kamala marathon the Party would hope for—the story could be—that he is bad?

That would be seriously weird. At a certain point—it might be the least weird thing? I dunno. As Hunter’s namesake put it: when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Or is it getting weird? Again—maybe—in a way—it’s getting less weird. Historically.

So much for geotemporal exceptionalism. Our time and place, it turns out, is just another time and place. As Carlyle predicted: eventually Americans would find out that their country is just another country. Their government is just another government. Their regime is just another regime.

Look: when you have to hate the only system of government that actually works, this is what you get. Yes, democracy is pretty. When you want a pretty ideal whose reality can never be real—what you get is an ugly reality you were never supposed to see. But—now you have to see it. Bummer, dude. Sorry about the whole Truman Show vibe.

Americans: do you want to understand how government is supposed to work? After this latest charade, are you finally ready to admit that there are no secret magic beans in your beautiful old pieces of paper? That your history is just history? That your country is just another country? Can you hear this with your jimmies yet unrustled?

Can you take a step up the catwalk and, like Truman, look back on the movie set of your old public reality, when you still thought it wasn’t? When you still thought your time, your place, was somehow an exception to history, was better than history, just naturally an improvement on all other times and places? At least in its governance?

In retrospect, in hindsight, wasn’t thinking in this way narrow, parochial, even bigoted in the old dictionary sense of this word? Don’t you want to discard all this smallness? Don’t you want to grow? Don’t you want to change? Don’t you want beautiful women who “just got out of a relationship” to be shocked, then amused, and then enthralled? Then try being a monarchist! As Anais Nin put it: “and the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

The thing is: monarchism is not a belief. Monarchism is an absence of belief. Are you ready to throw away all the stupid sacred principles you believe in—accept that they are all just Western variants of “the workers and the peasants”—take a deep breadth and admit that, by historical standards, your government, your system of government, even your idea of government, is not just not necessarily excellent, let alone superlative or even exceptional, but perhaps—not even good?

Are you ready to admit that your country is just another country and your regime is just another regime? Ready to learn the true principles of government from scratch?

Why mess with the rest? Go straight to the best! Learn from the “Sun King.” What’s great about Louis XIV’s instructions for his son is that they were never meant to be published. They may or may not be fully authentic—but they are certainly plausible. (They are also surprisingly hard to find—they haven’t been translated since 1806, and Claude decided to hallucinate the name of the anonymous translator, who decided to call his subject “Lewis.” Library science is hard.)

As the Sun King explains:

Nothing can so securely establish the happiness and tranquillity of a country as the perfect combination of authority in the single person of the Sovereign. The greatest subdivision in this respect often produces the greatest calamities; and whether it be detached into the hands of individuals or those of corporate bodies, it always is there in a state of fermentation.

Forget everything you know about history, government, and political science. Learn that. Read the rest of the book, maybe. You’ll understand the “state of fermentation”—and maybe even learn to enjoy it. Text the link to all the new art hoes you’re meeting. Make bets with your new bros on whether they read it. Living in reality can be good! “The risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

Imagine if Democrats learned to love monarchy! Just from all this Game of Thrones stuff! I think the President, even detained as he seems to be in his Delaware dacha—could still strike back—if he had a plan. If only he had a plan…

Let me give him a plan. The name of the plan is: Hunter. I think it’s too much to ask to put Hunter at the top of the ticket. But what if the President’s price for cooperating was—not Biden-Harris, but Harris-Biden? We have a young Biden—tried and tested by the hardest of experiences—emerging, like George W. Bush, from addiction—put this crown prince up against J.D. Vance! Now there’s a debate America really needs to see. “And it would clear up a lot of this legal BS, too. Come on, Nancy. Let’s be reasonable.”