This is an excerpt from my upcoming second book, tentatively titled Mein Kampf 2.
I was sired in a decade where nothing mattered.
The Age of Fukuyama.
It was four years after the Wall came down; two months before NAFTA was signed; roughly halfway between Rodney King and OJ. The best way to understand American history is in terms of geopolitics, macroeconomics, and black people. Some years prior we'd flattened Saddam like an ant and repaid President Carvey by electing a smooth-talking hick from Arkansas drenched in sex scandals—a couple affairs and also some rapey shit. They didn't really matter at the time, and probably wouldn't matter today, but would have obliterated his career a decade earlier or two decades later and nobody talks about this. Anyway the fat hillbilly predictably shit the bed during his first years in office, and that paved the way for Republicans to take back Congress for the first time in decades. And obviously I don't remember that happening given that it occurred only a fortnight after baby Walt's first birthday. But I *do* remember learning a few years later that the fella who led these efforts—one Newton Leroy Gingrich—wasn't really like other Republicans, who at the time tended to be aggressively normie-coded fuddy-duddies coming out of business or the military. The mercurial Dr. Gingrich was an entirely different breed of man: a draft-dodging academic and alternate history writer who at the time was on his second wife. His romance with Marianne had begun as a torrid affair initiated while his first lady Jackie was plagued with uterine cancer. Jackie had been his high school geometry teacher, and they'd wed when he was 19 and she 26 so the jury's still out on whether she groomed him. Personally I'd say no that's obviously dumb... but it *does* sanitize his eventual decision to leave her for a woman his own age. A bit harder to sell is his subsequent choice decades later to leave Marianne for a grasping little blonde congressional aide named Callista, ostensibly because Marianne wouldn't agree to an open marriage and poor Newt was born a few decades too early to properly exploit the polyamory meme. But also, c'mon—morality aside, would you *really* expect anything different from a shlub who got powerful decades after marrying a plain jane? To be honest I've always sort of identified with Newt. Like his rival William Jefferson, the man was a deeply Faustian character well-calibrated for the amoral decade in which he peaked. His genius for strategy and propaganda and sheer willingness to throw acid in Clinton's face was precisely what the GOP needed at the time to seize power, but over the long term that tack has clearly proved a bargain with Mephistopheles. But it was also pretty fucking fantastic in the short term—we got a surplus, the economy came roaring back—and yet this was also the decade in which American politics started to become post-morality, post-civility... really just post-truth altogether. And maybe all that would have happened without Newt. But in my estimation you probably did need someone with the mythmaking chops of an Alt History writer to set the fire that Limbaugh and Coulter and Drudge and Murdoch would later douse in gasoline. Polarization works for the GOP and they can get away with shit the Demon Rats can't because this way of looking at the world was theorycrafted by a trained historian—a man who instinctively looks at world events in terms of centuries and knows in his bones that it's all just written by the fucking victors. Or at least the historians. The real tragedy is that like all brilliant / charismatic / probably subclinical narc ENTPs who end up with substantial political power—think Chairman Mao, Kissinger, arguably Obama—Gingrich clearly gets a vastly stronger hedonic return from people telling him he's brilliant than he does from actually achieving his goals, which is why he's kind of a meme these days and is also married to a woman who looks like this:
The hospital was Mesa Lutheran, though I can’t say I recall meeting a single solitary Lutheran during that first decade of my life spent in Mesa.
There *was* this really beautiful Lutheran church within walking distance of our cozy suburban home that my mom sometimes took me to when she wanted to light a candle for some dead person, but I never really processed the church or its flock or my mom as anything more than generically Christian. Maybe it’s just that Lutherans don’t really talk about being Lutheran outside of like Minnesota. It would be weird.
Most of the kids and a lot of the teachers in my elementary school were Mormons. They liked to tell me about that, but they were never weird about it. It’s relatively hard for Mormons to seem weird even when they’re doing shit that’s objectively quite weird—one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to them.
Another reason is they seem to have a powerful inclination to assess someone’s good and bad traits as entirely separate things while actively striving to maintain nuanced opinions about people, which no doubt stems from their own history of prosecution and the whole mission trip culture. This tendency makes exmos incredibly useful as friends because they do a great job playing Jiminy Cricket and acting with moral clarity, which is something I occasionally need in my life to balance out my BPD tribalism. But in the realm of politics I think it’s mostly a hindrance.
It wasn't long before Gingrich fell from grace. He'd outfoxed a Clinton who wasn't quite ready for the big leagues, but in due time was hoisted by his own petard because as an overall politician Slick Willie was easily the most talented man of his era, and as a pure campaigner no one even came close. He'd demonstrated that years before when he eviscerated Papa Bush through Boomer sentimentalism and his impressive ability to convince poorfags he relates to them despite having spent decades coercing their wives into eating his cum in a plausibly deniable way. And that wasn't just raw charisma; even Clinton's charm had its limits. The reason he pulled it off is that the man was genuinely peerless at surrounding himself with the nation's top propagandists and political tacticians. Begala and Stephanopoulos and that Cajun guy who looks like Mr. Peanut figured out a brilliant way to hammer the GOP on the economy, and Clinton had the message discipline to stick to their vision.
It was thanks to that message discipline that Clinton managed a comeback after his disastrous midterms, and then for the next few years was mostly able to outmaneuver Gingrich's boys in Congress, taking credit for their victories and masterfully painting Republicans as vindictive hypocrites when they made the mistake of impeaching the dude for a cheeky Resolute Desk beej from some BPD Jewess. He also completely wrecked Dole in 1996, to the great disappointment of a young
but virtually no one’s surprise at that point. It isn’t accurate to say Clinton killed the Republican Revolution in its cradle, but he absolutely gave it lifelong developmental issues.And the thalidomide of choice was, of course, his infamous strategy of Triangulation—an approach every bit as Faustian as Gingrichian Polarization, which made it a natural fit for a man like Bill Clinton, who’d spent practically his entire life in a buddy comedy with Mephistopheles. But Clinton himself wasn’t an ideas guy so much as a brilliant implementor of ideas; the man who theorycrafted Triangulation was if anything more Faustian and mercurial than the President and Speaker combined, which is why he fell a lot sooner than they did under a significantly more embarrassing sex scandal.
I’m speaking, of course, of Dick Morris.
He's also someone I recognize a lot of myself in: that ability to see the world in sharp relief thanks to a certain amoral ruthlessness, which at times turns into a rather amusing if deeply limiting obsession with frivolous personal vendettas; that preternatural talent for manipulating people in plain sight while being completely open about it, probably stemming from a cognitive architecture that also makes you take what pretty girls say entirely at face value; a penchant for paying strange women to let you suck on their toes.
But unlike Walt Bismarck and Slick Willie and Chairman Gingrich, I’m pretty sure Dick Morris literally just doesn’t have any principles at all. The rest of us will make embarrassing unforced errors chasing pussy and feel bad about compromising the mission (or at least annoyed at ourselves for being self-indulgent), whereas Morris is basically in it for Morris alone. Sure, the dude saved Clinton’s presidency, but these days he’s a Trump shill and last I checked still an obsessive enemy of Hillary.
IIRC he’s actually one of those “the Left has gone insane!” types. You hear that line a lot from guys like Maher who don’t understand this is simply Mephistopheles coming back for his pound of flesh in exchange for giving them Triangulation in the 90s. It was ALWAYS going to end up with some doddering old man who instinctively holds the median Democrat position on every issue doing the splits between batshit insane Warrenite viragoes on one hand and lisping Jew technocrats on the other, with the only alternatives being a dissembling prostitute and Bateman on the Bay.
You see the same thing on the other side. Gingrich himself understood Cheeto Benito was the logical endpoint of Polarization, hence him being rather sanguine about Trump from the very beginning. To him that was a feature and not a bug; think of Gingrich Thought as a less autistic sort of Moldbuggery. The thing is that ackshual subversive intellectuals who know how to rewrite the script of reality / marry their high school geometry teacher are pretty good about maintaining a certain esotericism and keeping their eye on the prize while the Mitts and Jebs of the world poop their pants every time something changes and overindex based on noise.
…which is why I also suspect Morris himself probably did realize that Triangulation would eventually destroy the Democrat Party. He simply didn’t care, because he almost certainly has some weird personality disorder and was always planning to switch sides. That’s why when future historians assess the gradual but inevitable decline of American Democracy the very canniest of them will almost certainly recognize Dick Morris as having planted one of the most potent seeds.
Yes the dude is kind of a meme. Yes the few people who remember him mostly do so because he fell in love with a hooker and leaked a bunch of state secrets. Yes he is completely lacking in beliefs or principles and tends to live his life without any serious regard for the consequences of his actions.
That’s why he epitomizes the spirit of the nineties.
My peers in Mesa seemed quite affluent—on field trips the parent chaperones were 90% cute young SAHMs, with most of the dads off work being something like a software engineer or some kind of skilled tradesmen. Lots of nerdy white LDS dad / hypergamizing castiza mom couples. If memory serves I briefly harbored a crush on at least one daughter of such a union, who went by Chelsea and sort of reminded me of Queen Rapsheeba from ChalkZone. Though Chelsea was also kind of weirdly brown for her situation; a lot of the time in Mesa you’d have a kid who looks vaguely Italian or even German and then one day he’d randomly introduce you to his super Aztec mom.
Anyway it was a decent childhood.
I mean, I never got molested or beaten up or anything, which is good for more than just me because I likely have the genetic predisposition to have become a genuinely terrible person if I had. Not Ted Bundy or Dick Morris, obviously, but mayhaps closer to Chairman Mao than Newt Gingrich.
I had lots of friends at school. I was definitely The Weird Kid, but only in the same way I’m currently The Weird Guy on Racist Substack, and it didn’t really impede me from being popular any more than it does now. I was polarizing for sure, but I was typically better liked than the niggas who hated me. Honestly I might have been a Chad had my mom not skipped me forward through kindergarten, ostensibly because I’d been reading for years and was severely bored doing phonics or whatever but probably more so she could brag about having a kid who skipped kindergarten.
Decades later I learned about “redshirting” and flew into a bit of a rage when I realized that basically the opposite had been done to me.
In general I just became a little dopamine cow the moment she went back to work. I became obsessed with xbox and cartoons and Neopets and a bunch of other shit and my overall executive functioning simply tanked. I also basically stopped doing my homework and wouldn’t really do it again until honestly college.
Still, in the end it all washed out. And I’d love to drop some self-satisfied line that attributes that outcome to having ruthlessly exploited asymmetries etc. but if I’m honest it’s more that I take after Dick Morris and Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton in that my personality is incredibly optimized for externalizing costs and pivoting out of failure in a way that ensures I’m never sufficiently humiliated to precipitate change, even in the wake of very retarded unforced errors that would sink any other man.
The thing is Faustian Bargains are sort of get out of jail free cards; they almost always present themselves when you fuck up real bad and the last bargain’s Mephistopheles at last comes knocking. If you’re clever you can just keep refinancing that bargain ad nauseum, each time with a bigger and scarier Mephistopheles, and if you’re really fucking good you’ll end up like Trump or Bill Clinton atop a pyramid of skulls, whereas if you’re a little less good you’ll end up like Gingrich at the high end and Morris at the low.
The key is to never stop pivoting, never stop triangulating or polarizing, and above all else, never lose control of the narrative.
That said I really hope you’ll believe me when I say I don’t at all like thinking this way. There's part of me that really envies people with a gentler approach to life. At the same time, what can I say? I’m a child of the nineties.
"Between the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the coming of the War on Terror, there was an age undreamed of. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure..."