The Home Stretch
As the U.S. enters a consequential election and the world declares war on Israel and the Jews, my output has plummeted. Time to speak up about my silence.
Speak only to Say that which is Worth Hearing
A lot has been happening lately, and I’ve been writing less than usual. Why? In part because of personal events and demands on my time (a couple of hurricanes passing through the neighborhood haven’t helped).
Perhaps the larger part of the reason, however, is that I feel compelled to write only when I think I have something useful to add to the conversation.
My strength, at least IMHO, is as an analyst. I think I’m pretty good at separating signal from noise, tracing problems to their sources, diagnosing the points at which conventional wisdom went awry, projecting trends towards their logical conclusions, proposing solutions, and explaining my reasoning.. I claim no particular talent in predicting which specific events will occur on a precise timeline. (If I did, I’d be picking stocks for a living).
The two big stories of the year—at least in the worlds that I inhabit—have been the U.S. Presidential election and the multifront war against the State of Israel and world Jewry.
On the latter issue, I’ve been working diligently on the long-term implications to the American Jewish community; I’ll release them when they’re ready. The excitement, however, has been on day-to-day military news from Israel. I claim no military background, and I have special information about Israel’s capabilities. So I try not to weigh in on the aspects of the story that most excite most readers.
Election Thoughts
On the former question, my overriding concern remains where it’s been since at least 2016: The electoral processes we use in this country lack all credibility. In theory, America holds elections to solicit public preference, at a preset and fixed point in time, vis-à-vis the succession of authority. In practice, the procedures we deploy are about as attuned to measuring that preference as your kitchen scale is to measuring tire pressure.
What we call “elections,” most clearly but hardly solely at the Presidential level, are more closely akin to scavenger hunts. The Red and Blue teams have several weeks to collect ballots in each of fifty states (plus one territory). There are allegedly rules concerning ballot collection and handling, but enforcement is uneven, verification is scant, all collected ballots are presumed valid, it’s difficult to obtain the information necessary to prove invalidity, and the penalties for being caught cheating minimal relative to the payoff.
In 2020, the Blue Team played the game well and collected over 81 million ballots. The Red Team strategy was to hold itself to the spirit of the exercise, ignore unethical rules, let Blue expose its massive cheating, and rely upon weak and untrustworthy groups like the national media, state legislatures, and judges to call them out.
Much as I would have liked to see Red win in 2020, and much as I speculate that Red would have won an actual election, it’s hard to imagine a more boneheaded strategy. Blue deserved to win not because it had a better candidate (it didn’t), better platform (it didn’t), or a better read on public opinion (it didn’t). Blue deserved to win because it was the only team playing the actual game.
In 2024, at least elements of the Red Team have joined the game. It’s still rigged heavily in favor of Blue—who, in accordance with the game, have placed its own team members in all strategic and adjudicatory positions—but at least Red has a chance.
A victory for my team, however, can’t save a broken system. American elections lack credibility as elections. In the broad sweep of history, a rigged scavenger hunt is hardly the worst mechanism ever devised to determine succession. It’s less bloody than conquest and it incorporates greater elements of public participation than single combat.
We could do worse. We could also do better. So sure, the country needs Trump to win. The world needs Trump to win. But what we really need is a process that isolates the dangerous, cruel, bigoted Woke insanity, promotes a decent, educated, sane population, and then solicits informed public opinion.
Where I have been Speaking: Education & Regulation
Which brings me to two recent pieces that I have published:
The first, courtesy of RealClearEducation, keys in on the part about an educated public. Those who’ve been following this space know that in the summer of 2023, I joined the team working to reform New College of Florida as Admissions Director. In that role, our college president tasked me with becoming the point person on college rankings. I dove into the methodology to see what we could do to improve our standing—or barring that, to understand why we stood where we stood.
What I learned wasn’t pretty. The folks assembling these rankings actually collect interesting, informative, and potentially valuable information. They then make it completely inaccessible, hidden behind a meaningless combined score and a garbage set of rankings.
The second, my first appearance in Blaze Media, outlines a way to drain the swamp. Reining in the Administrative State is hard work. Some very smart, very committed, very authoritarian, very corrupt people have spent a century-plus building a comprehensive and robust web of regulations governing all aspects of modern life. It’s not a house of straw that will crumble when huffed-and-puffed upon. It’s a stable skyscraper that must be brought down through a controlled demolition.
I show how to redeploy a regulatory theory popularized during the Obama years and the enforcement discrimination at the heart of the Biden years to effect precisely that demolition.
If you’ve noted a common theme running through today’s essay, kudos! It’s subtle, but it’s there:
Nearly all of my analyses stem from a focus on methodology. Every system—elections, education, regulation, etc.—is what its underlying processes make it. Mission statements are nice but irrelevant. The thoughts, ideas, and intentions of the people working the system are equally irrelevant. As I explained most fully in The New Civil War understanding a system and projecting its trajectory requires an understanding of its internal incentives.
Closing Thought
With that, a quick closing thought:
As the U.S. heads into a deeply consequential election, I believe that the right candidate will win (bringing me up to 4-7 in presidential elections). I do not, however, believe that the power structure arrayed against him will go quietly into the night.
Authoritarian states feigning democracy frequently hold elections with processes lacking credibility. When the people unite behind an opposition leader, the opposition wins. The regime, however, releases official results showing the contrary. Opposition protests are overwhelmingly peaceful. Regime enforcers and regime-sanctioned thugs, on the other hand, unleash widespread brutality. A crackdown ensues.
Don’t think it couldn’t happen here.
Pray that it won’t happen here.
For more information about Bruce D. Abramson & American Restorationism, visit: www.BruceDAbramson.com
To learn more about America’s Spiritual Crisis and the new religion of Wokeism, see: American Spirit or Great Awokening? The Battle to Restore or Destroy Our Nation (Academica Press, 2024).
To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).
To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).
To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at The Coalition for America.
To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please e-mail me at bdabramson@pm.me.