We know what Democratic boilerplate is going to look like: "The economy is great and don't you dare vote third party or RFK Jr.! And Trump is a fascist!" The patent unreality of the Dems' economic position is revealed in this Substack post by Stephen Semler, and even though Simplicius the Thinker used to think the proxy war in Ukraine could drag on for five or ten years, he no longer thinks this way, believing instead at this time that it will end next summer. Rumors that they're going to replace Biden with Gavin Newsom as the candidate for next year are weird. When, perchance, would they do this? A last minute surprise would not be effective.

At any rate, if you want evidence of how thoroughly hogtied the Democrats are -- this year into next -- look at the polling on the Ukraine war effort. Who's most in favor of Biden's folly? Liberal Democrats. This is the LAST population you'd want endorsing a stupid war.

So in the real world of today we are undergoing a sea-change in politics. The Democrats, though, are not likely to change their messaging to reflect that sea-change, and will therefore be stuck in the past. The Republicans, on the other hand, could really do something, if not for the fact that they have such unimpressive personalities. At any rate, I think the Republicans are likely at some point, probably later, to latch on to the ideological line granted in this post on Gaius Baltar's Substack, tltled WHY IS THE WEST SO WEAK (AND RUSSIA SO STRONG)? . When (note that I did not say "if") the collective West wakes up to the fact of its delusional foreign policies (next year?), a lot of people will be asking the question Gaius Baltar so proudly claims to be answering.

Asking this question is the primary virtue of Gaius Baltar's post. The Democrats in power and the so-called leaders of Europe are too blinded by their own hubris and hemmed-in by their stupid previous positions to ask such a question. They want desperately to pretend that they haven't sacrificed Ukraine to be eaten by Russia and sacrificed a good deal of their own power in the process, which is in fact what they have done. So they aren't likely to ask such a question. The Republicans are more likely to ask why the West is so weak and Russia is so strong for the simple reason that they aren't the party in power. Baltar offers a possible Republican boilerplate answer for such people: it's biased in the way the Republicans are biased, while sounding more intelligent than they currently do.

Baltar begins by saying:

The dysfunction of the West is far deeper than just the situation around the Ukraine project. It’s absolutely everywhere. The West can’t do diplomacy in general, it can’t run its cities or countries except into the ground, its high-tech projects fail almost as a rule, its infrastructure is crumbling, its economies are crumbling, and all public policies seem to have a civilizational suicide as a final goal. The West’s control mechanisms over the rest of the world are also crumbling, including the dollar, sanctions, color revolutions, military interventions and threats. Nothing seems to work and everything the West does seems to make things worse.

This statement is an exaggeration, but not by much. The main evidence of the truth of this thesis is, of course, that those currently in power in the West, now, appear incapable of making peace with Russia and are instead stoking a war with China, and will lose control over the world as a result. Baltar does not, however, question the GOALS the West is so dysfunctional at pursuing. If the West is less effective at controlling the world, maybe that's a good thing. At any rate, if Republican boilerplate is to be amenable to the shadow governments (FBI, CIA, NSA and so on) infiltrating America's ruling mechanisms, it won't question such goals.

Gaius Baltar then goes into an analysis of how only a certain portion of the total population of a complex society is capable of handling managerial duties. In this analysis there are smart people, and there are not-so-smart people, and that's all there is to it. No consideration is made here of how smart and/or not-so-smart people are MADE. But this is future Republican boilerplate, so it must justify elitism while sounding intelligent.

At that point in the narrative, Baltar argues that the West is defective because the wrong people have been promoted into positions of power. Certainly this is evident from any brief analysis of the behaviors of Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, or Jake Sullivan. Baltar, however, wants to say more broadly that the whole of the West appoints the wrong people because it has bad IDEOLOGICAL goals. There is, of course, a kernel of truth to this assumption. The real problem, of course, is that the actual ideology in practice in the West works toward the concentration of greater and greater sums of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. This can count as an ideological goal, but if Baltar's stuff is to be made into Republican boilerplate, good things about billionaires must be said. Toward that end, Baltar says good things about Elon Musk.

Baltar then launches into a critique of the modern university, claiming that the modern university is directed by ideological goals. Within this critique is a general disdain for humanities work, as if the only legitimate purpose of universities was in the training of professionals. As Baltar says:

Fake disciplines have been invented from the ground up for the purpose of training the ideologically pure without the need for competence or intelligence or any connection to reality. These disciplines can be found in lists of “most useless university degrees” all over the internet, but that is a misunderstanding. Those degrees are not useless at all – they elevate the ideologically pure in society by awarding them university “certification.” This certification justifies giving them important positions in society.

As regards "fake disciplines," one is to think of departments of "Black Studies," "American Studies,"" and other inventions of the humanities. Anti-humanities thinking dovetails well with the current Republican focus on anti-wokeness. It's that evil liberal humanities ideology, you see, that corrupts the university. (Never mind that your present-day college student has for the most part ditched the humanities for the STEM disciplines.)

Generally, Baltar's obsessions with competence and meritocracy will nonetheless sell well with Republicans, if indeed they are clever enough to incorporate such obsessions into their campaigns. What I am suggesting, here, is that at some future point Republicans will emerge who will sound like Baltar. Moreover, this message will, if fully incorporated into the Republican boilerplate, give them election victories. This is the winning message.

At any rate, we are told that Russia has avoided such flaws as Baltar sees in the West by focusing upon competence and meritocracy. But the specific problem with the war in Ukraine is not that the West can't compete or that the West is not meritocratic, though it certainly looks that way. The specific problem with the war in Ukraine is that the West's goals are bad ones. "Weakening Russia" through war and sanctions was a goal that would only lead to blowback, as indeed it has. Moreover, even though the West's hatred of Russia appears profound and sincere, the West did not fully commit its resources to the goal of "weakening Russia," since its so-called leaders imagined that Russia was a tiny principality that could be defeated with the wave of a hand. This wasn't the case.