THE RETURN OF JEB: AMERICA'S ONE-PARTY STATE REASSERTS ITSELF

by Colin Liddell

I'm rather enjoying this U.S. election. I want Trump to win and I even predicted he would win, but there are also compensations to him losing. My main criticism of Trump is that he didn't really fight the culture and media wars, and this has clearly come back to bite him in the butt.

The real difference between Trump winning and losing is that if Trump wins you get a toxic, culturally Marxist America spreading its cultural and ideological poison across the globe that sort of works, whereas with Biden you get a more dysfunctional version of the same. I long ago concluded that the decline and even fall of American power would probably be the best thing for the cultural and ideological health of the World (although there would doubtless be lots of geopolitical fallout as well), and even after 4 years of the Trump Revolution I haven't seen too much to convince me otherwise. 

But the election is interesting most of all because it sheds so much light on how things really work. We would never have seen the gears moving in this machine without Trump. Or, to use an even better metaphor, the squirming of the worms in this previously unopened can.

The vote count graph meme (see above) is a key part of this. The sudden uptick in the blue line represents the "ballot stuffing" that apparently occurred in the wee small hours in a number of Dem-run cities, although there are some other explanations. For years we knew that heavily Black, perma-blue cities like Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Detroit, etc., were totally corrupt when it came to elections. The vast expansion of mail-in votes kind of turbo-charged that in this case, in particular allowing the Dems to use their Big Tech backdoor into the electorate to mobilise harvest a lot of the passive vote. I really should have factored that into my predictions, and would have if I had been better motivated to care. But wasn't this just taking a page out of the Treasury Department's book?

America is the country that prints money into existence. Should we really be so surprised that they are now taking the same approach with votes?

— TRAD NEWS (@AffirmativRight) November 6, 2020

But what I find most fascinating about US democracy is not its incompetence and corruption, but how essentially undemocratic it is even at the best of times. No, that's not quite strong enough. I guess a better word is anti-democratic. 

First of all you have effectively just two realistic political "choices" in a country that they keep telling us is blessed with diversity. The number of varieties of toothpaste on supermarket shelves offers an interesting contrast.

Plenty of choice: toothpaste is obviously more important than politics to Americans

But even better, both parties, Democrats and Republicans, constantly work to dis-represent their voting bases. This would not have been at all as obvious as it now is without the remarkable advent of Donald Trump, who, to the best of his ability, pushed in the other direction. This fact alone is all you need to understand the establishment's endless hatred for the man. Bernie, in a much weaker way, attempted the same thing from the Left.

Whatever you think about the ideas involved, Republican voters basically want nationalism and populism, and always have. Dem voters, by contrast, have always wanted some form of socialism. But the contrast between these two grassroots is not that sharp. Nationalism, populism, and a degree of socialism could easily be combined, and America is still rich and dominant enough to pay for it. However, the ruling cliques of both parties don't want any of that. What they stand for is corporate globalist centrism, which shits on the poor schlubs who want the GOP to be nationalist and populist and the Dems to be socialist. 

In the memetic image at the top we see the vote count graph meme from this election combined with the famous Jeb! meme from the last one. The Jeb! meme includes a lot of tightly packed information, which is why it remains potent even today. So, what does it really represent? In that simple image of Jeb! throwing his arms wide in triumphant ecstasy we see the arrogance of a GOP establishment that thought they could gin up voter enthusiasm simply by adding an exclamation mark to the name of this charisma-free dynastic politician. But Jeb! also represents a further arrogance that says "we don't even need put a cherry on the turd to get them to eat it."

Jeb! represents the dead, middle ground of corporate globalist centrism that appeals to almost no-one, but towards which both party elites constantly strive when they aren't being tugged too strongly by their pesky voters.

The corporate Dems found they could zero in on that rich fat zone of juicy donations and other golden opportunities by fobbing their moronic voter base off with fake leftism of the feminist, gay marriage, identity politics variety. As long as their base could get to call other Americans "racist, sexist homophobes," then any number of jobs could be outsourced to China and migrants brought over the border to push down their wages.

The GOP didn't quite have something as convenient as that for their populist and nationalist base, especially when pointless foreign wars became unfashionable under George W. Bush. This is why they ludicrously tried to openly sell corporate globalist centrism -- i.e. Jeb! -- to their base.

Yes, Jeb! represents that thing that the elites of both parties wish their dumb, stupid voters would accept, but which they usually have to dress up with something more appealing -- i.e. the cherry on the turd. 

The reason the Jeb! meme was such a big hit -- along with the "cuckservative" slur in 2016 -- was because the GOP had no cherry on their turd in 2016. It was this which created the enormous opening for Trump to make an insurgent appeal to the GOP nationalist and populist base. 

Now we see the system and its two nominal parties, who are more correctly one party, fighting back against Trump and the democratic tendency he represents. Biden is essentially Jeb! 2.0 -- but without the exclamation mark.

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here. He is also featured in Arktos's collection A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders.