Trump! Trump! Trump! The Boys Are Marching...

The tea leaves are speaking loud and clear...as long as you drink the right tea

I started blogging almost a quarter of a century ago, and if there is one thing I’ve learned, it is that making political predictions is a mug’s game. Of course, so is shooting up crystal meth or heroin, but people still seem to do it.

Including me. The meth is the madness, when it comes to the political prediction game. Here’s mine.

The Democrats have lost the Mandate of Heaven to President Donald Trump, who will be the new Emperor, and the prime instrument in the completion of the nationalist/populist political restructuring now well underway in the United States, a process that also enjoys this new Mandate of Heaven.

The Mandate of Heaven is an Asian variation of the European ‘divine right of kings’. As in medieval Europe, ancient Egypt and other civilisations, emperors claimed their authority to rule and to govern was bestowed of them by the gods.

The Mandate of Heaven differed from the divine right of kings in three respects. Firstly, Chinese religion, unlike Christianity, was not monotheistic. The Chinese did not believe in one all-powerful god but in a number of minor gods, mythical figures, heroes and spiritual ancestors.

On that basis, the mandate to rule was granted by ‘the heavens’, a supernatural community rather than a single godhead.

Secondly, the Mandate of Heaven could be conferred on anyone, on any individual from any strata of society. The emperor did not have to be of royal or noble birth – he only had to be capable and fit to rule.

Thirdly, and most significantly, the Mandate of Heaven held the emperor accountable to certain standards. He was answerable to Heaven and indirectly answerable to the Chinese people.

If the emperor and his government failed to govern responsibly, mistreated the people or abused their power, their authority to rule could be withdrawn. Some of the signs that Heaven had withdrawn its royal mandate included natural disasters such as floods, droughts, famines or pandemics.

Peasant rebellions were also construed as evidence that the emperor had lost the support of Heaven...

The United States has been governed by a functional oligarchy since well before Robert Michels formally explicated his Iron Law of Oligarchy in 1911:

Michels argued that organizational oligarchy resulted, most fundamentally, from the imperatives of modern organization: competent leadership, centralized authority, and the division of tasks within a professional bureaucracy. These organizational imperatives necessarily gave rise to a caste of leaders whose superior knowledge, skills, and status, when combined with their hierarchical control of key organizational resources such as internal communication and training, would allow them to dominate the broader membership and to domesticate dissenting groups.

In other words, once any organization becomes more complex than can be managed by simple face-to-face meetings of all the members, a bureaucracy will be required in order to manage that organization.

I have often noted how Jerry Pournelle’s own Iron Law of Bureaucracies explains equally clearly how bureaucracies themselves will be hijacked by a much smaller sub-group dedicated to the preservation of the powers and perks of the bureaucracy itself, rather than the goals it was established to achieve.

My contention is that the upper reaches of our national ruling Oligarchy comprise the “divinities” that bestow the Mandate of Heaven on the political bureaucracy that rules America on a day-to-day basis.

For a hundred years, that bureaucracy has been the Democratic Party. For a variety of reasons, however, the faction of “heaven” that bestowed upon it the Heavenly Mandate has been defeated by an alternate faction, which now rules in “heaven,” and so is preparing to bestow that mandate elsewhere.

The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has gone all-in on supporting Trump. The second richest man in the world, Larry Ellison, has been quietly supporting Trump for some time now. The third richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, just withheld the endorsement of The Washington Post, the most powerful political journal in America, from Kamala Harris and the Democrat Party. The fourth richest man in the world, Mark Zuckerberg, who kicked in nearly half a billion Zuckerbucks to the effort to defeat President Trump in 2020, now says: ““My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another—or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.”

The trend seems obvious. The four richest men in the world are either not helping Harris and the Democrats, or actively working against them. That is a tell that is hard to ignore.

Why is it happening? The left, when it bothers to notice at all, says that it’s just rich oppressors trying to avoid having their taxes raised under a Harris administration.

My hunch, and that’s all it is, is that this faction thinks the Deep State, the permanent bureaucracy, the poisoned pencil pushers, have gotten too big for their britches, to the point that they may pose a legitimate threat to the oligarchy itself, and therefore they intend to take it down a few, or several, notches.

Which is why the most potent of them all (literally - he’s got the most money, the most kids, and the biggest balls of all of them) is spearheading what can only be described as a full on war against The Swamp.

And why the American version of The Mandate of Heaven has been bestowed on Donald Trump.