William Jennings Bryan: America’s Forgotten Political Titan

By Nick Deiuliis

The most prominent figures in American political history occupied the White House as president.  But there are a few exceptions, quite notable ones.

Two obvious ones are Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton. Neither served as president but both left outsized impacts on the United States that endure to this day.  And there are a couple of other names with extensive legacies that are lesser known: Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun. Neither were president but both exuded tremendous influence and power during their political primes.

Yet there is another, one who had just as much influence and impact on American politics and policies, perhaps arguably even more, than Hamilton, Clay, or Calhoun.  Most Americans outside of political history buffs don’t even know his name, let alone his story.

His name is William Jennings Bryan.  His story is fascinating.

The Beginning

William Jennings Bryan was born in southern Illinois in 1860, just before the Civil War exploded.  He attended law school at then Union Law College, which is now Northwestern University.  Early in his legal career, Bryan moved west to Lincoln, the capital of fast-growing Nebraska.

Left: a young William Jennings Bryan. Right: Bryan’s boyhood home in Salem, Illinois. Built in 1852, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Bryan built a successful practice and started to advise and campaign for local politicians.  Bryan was an exceptional public speaker, inspiring with vision and passionate delivery. 1

After a few speeches his raw potential as a politician was too great to ignore.  Bryan ran for Congress in 1890 as a Democrat.  His platform consisted of reducing tariff rates, supporting the coinage of silver at a ratio equal to that of gold, and breaking the power of business trusts.

Bryan was a prototypical populist from rural and small-town America. He had an inherent mistrust of big business and championed himself as a fighter for the common man.  His views early on were somewhat radical, but as time passed his views became more mainstream within both the Democratic and Republican parties.  Many of those views remain embedded in modern American policy.

He won his House seat, and his Democratic party was ascending and secured a majority in the House after the 1890 election.

Once in the House, Bryan began to evolve his views and platform.  This was the height of the Gilded Age, and the Democratic Party splintered into two groups. The conservative northern “Bourbon Democrats” sought to limit the size and power of the federal government. Another group of Democrats, largely farmers of the South and West, favored greater federal intervention to help farmers, regulate railroads, and limit the power of large corporations.2

Bryan became affiliated with the latter group of farmers and populists, and he advocated for the free coinage of silver, what was labeled as the Free Silver Movement, and the establishment of a progressive federal income tax. That endeared him to many reformers.

Winning By Losing

After the economy tanked during the Panic of 1893, Bryan became more appealing to many voters. Rather than running for re-election in the House in 1894, Bryan sought election to the United States Senate.  He lost.

But he gained wider notoriety and his national profile surged.  Everyone, it seemed, wanted to hear or see him.  Speaking fees allowed Bryan to give up his legal practice and devote himself full-time to public speaking and politics.

His defining moment that elevated his brand nationally tied back to the Free Silver Movement and populism.  Bryan called the gold standard “not only un-American but anti-American” and used the issue to emerge as the nation’s leading Democrat.  In his famous ‘Cross of Gold’ speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1896, Bryan argued that the debate over monetary policy was part of a broader struggle for democracy, political independence, and the welfare of the “common man”.

The Cross of Gold speech was a raging success.  Bryan was met with applause on the floor of the convention that lasted for over half an hour at the end of the speech.  Three excerpts display the power of his words:

A line from early in the speech: “The individual is but an atom; he is born, he acts, he dies; but principles are eternal, and this has been a contest over a principle.”

From the middle of the speech: “This was a struggle between the idle holders of idle capital and the struggling masses, who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country.”

Bryan campaigning for president in October 1896. Listen (here on YouTube) to Bryan reciting his “Cross of Gold” speech 25 years later in 1921.

Here’s the famous ending of the Cross of Gold speech, from which it got its name: “If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

Three-Time Presidential Candidate

The Cross of Gold speech secured Bryan the Democratic nomination for president.  And at the age of 36, Bryan became, and remains, the youngest presidential nominee of a major party in American history.

Bryan faced off against Republican candidate William McKinley in 1896.  McKinley campaigned from his porch and enjoyed a sizeable funding advantage.  But Bryan had his words; he went on the road and gave hundreds of speeches.  Twenty to thirty a day, many taking on an almost religious revival feel.

But McKinley won the election, taking the northeast and upper Midwest.  Bryan took the South and West, excluding California.

Despite the loss, Bryan’s support within his coalition grew stronger, and he easily won the Democratic nomination and ran again for president in 1900.  Once more he faced McKinley, this time as the incumbent president and with the charismatic Teddy Roosevelt as vice president.

Bryan focused his campaign on anti-imperialism and was opposed to the US assuming control of the Philippines. Bryan argued that the United States should refrain from imperialism and should seek to become the “supreme moral factor in the world’s progress and the accepted arbiter of the world’s disputes”.3  The American Anti-Imperialist League, which included Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain, didn’t exactly love Bryan, but his strong stance against imperialism garnered their support.

The 1900 Democratic campaign once again relied on Bryan’s marathon of oratory.  In a typical day, Bryan gave four hour-long speeches and shorter talks that added up to six hours of speaking. At an average rate of 175 words a minute, he turned out 63,000 words a day, enough to fill 52 columns of a newspaper.  That put tremendous wear on his voice.

Yet he continued to move people with his words. One observer described it as “the poor, the weak, the humble, the aged, the infirm would rush forward by the hundreds holding up hard and wrinkled hands with crooked fingers and cracked knuckles to the young great orator, as if he were in very truth their promised redeemer from bondage.”

Yet McKinley won again, and by a wider margin than in 1896. Bryan even lost his home state of Nebraska.

After the 1900 election loss, Bryan turned to journalism and more public speaking.  He began publishing his weekly newspaper, The Commoner, which echoed his views.4 The newspaper became one of the most widely read of its era and boasted 145,000 subscribers.

President McKinley was assassinated, and Teddy Roosevelt became president.  Roosevelt moved to the left, favoring federal regulation of railroad rates and meatpacking plants.  And of course, he was an ardent trustbuster.  President Roosevelt adopted key policies as a Republican that looked much like what Bryan advocated for when he ran for president as a Democrat.

However, Bryan didn’t stand still on the ideological spectrum either.  He kept moving to more progressive policies.  He favored federal regulation of banks and securities, protections for union organizers, and federal spending on highway construction and education.  He demanded transparency in campaign contributions and advocated for government control of the currency.  All of which we have today on a massive scale.5

Bryan speaking at the 1908 Democratic National Convention.

For a third time, Bryan ran as the Democratic nominee for president, this time in 1908 against Taft. Bryan added to his policy platform requiring national banks to provide deposit insurance. And he unified the labor movement and secured the first presidential endorsement ever issued by the American Federation of Labor.

However, the third time did not end up being the charm for Bryan. Because the Republicans also moved left, there wasn’t much substantive difference between Bryan and Taft in 1908.  Taft won easily, taking almost everything outside the South.

Bryan was a three-time presidential election loser.  But the 493 cumulative electoral votes cast for Bryan across three separate elections are the most received by a presidential candidate who was never elected.

Wilson Era

After three losses, Bryan surrendered his presidential ambitions.  But he did not leave presidential politics, playing s crucial role in helping Woodrow Wilson secure the Democratic nomination in 1912.  Wilson won the presidency when he beat the split Republican candidates of Teddy Roosevelt and Taft.

President Wilson nominated Bryan as Secretary of State, an obvious and logical choice considering Bryan’s popularity and support.  Wilson explained that “this is only natural for the man who had led in the transformation of the national attitudes.”6

Bryan also helped Wilson reduce tariff rates, impose a progressive income tax, introduce new antitrust measures, and establish the Federal Reserve System.  The residual good and bad of these moves are present today.

But the honeymoon with President Wilson would not last.  Wilson was a globalist and viewed America as a leader in the world while Bryan at heart was a staunch isolationist. The fatal falling out between the two came with the First World War and navigating the European powers. Wilson was sympathetic to the Allies (the UK, France, Russia and Italy) while Bryan favored strict neutrality.  When the Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat and American citizens perished, Bryan did not want to take Germany to task while Wilson viewed the event as a wanton act of war.  Before you knew it, Bryan resigned as secretary of state.

Challenging Times

After leaving public service, Bryan focused on advocating for the eight-hour workday, a minimum wage, the right of unions to strike, and women’s suffrage.  In the 1920s, Bryan became one of the most prominent religious figures in the country.  And that’s when his fortunes started to darken.

Bryan dedicated himself to two crusades: rabid support for prohibition and opposition to the teaching of evolution in schools. He saw alcohol as inherently evil and something that the state should prohibit.  He called for state and local laws banning public schools from teaching evolution because he saw Darwin’s scientific hypotheses conflict with the literal text of the Bible.

The religious, teetotalling, and anti-evolution rhetoric led to a famous (or for Bryan, infamous) event.  In July 1925, Bryan participated in the highly publicized Scopes Trial. The defendant, John T. Scopes, had violated a Tennessee law barring the teaching of evolution in public schools, while serving as a substitute biology teacher.

Scopes’ defense was funded by the American Civil Liberties Union and led in court by the famed lawyer Clarence Darrow.  Darrow argued that the Tennessee statute violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution.  Bryan defended the right of parents to choose what schools teach and argued that Darwinism was trying to invalidate “every moral standard that the Bible gives us”.  He wrote that “science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals.”7

Scopes was found in violation of the law and fined $100.  The national media intensely covered the trial, and many ridiculed Bryan as a symbol of ignorance and anti-intellectualism. Will Rodgers at the time said, “I like Bill Bryan, but he is making a fool out of himself and out of religion.”

Bryan passed away in the summer of 1925, days after the conclusion of the Scopes trial.  He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.  The back of his headstone reads: “He kept the faith.”

Greatness Comes With a Mixed Legacy

William Jennings Bryan was far from perfect, at least from the perspective of protecting individual rights, keeping government minimal, letting the free market function, and holding science supreme.

He was for big government, perhaps mainly because of his distrust of big business.  He trusted the government agency or bureaucrat more than the private sector capitalist.

He could, depending on the issue, be anti-individual rights, whether it was with African Americans’ rights or with denying individual choice through his support of prohibition. Ironically, despite being a great orator, he held positions that stifled free speech, primarily his opposition to the teaching of evolution theory.

Which meant he could too easily place ideology and religion above science, as evidenced by his role in the Scopes trial.

But the man exuded undeniable and substantial positives. Particularly as an advocate for the small town, the farmer, the industrial worker, and the middle class.  He earned the moniker of The Great Commoner.

He was a force to be reckoned with, and his fingerprints remain across American policy and society to this day.  Bryan was, if nothing else, a courageous voice for the commoner at a time when the little guy needed such a champion.

And few other American greats can lay claim to substantially changing both their political party as well as the opposing party; Bryan certainly can lay claim to doing so.  His playbook is borrowed by more than one prominent current American leader or candidate and is copied in more than one current major policy or political movement.

Ponder what Bryan’s views would be of America today.

  • The Federal Reserve: would he view it as a protector of the little guy or an out-of-control beast laying waste to the commoner to enrich the 1%?
  • Would big government still be desirable to him? Or would it now represent to Bryan a bigger threat than big business?
  • And the religion of climate alarmism muscling its way to becoming The Science, subsuming real science.  Would he see such as part of a moral crusade or instead as the suppression of the individual, middle class, and science itself?
  • Would Bryan’s support of private sector unions then translate to support of public sector unions and their political monopoly on power today?  Or would he instead view public sector unions as a very different and dangerous thing, much like FDR did after him?

Speaking of FDR, one could postulate that if there was no William Jennings Bryan, there would not have been FDR’s New Deal.  A byproduct of impressive legacies like Bryan’s is fascinating speculation over alternative history scenarios.

Bryan had great feel for the pulse of America, enjoyed innate great timing, and was able to masterfully package a message into compelling oratory.  As such, it is not surprising that his policies took root in American politics and society.  Yet those legacies grew out of control after Bryan’s time.  Indeed, the Frankenstein monster he jolted to life is now running wild and unchecked.

It is not just history repeating itself; it is testament to William Jennings Bryan’s impact on the United States of America. What he drove and what he represented, both the good and the bad, endures.

His legacy is…everywhere.  And more Americans need to know his story.

•

[1] You can hear Bryan’s speeches on platforms like YouTube.  Give him a listen; impressive in front of a mic.
[2] Read more about the history of American farmer political movements at: https://nickdeiuliis.com/news/harvesting-history/.
[3] As you read on, it will become difficult to assess whether Bryan was a staunch isolationist or a naïve globalist.  Perhaps the truth is he could be either, depending on timing and circumstance.
[4] Bryan’s nickname was The Great Commoner.
[5] With mediocre success, to be kind.
[6] Imagine this: the State Department at that time boasted 150 employees in Washington and an additional 400 in embassies abroad.  A staff of 550.
[7] America has a sad history of allowing ‘The Science’ to suppress the scientific method and of letting religion or ideology subsume rational thought.  It didn’t start with elites dictating pandemic policy or preaching climate alarmism.

Address to the Jonathan Club, World Affairs Group

The following is a summary of Nick’s June 12, 2024, address to the World Affairs Group of the Jonathan Club.

Thank you for that too long but kind intro. Only a third is true, but I’m not going to tell you which third.

I am so happy to be here, with this wonderful group of what I reference as ‘doers’. I am honored to be the first speaker in the revived World Affairs Group of the Jonathan Club. I think you will be intrigued with the topic today; it is right down the power alley of world affairs.

You know I always feel a degree of pressure speaking to a group like this. It’s normal, I suppose. You are all smart and many of you are coming in with a very different view of what I am going to posit on policy. And some of you may still disagree with me by the end of the talk, but I bet you that I at least having you rethinking your premises. Rest assured I do welcome the feedback, it’s part of the wonder of civil public discourse, after all.

But now you heap tremendously higher pressure on me by putting me on a podium in the Reagan Room, surrounded by all these portraits of unbelievable achievers who were here before. And with a portrait of a prior Jonathan Club honoree and fellow Pittsburgher, David McCullough, literally looming just over my left shoulder. I am feeling the heat, friends.

I typically decline many of these invitations to speak and interact. It’s much more comfortable for me to publish thoughts on my website or discuss issues on my weekly Far Middle podcast than to take the much bolder step of interacting with fellow human beings. I love to create and express, but I struggle with that human interaction thing.

But I couldn’t resist coming today.

One reason is this place, or the idea of this place. Since you are from California or the LA area, you may take something for granted about the position this wonderful state holds within our nation. My family, like most of yours depending on how far you go back, were not from America. Our people came to America. More specifically, our people aspired to come to America. Because of what it represented and offered, which was in stark contrast to the places where our people left. People from all over the world dreamt of coming to America; don’t worry I’m not going to break into Neil Diamond’s America.

But within this great nation sits California. You see, people from all over America dreamt of…going to California, to borrow the title of a great Led Zeppelin song. California for decades was the dream within the dream. The next level of the American ideal.

I sure had that dream but never realized it. Since I was a kid. My favorite TV shows were centered in California, hello CHIPs. The first movie I ever saw in a theater was Earthquake, where my perceived ideal of a place was devastated by a natural disaster.

I love sports, or at least used to. As a kid I became obsessed with the late 70s/early 80s Dodgers. Vin’s voice and that shrine of a stadium. Lasorda, Garvey, Dusty, and my personal favorite, third baseman Ron Cey. The Dodgers perfectly mirrored my image of California and LA.

And today is a special day indeed in southern Cali sports history. On June 12, 1970 LA native Doc Ellis pitched a no-hitter down in San Diego, allegedly under the influence of LSD. And the crazy event started here in LA. You see, after the Pirates had flown to San Diego on Thursday, June 11, Ellis visited a friend in Los Angeles and used LSD “two or three times.” Thinking it was still Thursday, he took a hit of LSD on Friday at noon, and his friend’s girlfriend reminded him at 2:00 p.m. that it was Friday and that he was scheduled to pitch that night in San Diego. Ellis leaves LA and gets to San Diego at the stadium at 4:30 and the game started at around 6.

Ellis said that he threw the no-hitter despite being unable to feel the ball or see the batter or catcher clearly. As Ellis recounted: “I can only remember bits and pieces of the game. I was psyched. I had a feeling of euphoria. I was zeroed in on the [catcher’s] glove, but I didn’t hit the glove too much. I remember hitting a couple of batters, and the bases were loaded two or three times. The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes, I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder. They say I had about three to four fielding chances. I remember diving out of the way of a ball I thought was a line drive. I jumped, but the ball wasn’t hit hard and never reached me.”

Even without the uniqueness of Doc Ellis, there is nowhere in the world like here. Although I never left Pittsburgh and God willing never will, I remain fond of California and LA. And I am deeply troubled about both. And America. And my hometown as well. We’ve all got issues. Allow me to explain.

AN ENDANGERED AND VILIFIED COMPOSITION

Understand my makeup. Like most of us here today, I am a mosaic of things.

I am engineer by training, which means I am passionate about the scientific method and objectivity when setting policies. I am not a fan of, and am deeply troubled by, ‘The Science’.

I am a liberal, as in the endangered species of classic liberal, when it comes to individual rights. The Constitution and our republic were structured to protect the rights of the individual. From the tyranny of the majority and certainly from the state. The individual should be free to choose.

I am most definitely a fiscal conservative. I never spent more cash than I took in, including when I was young, starting out with basically nothing, and no car. So why should our government constantly grossly outspend what it takes in?

And philosophically, I am best defined as libertarian. But I’m not voting for RFK Jr. I recognize we need some level of government – to protect property rights, protect individual rights, and to defend from outside threats. But that level should be minimal so that the individual is optimal. PM Modi of India has that phrase ‘minimum government, maximum governance’; good summation of my desire.

And I am a proud capitalist. And an unapologetic domestic energy producer of natural gas. And a believer in meritocracy. And a free market advocate.

What’s interesting is how that mosaic makeup I just listed is outright vilified today by experts and elites as something in need of silencing and eradicating.

Think about it. The Science reigns over science. Individual rights are trampled by the official views set by the elite and expert classes. Fiscal responsibility in government has been obliterated and we pretend the bill will never come due. Government has become a monster, light years away from minimal. Socialism eats away at capitalism. Zero carbon myths are used to attack domestic energy. And equal outcomes destroy meritocracy.

Why are all these things coming to bear at the same time across our great land and this awesome state? It boils down to one culprit, friends: the Left. Indeed, if you take the opposite composite of the things that I love, that I associate with, that I just listed, you will come up with today’s Left.

AMERICA’S SHALE GAS MIRACLE

Learn how CNX Resources produces natural gas.

And there’s no better case study of how the Left attacks a culture of achievement, value creation, and doing than what is going on in the world of energy. My world, which I assure you, impacts your world. Everyone’s world.

I mean come on. Not only is the Left the antithesis of all that I hold near and dear, it also—quite astutely I might add when one considers the Left’s end game—attacks and vilifies the industry and region that are in my DNA. Those being the domestic natural gas industry and Appalachia, with Pittsburgh serving as its beating heart.

And there is much that we all stand to lose if the Left succeeds. Allow me to illustrate with my world, which seems far from here but in fact impacts everything here in Cali. It’s the greatest success story never told.

The U.S. went from being a net annual importer of natural gas as recently as 2016 to the largest global producer of natural gas and a net annual exporter today. The Appalachian basin is a big reason why; the Marcellus and Utica shale horizons underneath where I live represent cumulatively the second largest natural gas field in the world.

What catalyzed this stunning rapid transformation and dominant position? The free market bringing innovative and disruptive technology in the form of horizontal drilling and advanced completions techniques. American ingenuity allowed methane, aka natural gas, to be liberated from shale rock deposits at prolific rates and low cost.

Cumulatively, the benefits across this virtuous value chain total in the trillions of dollars. Because of capitalism and efficient market theory.

You see these benefits locally in places where the manufacturing of energy occurs, often in rural and underserved locales. Landowners have enjoyed a windfall from gas rights leasing that they’ve reinvested into family farms, homes, kids’ education, and local businesses. Communities ravaged economically now see improved employment in jobs that pay family-sustaining wages. Where no hope existed, attention has now turned to a future with promise.

You see the benefits regionally. Pennsylvania retooled its power grid to feed off domestic natural gas and the state’s carbon dioxide intensity declined nearly 40 percent in just 12 years while its manufacturing sector was revived and businesses and homes enjoy lower energy bills. Using PA DEP emissions data and EPA values for emission reductions, the increased use of nat gas in power generation delivered up to $1 trillion in public health benefits for PA residents. Old-line industries are resurrected across the Rust Belt by the jolt of cheap and reliable energy. Which means the building trades are booked solid.

Benefits are evident across America and North America. Canadian heavy industry in western Ontario is now fed by new pipeline infrastructure conveying Appalachian carbon-based molecules, making it more competitive. Mexico is the largest importer of U.S. natural gas.

The US shale industry and free market have done more for North American prosperity than the NAFTA and USMCA, combined.

America’s domestic energy industry is redrawing the geopolitical map.

We broke OPEC’s back. Domestic carbon manufacturing allows the U.S. to withdraw from endless conflicts in faraway lands since we now deliver our own energy security. U.S. natural gas is the biggest strategic lever against the growing threat of the ominous Chinese communist state and its global ambitions, as well as Russia and Putin.

There are basic underlying reasons why this miracle occurred in a very short time.

First, the free market was able to function without major government intervention. The industry innovated faster than bureaucrats and the Left could keep up to meddle. Second, the free market allocated capital across the value chain, and what were once fragmented pieces quickly become integrated and efficient.

And if left unmolested by the Left, we are just getting started. Two big opportunities are on the horizon.

First, another round of disruptive and innovative technology is coming to bear, much of it being developed and demonstrated by CNX in Appalachia, that will allow natural gas manufactured at the wellhead to be efficiently transformed from gaseous methane into compressed natural gas and liquified natural gas. Or CNG and LNG, respectively. That’s a game changer, because CNG and LNG will instantly displace massive volumes of foreign sourced oil used in the transportation sector.

When you utilize CNG or LNG into a truck, heavy equipment, bus, or airplane in place of gasoline or diesel, a few things happen. Costs go down because the natural gas derived BTUs are less than half the cost of gasoline or diesel BTUs. Huge savings.

Supply chains shrink drastically, from tens of thousands of miles with oil currently, down to as short as dozens of miles under this development chain.

Global CO2 and local emissions plummet, because you are now using the lowest methane intensive natural gas on the planet to displace higher emission pieces of the energy portfolio.

Employment and tax base go up as workers earn family-sustaining wages and pay taxes. Trade balance improves and trade deficit shrinks as energy imports drop. And our geopolitical leverage increases as we create not just improved energy security for ourselves, but also our allies.

Yeah, allowing doers to do their thing in domestic energy has the geopolitical reach of several aircraft carrier groups, when one thinks about it.

Second, once you displace the foreign sourced gasoline and diesel transportation markets, you can start to expand the exporting ability of domestically produced natural gas to other nations.

Liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals allow the product to be shipped to Poland, South Korea, Spain, Japan, and India. Our carbon-based molecules are being utilized globally to help spur improved quality of life for billions of people.

THE LEFT’S ENERGY BATTLE PLAN

But…the doers in domestic energy and Appalachia are not being left alone by the Left. Quite the contrary. It’s as if the success of the domestic energy industry drove the Left mad, to the point where their zealotry to destroy and appropriate the value of doers exponentially increased.

Code Red for humanity and climate alarmism serve as the overarching religion to destroy not just the domestic energy industry, but everything tied to it. Which is effectively the entire private sector economy and the freedom of the individual. There are three tactical prongs to the Left’s attack under the ideology of climate alarmism.

The first prong of attack is heightened regulatory standards on domestic energy production and reduced access to natural gas reserves. You see this attack every time an administrative state bureaucrat issues a new regulation on the industry. Often without the specific backing of a statute, I might add.

The second prong of the attack targets the industry’s access to capital and looks to cut off supply of the vital lubricant for any capitalistic endeavor. This attack will be evident when major banks bow to pressure from environmental groups to stop lending to the carbon economy (read that as the same as the real economy, since no carbon, no economy), when foundations or endowments of universities chest-thump about their divestment from carbon producing companies, or when credit ratings firms assign poor credit ratings to such companies not because of quantitative metrics but instead because of subjective views of the industry’s social worthiness. Starve a growing industry of capital and you can slowly strangle it to death.

The third and final prong of the attack is the most insidious of all: thwarting the future demand growth for natural gas. This attack manifests through the throwing of regulatory and legal roadblocks into the paths of new pipeline projects that would convey natural gas from the producing basins to the growing demand centers. And it includes direct and back-door regulatory attacks on gas stoves, gas lawnmowers, and internal combustion engine cars. The over-arching objective is to replace energy abundance with energy scarcity and to replace individual choice with state control.

The Left justifies the three-pronged attack with a few convenient energy myths.

The first myth: wind and solar and EVs are zero carbon. Nonsense; they have massive carbon and CO2 footprints on a life cycle basis, higher than natural gas power generation for sure. EVs require 600+% more metals and minerals than gasoline-powered cars. Mandating wind and solar power generation and EV adoption will increase atmospheric CO2 net-net, not decrease it.

The second myth: we can manufacture wind, solar, and EV batteries at scale here in the US. We can’t because the stuff you need sits largely in Africa and South America and China. And all the processing capacity to purify that stuff is controlled by China, who dominates the markets for nickel, graphite, copper, lithium, polysilicon, and magnets. A mad dash to wind, solar and EVs necessarily creates energy dependency on the CCP, as designed.

And the murky supply chain of wind, solar, and batteries brings epic human rights abuses, with little kids toiling in open pit cobalt mines in DR Congo and Muslim prisoners working in solar factories in Xinjiang. It’s a new form of brutal colonialism. Brought to you by the Left, the Church of Climate, and Code Red. Not sure if you are following what’s going on in New Caledonia, the French territory in the Pacific. France covets its nickel deposits for battery making mandated by climate policies and demands export of nickel back to France. New Caledonia pushes back and erupts in riots. Like I said, climate policies reimposing colonialism and economic servitude across the globe.

And the third and final myth: you can electrify everything with mandates, spiking demand for power, that you can force a reliance on unreliably intermittent solar and wind on the grid, and that the grid will function just fine. It won’t and increasingly, it isn’t. The DOE says wind is only reliable 33% of the year while solar is dependable for just 25% of the time. Get this: wind energy generation decreased last year, despite 6.2 GWs of new capacity. Why? Um, because the wind didn’t blow when we needed it to.

Yes, the consequences of the Left’s peddling of myths in energy are real. It creates energy scarcity, which creates energy inflation, which then stokes general inflation. It helps create energy insecurity in the West and a dependency on places like Russia and Iran, because when wind and solar inevitably fail to perform at scale, the energy needs to come from somewhere. Putin feels emboldened and decides he can take a nation or two because of his energy stranglehold over the EU that the Left gave him. Iran feels emboldened because we need its oil and it sees us pleading with EU nations to not censure Iran for violating rules and pursuing nukes.

The Left’s climate policies suppress individual freedoms. Did you see Cali is testing car tracking? Why? Officially because EVs don’t pay gas tax, so tracking allows state to tax EVs as heavy as gas cars. But the real reason: once driving is tracked, it’s easy to start assigning social/climate scores to individuals. Climate policies: nothing to do with CO2, everything to do with social engineering.

Climate change is not the problem. It’s been happening for millions of years. Climate change policies and the myths they embody are the problem.

President Coolidge once wrote: “Isn’t it a strange thing that…men have the notion that they can pass a law and suspend the operations of economic law?” Today it’s worse, as elites have the notion they can pass climate policies that defy the operations of physics, and scientific law.

THE DUTY OF LEADERSHIP

Nick speaking at the announcement of CNX Resources and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s “Radical Transparency” initiative.

Now you get my anxiety. The Left, everything I am not, is looking to eradicate my beloved industry and region out of existence, with serious consequences for a range of stakeholders, from the local to the global.

That realization built over time and changed me. I used to subscribe to what I referenced as ‘political quietism’. Keep your head down, ignore the babble, and do your job. But with everything I just discussed looming larger, I began to ponder if that is what good leaders do. Is it ethical to not speak in defense of the accurate, of the rational?
So I began to focus on policy advocacy. And here we are today.

A FEW ‘HARD TRUTHS’

I’d like to spend a few minutes highlighting some of the major themes that I discussed in my book Precipice, which are the major challenges for us reflecting the major tactical avenues of attack the Left has adroitly applied the past number of decades. Let’s call them ‘hard truths’ to add to the hard truth I discussed earlier of there being no zero carbon world awaiting us. I will tie many of these to national levels and back to where I started this speech: California and LA. Our wonderful nation, this epic state, and this great city once represented the ideal but now unfortunately are the playthings of the Left.

Hard truth #1: Government today is a voracious beast and the bureaucratic state has grossly overstepped its constitutional boundaries. I tag the administrative state as the Deep State in Precipice. Not ‘deep’ as in secret; I wish. No, ‘deep’ as in rooted and entrenched everywhere and with everything. There is a historical lineage of how it came to be, from Wilson to FDR to LBJ to Obama to what we have today. The individual can do nothing today without government approval. And California is in many ways ground zero of the Deep State movement. Everything you do today must be permitted and approved by a faceless and unelected bureaucrat. 25% of all jobs in this nation added since Covid are in government. And that diminishes our efficacy as an economy and society greatly.

Hard truth #2: The US government is guaranteed to default on its debts and commitments. Closing in on $35 trillion in debt, or 120+% of GDP. Haven’t seen that since WWII. $2 trillion annual deficits that add to the debt pile. Hundreds of trillions in entitlement promises that don’t get added to the official debt. Trustees say Social Security has $25+ trillion shortfall and Medicare has $52+ trillion shortfall, or $78 trillion combined. About $1 trillion of new debt is being added every 100 days. The fiscal plane is flying right into the mountain and there is not enough time or space to gain sufficient altitude. Default or devalue, pick your poison, and both are indeed poison. Same for Cali, where Governor Newsom was asked: “Can we explain to Californians how we moved from a $100 billion surplus to such a significant deficit in just a matter of a few years?” His answer: delay in tax collection due to “rain bombs” and “atmospheric rivers” proving “climate change has impacts”. Right. Don’t look there, look over here.

Hard truth #3: Our education system is broken, perhaps beyond repair. Student proficiency rates in English, math, and science declined sharply across all grade levels and across the nation. Including LAUSD. Student proficiency levels have not come close to recovering to where they were before pandemic. Many districts lower the passing score on high school exit exams so that the statistics will show that more seniors graduated. Form over substance. Ideology over reality. The new mottos of our nation’s public education system.

The demographic that pays the heaviest price are the poorest. As of 2019, 2/3 of African American 12th graders did not possess even partial mastery of basic 12th grade math. That’s defined as being able to do arithmetic and to read a graph. And the number who are advanced in math was so small it didn’t show up statistically in the national data. Pretty much the same story in reading competency. Half of African American 12th grade students did not possess even partial mastery of basic reading and only 4% were advanced.

These statistics infuriate. We are assigning a generation to unrealized potential. We are dooming them to a life unfulfilled. And for what? And why? We know the answers: to instead have the system serve the desires of special interests who could not care less about the quality of life and future prospects of millions of Americans. That’s why funding levels skyrocketed over decades as scores have declined. What happened here with education during pandemic and who called the shots? Who benefits and who pays the price says a lot. Do we care about our kids? Sometimes I wonder.

Not much better with higher ed. Academia went from the marketplace of ideas to an Iron Curtain of ideology. From where a student was challenged and expanded horizons to one where the student is coddled and comes out indoctrinated with narrower horizons. The most common grade gifted at Harvard these days is an A. The California state university system was once the envy of the world. Today it is a massive burden, fiscally and culturally, for state taxpayers and citizens.

Hard truth #4: Inflation is here to stay. On the business news networks today everyone was excited about the inflation rate being a tick lower than expected and how inflation is now tamed, and the Fed can start cutting rates again. Hogwash. Unabated growth in the regulatory state makes everything more expensive. Languishing worker productivity creates skills scarcity and means more cost per unit of output. Climate alarmism is making the kilowatt-hour and HP expensive and scarce, which everything relies upon. Hyper government spending creates private sector scarcity. Taxes are rising everywhere and for everything, and the tab will be passed on, through the stream of commerce. The Fed’s free money policies pump asset bubbles and motivate excessive outspending. Crime adds to costs. Geopolitics stress already brittle supply chains. This isn’t our parent’s inflation from the 1970s. This is driven by policy and stoked by ideology. Until those reverse, inflation is here for the duration, as the cost of living in LA attests.

Yes, John Adams was right with his famous line: “Facts are stubborn things.” They make for hard truths, indeed. Sadly, the rest of America is gravitating toward where Cali is. Because the Left never sleeps, it’s always growing by consuming the value of others. Day by day. Profession by profession. State by state. In the words of ZZ Top, it’s going ‘nationwide’.

FOLLOW ALONG AND SPEAK UP

To wrap, thank you for being kind. Consider giving Precipice a read. Or follow me if you use LinkedIn or Twitter or YouTube. The Far Middle, as in not far right or far left but far middle, podcast is always looking for new constant listeners. Join those growing ranks – we issue episodes weekly, and they run under half an hour. I think you will enjoy them. Prior episodes are archived and available as well.

And my website nickdeiuliis.com is the depository for all the advocacy content, from book to podcast to news. Check in regularly.

Last, please speak up in defense of free enterprise, capitalism, individual rights, fiscal responsibility, value creators, and the middle class. For LA, for California, and for America.

God bless and thanks!

For daily insights and commentary from Nick Deiuliis, follow Nick on Twitter at @NickDeiuliis and on LinkedIn.

 

 

Harvesting History: Farmer Activism is Democracy’s Early Warning System

By Nick Deiuliis

Elites have a long history of looking down on and patronizing the working classes. It’s a sad social truth that extends back to America’s founding. Europe’s history of confrontation between the two classes stretches back centuries.

Today’s elites labeling the working class as Deplorables, Flyover Country, and Bible-and-Gun-Clingers is nothing new. It seems the more things change in America and Europe the more they stay the same.

You see the self-perpetuating dynamic with perhaps the original working-class demographic: farmers.

One of America’s first confrontations between the working class and elites was western Pennsylvania farmers initiating the Whiskey Rebellion during George Washington’s presidency. Indeed, farmers have a proud history of being first within the working class to confront excessive government control and elites looking to disenfranchise citizens.

And true to form, farmers across Europe are once again raising the alarm for the rest of society when it comes to loss of individual rights and constriction of liberty. Because the Left, the radical environmental theocracy, and the bureaucrat just can’t stop messing with society’s doers.

With so much at stake, a refresh of farmers’ movements in the United States and a discussion of the current farmers’ uprising in Europe is warranted.

American Farmers: A History of Political Activism

The latter half of the 1800s saw American farmers achieve a new, higher level of political activism that had national implications lasting to this day.1 It all started with disruptive technology.

The 19th century brought unprecedented economic advancement and groundbreaking technology, combining to drastically affect industry and agriculture. Steamships and railroads were game changers.

Along with new, advanced machinery and growing foreign trade, they disrupted everything across the American economy, from the factory floor to the farm field.

But net-net, manufacturing and urban areas benefited much more from the innovation and economic revolution than agriculture and rural areas. The individual farmer and small town were especially hard hit. Cities got bigger, industry became more profitable, but individual farmers found themselves struggling more.

Despite the innovations, farming still lacked scale. And competition was global when it came to demand and pricing for crops. Farmers were affected by global developments out of their control for revenue but had costs set by an inefficient local or regional market. The worst of both worlds created a financial pinch of low, at-risk revenue and high cost.

Adding to the farmer’s difficulty was a reliance on credit and a run-up in debt. As well as having to carry the risks of crop storage and transportation, lease rents for land, and speculators preying on micro-markets.

Indeed, the American farmer was facing seemingly impenetrable headwinds in the latter half of the 1800s.

Farmers decided it was time to unite and become activists to support their cause. Initially they looked to the labor movement in larger cities as the model to follow. The industrial labor unions were posting some impressive successes, so why not copy the playbook?

But farming is not the same as, say, coal mining or steelmaking. Thus, farmers quickly realized they would need their own brand of activism.

Just after the Civil War, the Patrons of Husbandry, also known as the Grange, appeared in the rural South and West.

It was the first national political movement for farmers—focused on setting rate caps on rail rates, which were a key point of contention and major financial risk for farmers in the South and West. The organization is alive and well today, with a Washington, D.C. headquarters and roughly 1,700 local chapters across America’s farming communities.

“I feed you all!” lithograph by American Oleograph Co., Milwaukee, 1875.
(Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

After the Grange came the Greenback Party, focusing on addressing the problems of currency and inflation that troubled farmers. The party advocated for a break from the gold standard, fiat money, and a cheaper dollar, reflecting aspects of today’s modern monetary theory, or MMT. It was hoped that such an approach would grow farm revenue while making debt more manageable.2

Although the Greenback Party ran presidential candidates over three national elections (1876, 1880, and 1884), it wasn’t very successful politically. But it was quite successful in calling attention to the shortcomings of the US monetary system.

Around the same time of the Greenback Party, the Farmers Alliances in the Northwest and South were created. The idea was to unite farmers, becoming a force in established party politics and taking on the Gilded Age. The Southern Alliance focused on commandeering the dominant Democratic Party by electing candidates to run for state offices and for Congress. While in the Northwest, the Farmers Alliance started to behave as a separate third party that was populist.

The fourth and most impactful farmers movement was the Populists, centered in the West and also having support in the South. It was known as the People’s Party, the Populists, or the Populist Party. Lack of rainfall got things moving as drought devastated farmers in the Plains in the late 1880s and farms began to fail.

Farmers felt that business interests of railroads and bankers were contributing to, and feeding off, their plight and wanted to do something about it. That started a passionate movement, with followers preaching populism. The People’s Party candidate for president, James Weaver, won 22 Electoral College votes in the 1892 election, winning four Western states outright and winning electoral votes in two others. The party eventually merged into the Democratic Party in the next presidential election of 1896.

Although the People’s Party ultimately died, many of its ideas lived on. Subsequent policies in the coming years affecting conservation, trusts, railroads, and banking trace roots back to the populism of the farmers in the late 1800s. Including the creation of the Federal Reserve and many of President Teddy Roosevelt’s positions and accomplishments.

Europe’s Farmers Rise Up in 2024

The American farmer acting up in the late 1800s shares a lineage to European farmers acting up in 2024. Despite over a century and an ocean between the two, the movements have much in common.

Indeed, history is once again rhyming. Because today’s European farmers find themselves under siege by the arrogant elites.

Farmers are protesting across Europe. Spain, UK, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Netherlands, France, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, and Poland; from Ireland to Romania. It’s become a truly pan-European movement.

Videos populate the internet of tractors and convoys of farming equipment blocking roads. Clips abound of farmers dumping wine and feed in front of government buildings.

And the protestors aren’t just the farmers in these nations, but also organizations that are affiliated with farmers and agriculture. These institutions have joined what was originally a grassroots protest and morphed it into something bigger and better organized. The movements are starting to win elections, from the local to the national, as seen in the Netherlands.

Typical of governments run by elites, the continent’s bureaucracy is making things worse and not listening.

For example, Spain issued thousands of sanctions or violations against citizens under its Orwellian Citizen Security Law (commonly referred to as the Gag Law). Yet Barcelona was still brought to a standstill by the protests. And Spanish farmers dumped wine in front of a municipal water authority to protest water restrictions.

Italy saw 1,600 tractors poised to enter Rome. A Milan protest saw a cow join in the march. Italian farmers were angered by the expiration of an income tax exemption. Italy’s Prime Minister ultimately relented and agreed to not let the exemption expire.

Greece is experiencing protests everywhere, with a major highway to Athens blocked. The Netherlands got things rolling on the continent with the Farmers Citizens Movement.

Germany is an especially interesting case. The government desired to camouflage the cost of climate policies by using pandemic emergency funds to fund its forced energy transition. Nice idea, but the courts deemed it unlawful, reasoning quite correctly that climate change is not Covid. So, the government decided that the climate policies would continue and that the cost would be offset by removing diesel fuel subsidies to German farmers.

Following the increased costs to farmers from all the other climate polices within the German net zero nightmare, the removal of the subsidy was the last straw. It stripped away the pretend veneer of the myth that net zero plans don’t hurt anyone. German farmers reacted; roads were blocked, from Munich to Berlin, and the world viewed images of farm tractors blocking the approach to the iconic Brandenberg Gate in Berlin.

Farmers protest at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Jan. 15, 2024.
AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi

European politicians are finally paying attention and assuring that they feel for the farmers being victimized by the EU bureaucracy and the elites who run it.

Enter the Spin of the Elites

With the farmer protests undisputedly in plain view for all to see, those looking to divert attention from the root cause jump into spin mode.

Mainstream media and politicians caught off guard by the agrarian working-class protests now blame five root causes for catalyzing these protests: climate policies, inflation, food imports, the urban-rural divide, and economic inequality.

Which is sort of true, but not entirely. Because only the first item, climate change policies, is the true root cause. The remaining four are symptoms of those climate policies. Much like the farmer protestors themselves.

Certainly, the European Green Deal is wreaking havoc on European farmers. One of the primary objectives of climate policies is to make it uneconomic to farm, to provide food, and to eat. At least without government support and approval.

A goal of climate policies is empowering the bureaucrat and the state to dictate what one eats and how much. Under the false flag of saving the planet and the pleasant-sounding optical cloak of ‘sustainable farming.’

Farmers understand climate policies will soon eradicate them, just as such policies initially targeted (and are on their way to eradicating) the fossil fuel industry, power grid, and gasoline-powered cars across Europe. But the farmers aren’t taking this lying down; they refuse to make the same mistakes the complacent domestic energy industry, autoworkers unions, and consumer advocates made when allowing the radical environmental movement to roll over their interests.

What about the other cause of the protests identified by the elites: inflation, food imports, the urban-rural divide, and economic inequality?

Of course, the cost of living and inflation are up. Natural gas costs are up and so is fertilizer cost, which requires natural gas as a feedstock. Farming requires carbon-based energy and products like just about everything else in a modern economy. Thus, if you create energy scarcity while inflating energy costs through climate policies, you do the same for the inputs of farming. Farming soon becomes uneconomic.

The European mainstream media point to inflation and pin it on Russia invading Ukraine, which increased energy costs. Or the media blames drought, caused by (you guessed it) climate change, as raising costs.

Climate policies enabled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and catalyzed general inflation. And yes, somewhere in Europe, right now, there will be drought. And somewhere in Europe, right now, there will be floods. It is a large continent, after all. But change in weather isn’t causing the existential plight of farmers or inflation. Despite media and academic experts wanting it to.

Farmers are hurt by food imports, but that is yet another symptom of climate change policies that dictate who makes and uses what on a global scale. Nations and the private sector within national economies ultimately lose autonomy under all variations of climate policies, from domestic energy industries to the domestic providers of food.

Climate policies are designed to make European-grown food too expensive. Which then has the desired effect of creating food scarcity. The food supply shifts from mostly European to mostly foreign providers, with Europeans now having to look to places like North Africa and Ukraine. Not exactly geopolitically stable places to get your dinner from.

Then there’s the popular elite excuse of the rural-urban divide stoking these protests. Which is ironic.

It’s not that urban elites don’t care about rural citizens. The government bureaucrat and the experts care greatly; the problem is they care about placing the rural, or what we call Flyover Country here in America, in economic chains and assigning them to a life of reliance on the state. Is it any wonder that rural Europeans tend to be more Euroskeptic? They are more astute than the urban elites give them credit for.

And when it comes to economic inequality, that fifth and final excuse proffered by the media as a cause of the farmer protests across Europe, one is hard pressed to think of anything that is a more regressive tax and regressive value appropriator than net zero plans and climate change policies.

Net zero plans radically catalyze income inequality. Like these other red-herring issues, the media wants to label economic inequality as a root cause of the farmer protests. Yet economic inequality is a symptom of the singular, true root cause: climate policies and their net zero scams.

Where Do Farmer Protests Go From Here?

One should be quite optimistic regarding the implications of European farmers standing up for themselves. Wider society stands to benefit three ways.

First, the farmer protests secured shorter-term successes when political leaders in nations such as France and Italy backed off planned moves that would’ve hit farmers disproportionately and that would have increased the cost of food. That’s created an incentive for farmers in other European nations to join the movement. Which is why the protests quickly spread across Europe, why they’ve extended into March and will likely continue. What’s good for the farmer is good for the consumer and the overall economy.

Second, the reaction of the farmers to climate change policies created a deterrent for European politicians and bureaucrats—forcing them to think twice before unleashing additional and similar draconian moves on other sectors of the European economy and society.

As they’ve done for centuries, the farmer has provided a great service to a host of others. This time their resistance and advocacy for common sense has stymied the consequences of climate policies for countless businesses and families.

Third, the farmer protest movement is winning elections, from the local to national level, as seen in the Netherlands. Candidates opposed to economy-killing climate policies trounced leftist parties obsessed about climate change, Code Red, and irreversible state control of the individual.

Despite these realities, a complicit media is still trying to cover for the bureaucrat in Europe. The overwhelming political upheaval and protest by farmers is precipitating a disingenuous discussion about who pays for climate change policies and net zero plans.

Which is nonsensical to debate, because everyone pays for climate change policies and net zero plans in a modern economy. It is not a question about who pays. Instead, it comes down to how transparent will the costs that are being borne by all be brought to light, and how soon.

Do people wake up before reaching the point of no return? Or do the policies become so embedded within an economy and society that it doesn’t matter what happens once society awakens?

European farmers have performed a noble duty for all Europeans. Following a rich history of American farmer movements. Let’s hope the current protests serve as both a moral and economic alarm clock to wake up society to the threat of climate change policies. Before it’s too late.

1. In the 1930s, historian John D. Hicks was a leading voice on populism and farmer movements.
2. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.
3. Climate change is nothing new; been happening for millions of years.

The Illusion of “The End of History?”: Unraveling Fukuyama’s Miscalculations

By Nick Deiuliis

Today the world is trembling with international strife. Russia continuing its brutal grind in Ukraine, Iran funding terror and disrupting Mideast shipping, Israel facing down dual terror threats of Hamas and Hezbollah in Gaza and the Golan, Venezuela massing along its border with Guyana to invade for oil, North Korea opening another nuclear reactor and firing ballistic missiles, and China signaling to everyone that an invasion of Taiwan is imminent.

The geopolitical gameboard is blinking red, with a new Axis of China-Russia-Iran plotting and building hegemony to counter and ultimately destroy the West.

Meanwhile, Western leaders dither and blabber with hollow phraseology that lacks tangible action. Worse yet, those Western elites insist on focusing more on the abstract fear of future climate instead of the tangible danger of present actors. The West fights with itself, where its once-proud institutions and values are systemically overturned and uprooted by our supposed leaders.

A 1989 Root Cause to What Ails the West in 2024

How did our elites and experts arrive at such a state of ineptitude? How did they not see this coming? And why do they continue to behave as paralyzed ninnies as troubling events unfold, one after another?

Thank a person few outside of elite foreign policy and political science circles have heard of: Francis Fukuyama. He is a noted geopolitical analyst, who has done it all in his field, from serving as an advisor to Muammar Gaddafi to being a thought leader for the US neoconservative movement.

In 1989, Fukuyama published his now famous essay, whose title was in the form of a question: “The End of History?” Fukuyama posited that the geopolitical fight between freedom and totalitarianism was over, that right prevailed over wrong, and that classic liberalism reigned supreme and unchallenged.

“The End of History?” influenced many a policy and leader through the years; it was fundamental to the thinking of everyone from Bush the Second to Obama to Kerry to whoever is running foreign policy in today’s White House.1 It was widely accepted as sage and the authority on how one should view geopolitics.

And that was quite unfortunate. Because the core premise of “The End of History?” has proven to be hogwash.

Contrasting the Expert Prediction and the Current Reality

Consider key excerpts from the influential 1989 paper and then contrast them with reality in early 2024. Doing so exposes the danger of Western elite arrogance, smugness, and overconfidence and their bad consequences.

The paper’s opening paragraph starts with a key sentence: “The past year has seen a flood of articles commemorating the end of the Cold War, and the fact that ‘peace’ seems to be breaking out in many regions of the world.”

What is breaking out across the world today? Iran developing nukes, Hamas manufacturing terror, North Korea firing missiles into international waters, Russia annihilating Ukraine, state-sponsored terrorists disrupting global shipping lanes, and China prowling Taiwan. Is that peace breaking out? Or more like the late 1930s when the Axis Powers were aligning and gearing up?

Fukuyama wrote of “ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war. But the century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: not to an ‘end of ideology’ or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.”

Do you feel that classic liberalism is alive, well, and winning—in Putin’s Russia or the Ayatollah’s Iran? Is the free market running on all cylinders in Xi’s China? To posit such today is laughable.

Fukuyama saw much of history and conflict stemming from a war between ideologies. Which is true. Then and now. But here’s what Fukuyama misjudged: he argued that the rival ideologies to republican democracy, the West, and capitalism were dead. Vanquished. Beaten.

Fascism and communism were supposedly wrecked and ruined. The first, fascism, was literally ruined by World War II bombs, both conventional and nuclear. And the latter, communism, was assumed to be destroyed by, for lack of a better term, Westernization and liberalization of places like China and Russia.

Fukuyama was dead wrong about communism and socialism being slain.

Once you assume the alternatives are gone, then it’s not a big leap to declare what Fukuyama proposed: that it’s the end of history, as we knew it. In his words: “That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

That assessment was tragically mistaken. The Left might have been on the ropes in the late 1980s and 1990s, but it was far from the point of surrender. And now the Left and its ideologies have Western civilization on the brink and on the ropes.

If you seek perfect examples of how bold statements that might feel good to say then, or enjoy popularity then, can age incredibly poorly, consider these snippets from “The End of History?”:

“…the appeal of communism in the developed Western world, it is safe to say, is lower today than any time since the end of the First World War.”

It was not, and is not, safe to say that.

And: “…those who believe that the future must inevitably be socialist tend to be very old, or very marginal to the real political discourse of their societies.”

Fukuyama should visit an Ivy League campus these days and see what ideological vibe he picks up from students.

There is an interesting pair of sentences on China sitting in proximity in the essay: “…the past fifteen years have seen an almost total discrediting of Marxism-Leninism as an economic system.” And “But anyone familiar with the outlook and behavior of the new technocratic elite now governing China knows that Marxism and ideological principle have become virtually irrelevant as guides to policy, and that bourgeois consumerism has a real meaning in that country for the first time since the revolution.”

Fukuyama should’ve checked with Chairman Xi first. Marxism and the Left are the things that matter most in China today. By cold, calculating design of the elite there.

Epic Miscalculations of China and Russia

Fukuyama was all-in when it came to the once-popular Western elite view that China would simply Westernize itself once it saw how great of a system we had. That China would become a ‘responsible stakeholder’ among enlightened nations.

He wrote, “…the pull of the liberal idea continues to be very strong as economic power devolves and the economy becomes more open to the outside world. There are currently over 20,000 Chinese students studying in the U.S. and other Western countries, almost all of them the children of the Chinese elite. It is hard to believe that when they return home to run the country they will be content for China to be the only country in Asia unaffected by the larger democratizing trend.”

Too bad it was hard for Fukuyama to believe that. Or for Wall Street and DC. Or for Republican and Democratic presidents. They all believed it. And every one of them got it decisively wrong. It wasn’t until Trump, that threat-to-democracy despot, that the West started to wake up. Yes, the crude-angry-narcissist-megalomaniac of social media got right what all the experts got wrong, at least when it came to China.

It gets worse for the aging of China musings from “The End of History?”

Consider: “The central issue is the fact that the People’s Republic of China can no longer act as a beacon for illiberal forces around the world, whether they be guerrillas in some Asian jungle or middle class students in Paris. Maoism, rather than being the pattern for Asia’s future, became an anachronism, and it was the mainland Chinese who in fact were decisively influenced by the prosperity and dynamism of their overseas co-ethnics – the ironic ultimate victory of Taiwan.”

It is painful to read that in 2024, to where one feels embarrassed for Fukuyama. The CCP, the Left, and communism are beacons today for nations with the Belt and Road Initiative; they run the curriculum across Western higher education and elite academia; and they fund chaos when it benefits them, from Ukraine to Israel.

And Taiwan victory? It doesn’t even officially exist in corporate brochures and on foreign office maps. And it may not actually exist by year end, or whenever China decides to move on it.

On Russia, Fukuyama was just as bad with his predictions. He wrote that Russia was reforming and that it was moving toward a society where “…people should be truly responsible for their own affairs, that higher political bodies should be answerable to lower ones,…that the rule of law should prevail over arbitrary police actions…that there should be legal protection for property rights, the need for open discussion of public issues and the right of public dissent…and of a political culture that is more tolerant…”

Did Putin smile to himself or outright laugh when he read that? And be certain that Putin has read Fukuyama. As has Xi. The Left studies its enemies and is always probing for weakness.

Fukuyama took to task those who said the fall of the communist state USSR would lead to a more nationalistic Russia led by a strongman. He wrote: “The automatic assumption that Russia shorn of its expansionist communist ideology should pick up where the czars left off just prior to the Bolshevik Revolution is therefore a curious one.”

Not so curious now, just ask Ukraine and eastern Europe.

He had the same view with China not going aggressive. He proclaimed, “Chinese competitiveness and expansionism on the world scene have virtually disappeared: Beijing no longer sponsors Maoist insurgencies or tries to cultivate influence in distant African countries as it did in the 1960s.”

Proof positive that Deng Xiaoping’s mantra of ‘hide your strength and bide your time’ was effective in lulling Western elites like Fukuyama into a foreign policy coma.

The opening paragraph of the essay’s conclusion does a great job of summarizing the failure that is “The End of History?” and its apostles with China and Russia policy:

“The passing of Marxism-Leninism first from China and then from the Soviet Union will mean its death as a living ideology of world historical significance. For while there may be some isolated true believers left in places like Managua, Pyongyang, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, the fact that there is not a single large state in which it is a going concern undermines completely its pretensions to being in the vanguard of human history. And the death of this ideology means the growing ‘Common Marketization’ of international relations, and the diminution of the likelihood of large-scale conflict between states.”

Today’s darkening world serves as a decisive rebuke of Fukuyama.

What Filled the Supposed Vacuum in the West?

If the United States was truly a unipolar power and it was indeed the ‘end of history’, then something had to replace the old way in the West.

How we should behave in the end of history era was a big question. A vacuum needed to be filled. Ironically, the very ideology Fukuyama said was eradicated: communism, socialism, the Left, was what filled that vacuum of values in the West.

The Left superimposed its value system on the West once experts and elites like Fukuyama assured and convinced everyone that communism and socialism were dead. That China and Russia would surely start behaving like us.

What did the Left fill our culture and values with? Well, it is rigidly secular. To the point where it becomes not just ideology, but a new religion. Strangely, secular purity morphs into a religion. With true, ardent believers.

Some call it postmodernism. Its foundational pillars are evident with the big ideas and movements of today. Three stand out.

First, it manifests in the expert class demanding that the global/universal issue takes primacy over national/local issues. There is an ethical duty and responsibility to put yourself, your community, and your country behind and secondary to what is best for the public good or the planet or humankind. The select few decide what best serves the global/universal, of course.

This leads to things like unbalanced globalization and open borders. Consider the open border issue these days. Texas, of course. But also, Italy. And even, of all places, Finland, on its border with Russia. The Left use open borders as an effective divisive tool.

A second notable manifestation of the value system of the Left is a religious fervor on Code Red and climate change. Where the planet is in peril and we all must take a back seat with our interests and place in life to tackle climate change. Climate alarmism looms so large these days, touching everything, that it deserves to be placed as its own foundational pillar of the Left’s new ‘end of history’ toolkit.

The third manifestation is a cleansing. Not an ethnic cleansing, but a values cleansing. Orwellian in many ways. Wiping away, erasing, vilifying, and, yes, canceling the prior values of the West, of capitalism, of the individual and their rights, and of America. Ignoring science to the benefit of ideology. Replacing factual history with subjective fiction. There are many current examples; you know them well.

Hope?

The epic transformation that Fukuyama predicted was a complete misread. A historic blunder that influenced more historic blunders by those in power who believed it and set policy from it.

The good news is certain thought leaders are calling for a tipping point, where the skewed values that the Left injected into the vacuum created by the “End of History?” crowd are exposed and the West turns against them.2

Carry healthy skepticism about such predictions. Today the Left hasn’t just injected the new values into this ‘end of history’ time, the Left is also running all the wheels of power and influence in the West necessary to keep such ideology in place, fed, and protected.

Academia indoctrinates on behalf of the Left. Indoctrinated minions leave the campus quad and enter the halls of government and corporate America where they end up leading both and setting policy for the former. And many of those minions end up in what has become the ministry of propaganda for the Left: mainstream media.

Yes, have doubts about the tide turning now for the better. It may get worse for America before improving. And let’s hope that prediction ends up being as wrong as Fukuyama’s in 1989.

[1] One example of many: President Obama in 2013 while on a trip to Russia proclaiming an end to the Great Game and how nations now realize no one “benefits from that kind of great-power conflict.” Russia invaded Ukraine six months later.
[2] Gerard Baker of the WSJ is an exceptional thought-leader in this arena.

20 Reasons Why the Worst is Yet to Come with Inflation

The start of 2024 has brought a symphony of assurance from economic experts, the business media, Wall Street, Biden administration officials, and Fed leadership that inflation has been tamed and has run its recent short-lived course.

A range of economic metrics, excuses (what Milton Friedman once facetiously referenced as “special events”), and data are offered to bolster the premise and add an air of clinical objectivity.

Wishing something to be true does not make it so. Unfortunately, inflation has not been brought to heel and the opposite is true.

It’s not just one thing stoking inflation. Rather, there are three broad categories of individual contributing factors: government spending/regulation, monetary policy, and geopolitics. And specifically, there are twenty key contributors keeping inflation at elevated levels, and perhaps worsening it.

1. Unabated growth in the regulatory state makes everything more expensive. The administrative state is exponentially expanding at break-neck pace across all facets of the economy and across all industries. If you make, provide, sell, buy, use, or report something, the costs of compliance are growing at historic rates. Such costs inevitably will be passed down the supply chain, ultimately to consumers, in the price of goods and services.

2. Languishing worker productivity means more cost per unit of output. More constraints are being imposed upon worker efficiency and productivity. Remote work comes with an inevitable reduction of individual and team efficacies. New labor agreements come with hidden but onerous work rules, beyond wage rate hikes, that significantly impede productivity. Output per worker is declining, which will increase costs.

3. Generationally low worker participation rate creates skill scarcity. Worker participation rate has been declining for 25+ years. Pandemic made it worse, and it is projected to decline further in the coming years, to barely above 60%. The reasons are many, but lower participation manifests in lower economic productivity and higher costs.

4. Climate alarmism is making the kilowatt-hour expensive and scarce. Energy is a feedstock for everything used or provided in a modern economy. If electricity costs increase rapidly and electricity availability decreases severely, inflation is stoked. Climate change policies are designed to do both (along with forcing a heavier reliance on electrification).

5. Climate alarmism is making horsepower expensive and scarce. All commerce requires some level of transportation in its supply chain. The transportation sector is now state-controlled, where modes and rates are set by bureaucratic decree. Costs rise, productivity plummets (for a real-time example, look to California’s disastrous mandate of electric trucks) and choice declines; all feeding inflation.

6. Commodities will experience unprecedented demand levels that are impossible to supply and that will explode costs. Climate policies rear their inflationary heads once again, this time by mandating levels of wind, solar, batteries, and electric vehicles that require enormous quantities of lithium, copper, rare earths, nickel, aluminum, and cobalt. Quantities that cannot be commercially produced in any reasonable time frame, and that will manufacture tremendous inflationary pressures for each.

7. Hyper government spending creates private sector scarcity. The US federal government spends over $6 trillion a year, $2 trillion more than it takes in as revenue. That epic level of spending consumes vast resources in the economy, making everything more scarce and more expensive for the private sector to do its thing. Voracious government activity elevates inflation in the real economy, soup to nuts.

8. Entitlements grow wider and deeper, driving potentially productive components out of the economy and keeping them sidelined. Social programs have greatly expanded: Social Security, healthcare for all (Medicare and Medicaid), student debt forgiveness (and higher ed subsidization), universal income, unemployment benefits, ‘affordable’ housing, sanctuary cities and open borders, and so on. The scale and breadth swamp the economy with suboptimal government spending. Worse, the programs often discourage potentially productive contributors of the economy from participating, keeping them out (or pushing them out). None of this bodes well for controlling inflation.

9. Taxes are rising everywhere and for everything, and the tab will be passed on, through the stream of commerce. Government needs a stupendous level of new revenue to fund its ever-growing self. Existing taxes will rise, new taxes will be created, and some new taxes will parade around as something other than taxes. Across local municipalities, states, nations, and global bodies (hello UN, IMF, World Bank, etc.). For driving in cities (congestion pricing), sitting at events (stadium taxes), eating (restaurant taxes and surcharges), shopping online (digital taxes), turning the lights on (carbon taxes), owning a pet (dog license fees) and flushing the toilet (municipal sewer ‘fees’).

10. Crime and heightened security add costs to retail. Shoplifting and theft have become societal norms, from the ransacking of trains carrying packages to flash mobs stripping retailor shelves bare. Businesses are paralyzed with inaction, law enforcement is instructed to not pursue the criminals, and everyone accepts such behavior. Yet the consumer pays for the consequences, from the lost merchandise to the heightened security measures, with higher prices.

11. But before those goods can be swiped off the store shelves, state-sponsored terror is making global shipping of those goods riskier and costlier. Today’s global economy means even the simplest of products carry massive, complex cumulative supply chains behind them (the route from Shanghai to Rotterdam is 12,000 nautical miles and requires a month of sailing). Inevitably, links of that supply chain will rely on water transport, and water-borne commerce hasn’t been this risky since the Republic of Pirates. When a ship is attacked, sunk, diverted to a longer (but safer) route, or delayed, it will increase cost and feed inflation. Shipping also becomes much more expensive to insure and protect, which also boosts inflation.

12. War is breaking global supply chains and commerce flow. War has never been conducive to global supply chain efficiency, but today’s geopolitical heat map is especially devilish. Consider Iran as an example: western climate policies shutter domestic energy and create reliance on Iranian energy, which creates market volatility and higher prices for oil, which benefits Iranian revenues, which allows Iran to fund terrorism, which provides the backing for terrorists to attack nations and global shipping, which disrupts supply chains, which drives up prices and scarcity more. Viola, spiraling inflation. And such a dynamic doesn’t apply exclusively to the Mideast and oil. Same cycle for war in Ukraine with grain and a potential war in Taiwan with semiconductors.

13. Deglobalization of supply chains injects inefficiency and higher costs into the system. Today’s global supply chains came to be because of efficiencies and economic advantages (whether built fairly or unfairly) of each link. The evolution and optimization that took decades to evolve are now being broken, sometimes for good reasons and sometime for bad reasons. Nevertheless, breaking down globalization and replacing it with regional or national supply chains is going to necessarily result in higher cost, less choice, and greater inflation.

14. And the links in those supply chains are becoming dangerously thin and unreliable. Decades of just-in-time manufacturing optimization have been applied to every link in very long global supply chains, resulting in over $90 billion in annual cash flow savings for US firms alone. That has gone from strength to weakness with today’s geopolitical volatility and deglobalization shift. The once desirable is now brittle. When one link can’t deliver its piece of the puzzle just-in-time to the next link, the end-results are delayed delivery, higher cost, and inferior effectiveness: hallmarks of inflationary pressure.

15. Economic policy favors consolidating supply and markets into a small group of large entities, creating oligopoly power. The current policy, economic, and geopolitical environment benefits scale in firms and industries. Scale and concentration allow the few to dictate the supply and price of products to the market down the supply chain, ultimately impacting the price of everything from breakfast cereal to smart phones. Once higher prices are established, the oligopoly will be resistant to both new entrants and price discounting. Inflation appears, and once present, persists.

16. Speaking of market power, OPEC is back from the dead as OPEC+, bringing with it monopoly pricing power for oil. What capitalism and innovation slayed with the shale revolution, western climate policies resurrected with draconian prescriptions. Oil is once again controlled by the few, with most of the few being adverse to the US. Since oil is a necessary feedstock for countless products and services in a modern economy, higher prices for oil mean higher prices for everything, which means inflation.

17. The Federal Reserve, despite touting its independence, is quite susceptible to political pressure and may set rates too low. Fighting inflation at central banks is never a fun or popular endeavor, as monetary policy adjusted to a more disciplined path creates short term headwinds and hardships for stakeholders. Politicians worry most about…their popularity…and the short term. That makes for a head-on collision between political leader ‘wants’ and monetary policy ‘needs’ during inflationary times. Don’t be surprised if the Fed folds and acquiesces to the politically expedient when it comes to choosing between what is clinically needed and what avoids criticism/outcry. That could result in too-low interest rates (or cutting rates prematurely), effectively pouring gasoline on the already raging inflation bonfire. For more on the Fed in 2024, listen to The Far Middle episode 136, starting at approximately the 20-minute mark.

18. And the Left (who runs government these days) loves free money, which is an inflation accelerant. Whether it is under cover of impressive-sounding Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) or just plain socialism, the Left sees free money and negative real interest rates as key tactics to reward the favored special interests at the expense of savers/value creators. The Fed buying Treasuries is another tactic utilized here to attempt to keep rates below market. Free money diverts capital flows into funding inefficient activities that crowd out more efficient endeavors. That’s a recipe for inflation.

19. But even with love of free money policies and an impressionable Fed, the cost of debt is inevitably increasing the cost of capital. The party is over for zero interest rates. The benchmark cost of debt set by central banks and the risk premiums above it are being reset toward more normal levels (although still nowhere near normal levels). Capital is still artificially cheap, but no longer free, and capital is the lifeblood of all economic activity. Thus, the products of all economic activity will reset to a higher cost level.

20. The confluence of the prior nineteen contributors creates an incremental, cumulative step-up of inflation. Although each of the prior factors will individually contribute to sustained and perhaps increasing inflation, all in combination will drive an incremental step-up of inflation. A cumulative effect that occurs when all these contributors manifest together.

If you doubt the list above, consider the past few years. Are you waiting longer for goods and services today? Have the costs of everything gone up or down? Has quality improved or degraded? Do you have more choice today or less?

And do you suppose the situation will improve or worsen from here?

No matter how bleak your prognosis view may be, there is still time to course correct. Fyodor Dostoyevsky wisely advised that, “To live without hope is to cease to live.” Let’s hope by advocating for actions that tame inflation so that we all may live better.