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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, organ version]
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, ladies and gentlemen, from your comparatively genial host John Derbyshire, here with a glance at the week's news. Just a wee bit of housekeeping before we get started. I am still adjusting to my new circumstances since the destruction of VDARE. My latest adjustment is that the transcript of each week's podcast will now be available at my own website on Saturday morning instead of being held back until Wednesday as used to be the case. So if you would rather read than listen, there it is. Just go to my home page at www.johnderbyshire.com. The box there has full instructions. Note please that the podcast audio is imbedded there on the first page of the transcript; so if you would like to read while you listen, you are fully accommodated. OK, end of housekeeping. Let's turn our attention to the news. Dominating this week's news has been the Democratic Party's National Convention in Chicago. I don't actually have anything to say about the convention; but I do have quite a lot to say about why I don't have anything to say. Here we go. |
02 — What party conventions are for. Yes: this week we have been entertained by the Democratic Party National Convention in Chicago. Please don't get me wrong when I say "entertained." This coming election is an important one, more important than the average. If the Democrats win the Presidency — especially if they also win Congress — our country will have taken a long step further down a road that leads nowhere good. I'd hate to see that. I'll be voting for the other party. All that said, I find it hard to take the political conventions seriously. It's rare to see important decisions taken at a convention: the serious stuff is all cooked up beforehand, as we saw this year with Joe Biden getting the pink slip. The convention is a show. And it's not a show you want to watch much of, if you have anything better to do with your time — grooming your parakeet, perhaps, or back-washing your Waterpik. Politics, says the old quip, is show business for ugly people. Is it? No, not really. There isn't much showbiz talent on display here. The drama is overwrought and unconvincing. No: Voting for the other guy will not bring about the end of democracy. Nor will it cause sea levels to rise and drown us all, nor the atmosphere to heat up and burn us all. Is there any chance of a Constitutional Amendment to ban the word "existential" from all politicians' vocabularies? The humor is even worse than the drama, as Barack Obama reminded us on Tuesday. [Obama clip: "Those childish nicknames; the crazy conspiracy theories; this weird obsession with crowd sizes …" (Audience laughter …)] Unconvincing drama and unfunny humor aside, you might get a performance from a B-list rock group or soloist. There'll be no dancers, though, no jugglers, no acrobats, no conjuring. Show business? Feugh. And yes, the speakers are mostly ugly. I don't doubt that some very smart and talented people have addressed party conventions; but a party convention is totally the wrong place to showcase your smarts and your talent. Convention organizers should really hire body doubles who do know how showbiz works. If you want to hear national policy addressed seriously, with intellectual rigor, by thoughtful people, don't waste your time with party conventions. That's not what they're for. What they are for is, to fire up party activists with enthusiasm so they'll work harder at organizing local rallies, working up mailing lists, knocking on doors, and schmoozing big-money donors. I don't even really understand why the durn things are televised. Well, that's my main take on party conventions. Please don't think I'm totally negative on them, mind. As a reactionary nationalist, I can't help but smile fondly at them, for all their stiff acting and lame humor. They're part of us, part of the traditional American way. This is what our politics is like. It's not beautiful, but it's harmless and it's ours. I cherish what is ours. Let me enlarge on that a bit. |
03 — Our politics: historical comparisons. Off we go on a brief trip down Memory Lane. I'll go back a hundred years, then two hundred. The 1924 Presidential election was a bit of an oddity. It took place when the U.S.A. was as tranquil and contented as a nation can be, with correspondingly low interest in politics. Voter turnout was below fifty percent. This was only the second time that had happened; the first was in the 1920 election, just four years previously. Ah, the Twenties! Garland Tucker wrote a good book about the 1924 election. I reviewed that book when it came out in 2010. Here is the opening paragraph of my review. (And yes, I know: I quoted this opening paragraph in last month's Diary. That was just a text quote, though. Now you have it in audio, too.) Quote from my review: The 1924 presidential election was, on the face of it, a snoozer. The major-party candidates were Calvin Coolidge (Republican) and John W. Davis (Democrat). Both were conservative — sensationally so by today's standards. As Garland Tucker notes in this enjoyable and informative book [inner quote]: "There were … very few philosophical differences between Davis and Coolidge." [End inner quote.] Both men thought that federal power should intrude as little as possible into the life of the nation. Both favored minimal taxation, wanted the states left to conduct their own affairs where the Constitution did not forbid their doing so, saw America's international role in terms of diplomatic sweet nothings, and believed that [inner quote from Davis] "to tax one person, class or section to provide revenue for another is … robbery" [end inner quote] and that [inner quote from Coolidge] "the chief business of the American people is business" [end inner quote]. End quote. Party conventions were held earlier in those days. In 1924 both took place in June: the Republicans in Cleveland, the Democrats in New York City. The GOP convention lived up to Cleveland's reputation as Dullsville. Coolidge biographer Claude Fuess tells us that, quote: Frank W. Mondell, of Wyoming, was made Permanent Chairman without opposition. The platform, read by Charles B. Warren, of Michigan, contained nothing startling or original. End quote; and be still, my heart. Coolidge didn't even attend. He disliked public speaking, and was a shoo-in for the nomination anyway. The Democrat event was much rowdier. The chairman, Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana, pounded his gavel so often and so hard that at one point the head separated from the handle, flew across the hall, and hit a delegate on the head, giving him a nasty concussion. Coolidge won the election by a landslide. It sounds cruel to say it, but it's surely true, that he got a sympathy assist: his younger son Calvin, Jr. had died in July at age sixteen from an infected blister. Coolidge, the GOP conservative, won 35 states. Davis, the Democrat conservative, won 12. "Fightin' Bob" La Follette, the Progressive Party candidate, took just his own state of Wisconsin. I tell ya: the U.S.A. in 1924 was a conservative country … well, except for Wisconsin. Back another hundred years to 1824, there weren't yet any national party conventions. Conventions started two election cycles later, in 1832. In 1824 and prior cycles, Presidential candidates were nominated in Congressional huddles or by agreement among state party caucuses. There weren't even well-defined parties in 1824, though of course plenty of guys wanted to be President. None of them got a majority in the Electoral College, so the decision was handed off to the House of Representatives, who elected John Quincy Adams with John C. Calhoun as his Vice President. Most disgruntled among the losing candidates were Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson. Adams pacified Clay by appointing him Secretary of State. Andrew Jackson snarled that it was all a, quote, "corrupt bargain," end quote and started plotting for 1828. And so it went. That's been our politics for coming up to a quarter of a millennium. For all that time there have been backroom deals, favoritism appointments, disgruntled losers, shows to whip up enthusiasm — and, for the last 192 years, party conventions with silly jokes and empty pomposities. It's not beautiful, it's hardly ever uplifting, it's occasionally scandalous … but it's ours. Let's cherish it for another quarter-millennium. |
04 — Totalitarian legalism (cont.) Forgive me, please, if I linger for just one more segment in our nation's early history. This follows on from a segment in my August 9th podcast. In that podcast I noted the publication of a new book by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, title: Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law. After some general commentary on the book's topic, I issued the following plea to listeners, quote: Someone help me out here, please. I very dimly recall many years ago being told the number of federal laws that were on the books, aside from the Constitution, when the U.S.A. began its life as a nation. It was a remarkably small number. Does anyone of my listeners know it? Reply by email to the address at www.johnderbyshire.com. End quote. A kind listener did the legwork I really should have done myself, enlisting ChatGPT to help. Here is the main body of my listener's email, for which I am very much obliged. Thank you, Sir! Long quote, slightly edited: I set the year at 1800 so as to give Congress a few years to act after ratification of the Constitution. Here is the answer: End quote. Once again, fulsome thanks to the listener who sent me that. "Only" a few dozen, huh? Justice Gorsuch and his co-author tell us in their book that scholars peg the number of federal statutory crimes today at more than 5,000 and that, quote: "estimates suggest that at least 300,000 federal agency regulations carry criminal sanctions," end quote. So: from a few dozen to around a third of a million. That is too many laws and way too many regulations. One of Donald Trump's promises in the 2016 election was to tackle the excess of regulatory rules. In office, Trump's Executive Order 13771 mandated that two federal regulations should be cut for every new regulation imposed. Success was mixed, with a lot of Trump's efforts scotched by the courts; but it was a good, sound policy. As with other of Trump's first-administration policies, we can hope that if he's elected President this November he'll take up the fight again, wiser and stronger. |
05 — Turncoat Trump? Yes, we can hope. Speaking as a Trump voter, though, I'm weary after all the times hope has flipped over into despair. Here was Donald Trump in Michigan on Wednesday. [Clip: … shield criminals; I mean, they basically shield criminals from prosecution. Uh-huh. "We need a lot of people. We need them. We need them for jobs, we need 'em for everything." For crying out loud, Mr President, can't you remember anything? Back in the 2016 campaign you were told, and seemed to understand, how that worked out in practice. How it worked out was, American workers, especially mid-level technical workers, were replaced by cheaper foreigners, often being forced to train their replacements if they wanted a severance package. This nasty little scheme, that destroyed the lives of thousands of Americans, was — and still is — deftly managed by outsourcing firms based in India, in cahoots with AILA, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and the numerous politicians they have purchased over the counter in Washington, D.C. Current quote from the U.S. Tech Workers' website, quote: The establishment media has mostly ignored one of the most devastating, avoidable developments in modern U.S. economic history. Since 2019, according to federal data, almost all job growth has gone to legal and illegal immigrants. End quote. A lot of American tech workers voted for Donald Trump in 2016 because he seemed to be aware of this worker-replacement problem. If he was, he isn't any longer, to judge by those remarks on Wednesday. For sure a Kamala Harris administration wouldn't do anything to curtail the outsourcing and worker-replacement rackets. They prefer foreigners over Americans in any context. Trump is the only hope we have here. So, Mr President: Cast down your bucket where you are! |
06 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items. Imprimis: When Barack Obama ascended to the Presidency some commentators thought it interesting — not good, not bad, just interesting — that the first self-identifying black person to take the White House had no American-slave ancestry. Obama's mother seemed to be entirely white; his father was from East Africa. (It turned out that Obama's mother likely had a black slave among her American ancestors. That emerged later, though, when Obama was finishing his first term.) A tiny vocabulary came up to discuss the topic. Someone — I think it was Ann Coulter — coined the term "ADOS" to refer to American Descendant(s) Of Slaves. For the opposite thing, cases like Obama, Steve Sailer suggested "exotic black(s)." How, some people wondered, did ADOS blacks feel about the first black President being an exotic black? Discussion drifted to and fro for a few months, then faded away. Now here we are with another exotic black reaching for the Presidency. That's two out of two. Why no ADOS Presidential candidates? Is anyone talking about this? It's interesting. [Added when archiving after recording: My memory really is shot. ADOS was a thing of the late 2010s, not the late 2000s. There is a Wikipedia page here. Ann Coulter preferred DOAS: "I like ADOS, but I think it should be DOAS — Descendants of American slaves. Not Haitian slaves, not Moroccan slaves, etc." Ann also wrote that Affirmative Action should go to the descendants of American Slaves, not to exotic blacks. See here, here, and here. Item: I opened my August 9th podcast with a segment on Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who had just ascended to be Kamala Harris' partner on the Democratic Party ticket. I noted his long and busy engagement with China, and wondered how it could be squared with critical remarks he'd made in Congress about the ChiComs' dictatorship and meetings he'd held with Chinese dissidents and the Dalai Lama. Well, the plot has thickened. Alpha News this week quoted a person named Shad who, when a student back in 1995, had accompanied Tim Walz on one of his many China trips. Shad says Walz was a true believer in ChiCom ideology. He bought multiple copies of Mao Tse-tung's Little Red Book to hand out as gifts. So in the mid-1990s Tim Walz was all in on Mao Tse-tung Thought. Shad believes he still is. Perhaps he is. Who Knows? If asked to explain those meetings with dissidents, Walz might say they were much later when he was in Congress, 2007-2019, and much wiser. The meeting with the Dalai Lama — a huge no-no for the ChiComs — was 2016. I don't know the truth of the matter here, but I really wish someone would ask Tim Walz for explanations. Item: I feel a bit ashamed of myself for spending as much time as I do on Twitter, but I do sometimes come away with a nifty apothegm or a thought-provoking observation. So it was earlier this week. The apothegmatist here … is that a word, "apothegmatist"? "apothegmaticist," … whatever … the tweeter here was mathematician Aryeh Kontorovich, tweeting August 21st, tweet: A lot of arguments about immigration, protectionist economic policy, etc. ultimately come down to: End tweet, and a round of applause from Radio Derb. |
07 — Signoff. That's it, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your time and attention, for your donations and your emails — especially emails as helpful as that one about federal legislation. And thanks once again to the Z-man for taking on the hosting of this podcast. Once again: If you'd rather read than listen, the transcript is now available on Saturday morning at my personal website; no need to wait until Wednesday. OK, let's have a little signout music. One thing about this current Presidential campaign that's depressed me — just one of many, many things — has been the absence of campaign songs. Presidential election campaigns always used to have songs. Wikipedia lists more than a hundred that were used in campaigns from the 1800 election down to this year, although I haven't heard any of this year's. The majority were not written particularly for a campaign; they were just songs already popular that seemed to suit some one candidate. I'd always vaguely supposed, for example, that the song "I'm Just Wild About Harry" was written for Harry Truman's 1948 campaign. No: it had been written for a 1921 Broadway show. The Truman people just picked it up and used it. Of the songs that were custom-written for campaigns, most are lame. I'm a serious admirer of the late great Calvin Coolidge, one of our half-dozen best Presidents ever; but his 1924 campaign song "Keep Cool and keep Coolidge" is highly forgettable. Here's a better one. This is a custom-written campaign song from way back in 1840, when the incumbent Democrat Martin Van Buren was being challenged by the Whig Party's William Henry Harrison and his running mate John Tyler. Harrison had made a name for himself thirty years earlier as Governor of the Indiana Territory, defeating a confederacy of Indian tribes at the Tippecanoe River. Hence the name of the song: "Tippecanoe and Tyler too." A Democrat journalist — yes: that breed was already flourishing in 1840 — had written about Harrison thus, quote: Give him a barrel of hard cider and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him, and my word for it, he will sit … by the side of a 'sea coal' fire, and study moral philosophy. End quote. Harrison's campaign managers jiu-jitsued that to present Harrison as a man of the common people, in contrast to snooty aristocratic Van Buren. Harrison won the election, but succumbed to pneumonia less than a month after his inauguration — the first President to die in office. So the country had voted for Tippecanoe and Tyler too but only got Tyler … who scored a first of his own: Tyler was the first President to face an impeachment resolution in Congress. The resolution failed, but it was a first none the less. A couple of other Tyler notes. First: When Charles Dickens visited the U.S.A. in 1842, President Tyler gave a dinner for him at the White House. Dickens wrote that, quote: The expression of his face was mild and pleasant, and his manner was remarkably unaffected, gentlemanly, and agreeable. End quote. Just one more Tyler note — a pretty remarkable one. John Tyler was born in 1790. One of his numerous grandchildren, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, is still alive, looking forward to his 96th birthday this November. OK, the music. There will be more from Radio Derb next week. |
[Music clip: Unknown artists, "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too."]