A conservative self-examination on how granular convection produced Donald Trump:
Did we ever actually listen to our people? I mean all our people, not just the people who went to the same colleges as us and who hang with us at the same awesome restaurants and read National Review. I mean the actual voters out there in wherever actual GOP voters live. Did we pay attention to them and their concerns? Did we listen to them about illegal immigration, about the impact of free trade, about the wars we supported? And did we fight?
Glenn Reynolds muses on how we ended up with Hillary and Donald:
We’re moving into a general election with two very unpopular candidates at the top of the tickets: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Substantial majorities of Americans dislike them both. Gallup last week found them with precisely equal, and awful, approval ratings: 37% favorable, 58% unfavorable. Each says the other is a corrupt tool. They’re both probably right.
How did we get to this situation? It boils down to failure at every level, from the political class, to the media, to the voters themselves. The consequences, I’m afraid, may turn out to be severe.
The political class failed in both parties. The Trump phenomenon is a result of the GOP establishment taking a large part of its voting base for granted. GOP donors want open borders in order to save on wages. Many GOP voters, seeing their wages forced down by immigration (both illegal immigration and legal-but-abused programs like the H1B visa program that allows tech companies to pay near-slave wages for foreign programmers and engineers) felt differently.
In a huge GOP field, only one candidate, Trump, actually spoke to their concerns. Others, who might have done better, were disqualified, to a large plurality of the primary electorate, by their positions on immigration. A few tried toughening their stances, but it was too late, and Trump steamrollered the opposition. He may not be the best GOP nominee, but the GOP didn’t give voters who cared about the subject any other options.
On the Democratic side, the entire primary was more-or-less rigged as a coronation for Hillary, to the point that Bernie Sanders fans are still claiming fraud. Fraud or not, there’s no question that the Democratic National Committee put a thumb on the scales for Hillary, to the point that, when hacked DNC emails were released on Wikileaks, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz had to resign. Hillary’s track record of money-grubbing and foreign-affairs incompetence is unattractive, but the Democratic Party didn’t really allow any other options.
There is one cosmic law: in a republic like ours, we get the leaders we deserve.
(Okay, fine: the pope isn't democratically elected by the masses, so this is disanalogous. But the people still want to see his balls. And they deserve what they get.)
We absolutely do, Kevin, albeit both for better and for worse.
ReplyDeleteWe got Washington when we needed the only person alive at that time who could create the republic we wanted to have.
We got Lincoln when most of us needed the only man alive who could preserve the Union and free the slaves.
We will get Trump if the majority of the electorate is sick and tired of the crap we've been handed by the execrable Left.
And, sadly, we will deserve to be buried by yet more crap from 0bama III if the majority choose that future for ourselves and our children.
We always deserve what we get because in our Republic we get what the majority chooses for us.
The Democrats and the Republicans are two factions of a single-party state: Both support Open Borders, unfettered immigration, "free trade" and endless war. They are also fully owned and operated by Wall $treet and the MNCs. (That was a nice propaganda smear by the USA Today, by the way, suggesting that Trump is as much of a "corrupt tool" as $hillary; a tool of whom, pray tell?) Oh, and each are great believers in the welfare state: Massive taxpayer handouts to big business, public-service employees and assorted voting blocks. There is a reason why many of the leading figures of the GOP skipped the RNC this year, and why many GOP heavy-hitters are now leaning in the direction of $hillary Clinton, who is herself essentially Richard Nixon in a pantsuit. The single-party state hates the hell out of Trump because he refuses to bend his knee before their neoliberal altar, and is a serious threat to the present status quo, which by any measure is a hopeless mess and one way or other is sure to face a reckoning at some point soon, as it is simply unsustainable. Of that, I am very much certain.
ReplyDeleteAs I have argued elsewhere, Trump is a pro-America nationalist, which is why the globalist establishment is aligned against him. I would go even further and argue that Trump is the candidate of the Internet, while Hellary Clingnon is the throwback, retrograde candidate of TV. It's no mystery why Trump's supporters have all the best memes, whereas $hillary is throwing all her hedge-fund money at TV ads (which younger voters will never see as they generally don't watch TV and prefer to consume their media content online). This is the real reason why Trump is so masterful at dominating the news cycle: He understands virality in a way that frumpy, dumpy BlackBerry-loving $hillary simply doesn't, and since the MSM are themselves operating under an increasingly obsolete Old Media paradigm, they invariably find themselves reacting to Trump rather than controlling the narrative themselves despite their great efforts.
In a nutshell, Trump acts and $hillary reacts, and that's why he will win. (Who wants a president who doesn't know how to lead, anyway?) He has been playing the media every step of the way, and it will take them years afterwards to understand exactly what he did to them. (Most recently, they thought they were baiting Trump over the whole Khan affair, but we can already see that he's been ten steps ahead of them, and that he was actually baiting them; suddenly Khan's own Web site has been shut mysteriously, and he has withdrawn from the media spotlight for good reason.) In short, Trump is trolling the whole damn rotten system, and it richly deserves it because it stinks to high heaven and needs to be gone.
I'll say it again: Trump in a landslide, mark my words. And I'm sure Julian Assange agrees!
KB,
ReplyDeleteI think you nailed the sentiment (well, at least my own sentiment), but I can't say I am as confident about a Trump victory. Because rampant national ignorance.
TBH, the Internet will Make America Great Again!
ReplyDelete