— by Odysseus
Even for liberals and moderates, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump represents the lesser of two evils in a way that America cannot yet even imagine. Trump is more a symbol than a man. He is living proof that vast swaths of the United States have utterly lost faith in the elites, the establishment, and in America’s political system in general, and demand a change. Trump’s election now is needed to avert the greater calamity waiting around the corner.
Trump is a protest vote against our country’s elites who have spent the post-cold war years squandering more than 200 years of political legitimacy. If Donald Trump does not win the presidential election in two weeks, the American republic will have sounded its last note. The United States will inevitably go the way of the French monarchy, the Russian czars, the German Weimar Republic, the Shah of Iran, and the Soviet Union.
In the specific terms of political science and history, legitimacy is a way of describing the measure of the connection between a country’s governing structure and the population that it governs. All governments, kingdoms, ruling bodies, and empires live and die by their legitimacy level. If the people of a tribe lose faith in their chieftain’s power or ability to adequately provide effective dispute resolution and leadership for their little group, that chieftain is challenged and replaced by someone who will. He has lost “legitimacy”.
The same principle of legitimacy is true of any country’s leadership structure, be it led by a king, a prime minister, a politburo or an aristocracy. Loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the people occurred in France before the aristocrats were introduced to the revolutionary guillotine, just as it did in the Soviet Union when it collapsed to a mildly inebriated Boris Yeltsin.
America now has that same problem. The cultural, intellectual, and political leadership of the United States has been pissing away government legitimacy for more than 30 years like a sailor on a drunken binge.
It is not merely that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is distrusted. It is not merely that President Barack Hussein Obama failed to live up to the hopes and expectations placed in him. The crisis in America is much deeper.
The national news media is perceived by many Americans — if not most of Americans — as having completely abandoned not only any semblance of objectivity, but even any financial motivation to provide the country with adequate coverage of real news events. On the national level, news reporting is nothing more than television presenters emoting the talking points on their teleprompters that were given to them by the Democratic leadership. As for printed media, the reporters essentially regurgitate the press releases handed or e-mailed to them.
Selective and biased reporting is now the norm. First, to protect President Obama and now to support Hillary Clinton or to push various pet collectivist causes, the liberal media has blatantly and repeatedly under-reported or even concealed from the public known facts when they were harmful to the political leaders or to the causes that it supported.
It is no wonder, then, that in such an environment, people look for alternative information sources, which may or may not be as accurate and sourced as traditional media has the potential capability to do, but does not. However, if the public already knows that traditional media is not using its capacity for research and sourcing of materials on issues that the public wishes to know about, what good is that potential capability? Most Americans now resort to obtaining their news and information from other sources. They have correctly made the decision that it is better to have some accurate information than no accurate information at all.
Worse still, consider the high profile scandals of well known news anchors over the last 30 years like Dan Rather and Brian Williams. These once-trusted names were exposed for making outright fabrications. These incidents have proven that even what is actually covered on the news is biased and of dubious value.
As if these scandals were not enough, it is now well known from the exposure of the “journo-list” early in the Obama years to the more recent revelations by Wikileaks that, rather than critically questioning government officials and actions, sycophantic news organizations now work hand in hand with government officials to advance their leftist agenda, to conceal the lies of favored politicians, to attack opponents, and to lend credibility to falsehoods. New York Times’ Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty, whose deceptive 1930s articles concealed and excused the worst of the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin, must be the patron saint of today’s journalists.
At this point, the American public does not merely suspect that it cannot trust what the government tells it or conceals from it, it knows it to be certain. It was revealed by the outright mendacity of Johnathan Gruber, the MIT economics professor and one of the fathers of “Obamacare”, who knowingly and intentionally sold it to the American public by, in his own words, “fooling” Americans into going along with a sweeping government plan that he knew would not operate as advertised.
The American public should not have been stunned — but was — when Ben Rhodes, the White House’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, proudly crowed about how he and his team created the false narrative surrounding President Obama’s key foreign policy objective, the disastrous Iran nuclear deal. Rhodes smugly admitted that he employed a complicit press corps to create an “echo chamber” to convince the public, and, in turn, Congress, that the deal was worthwhile when it was less than worthless. He and President Obama and his administration fully knew that this narrative was merely the invented “story” concocted by Rhodes, an aspiring novelist who posed as a foreign policy expert.
To the public, Jonathan Gruber and Ben Rhodes are not lone aberrations. They are merely the new Walter Duranty poster boys for how Washington and its elites now work to achieve their objectives by deception. Because, if the truth were known, Americans would have never gone along with it as relatively quietly as they did.
There is no part of America’s governing structure that has escaped being besmirched during the last 30 years. It was from outright lies by President Bill Clinton about Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress to the false narrative about Nigerian yellowcake uranium and Saddam Hussein Iraq’s nuclear ambitions. Add to this President Obama’s false promise that, under Obamacare, Americans would keep their own doctors. Then, the promised privacy of one’s e-mails from NSA snooping was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden to be a deception. Now, Hillary Clinton, the darling of the ruling elites, has escaped justice for setting up a private e-mail server hidden in a spare bathroom in order to conceal her foundation’s corrupt operations from FOIA and public scrutiny.
While the public’s trust in government has long been low, the public’s widespread knowledge of the true extent that today’s politicians are financially, socially, and sexually intertwined with the journalists, Hollywood, the judiciary, and the supposedly non-partisan, high ranking bureaucrats in the FBI and the IRS is new. It is now inescapable to large swaths of the public that there is a self promoting, self sustaining, exclusive ruling class that is also self serving. The exposure of an exclusive ruling elite that has deeply corrupted all national level institutions is unprecedented in the United States, and it is a new, post Cold War phenomenon.
This ruling class has exposed itself and its true interests by presenting a unified front with the Bush and the Clinton political dynasties to push on the people its unpopular and damaging agendas and to attack all dissenters and critics in the most vicious and personal ways. The public now sees an American political system that looks a lot like the old Soviet model. What we now see in our magazines, newspapers, television, and movies looks less like news or entertainment and more like the Soviet Politburo and the Ministry of Culture utilizing state-operated information newspapers Pravda and Izvestia to support and push their political, social, and economic agendas.
The elites have not only ruled for the benefit of themselves, but, in recent years, they have taken to attacking, belittling, and undermining traditional American values. At least 47 % of Americans are not interested in anything “cosmopolitan” unless it comes in a glass with ice in it. No longer is there even a pretense that the elites’ objective is the promotion of benevolent tolerance for a live-and-let-live society with different lifestyles. Rather, the elites ooze contempt for traditional human notions of “marriage”, “religion”, “self reliance”, “individualism”, cultural and racial homogeneity and even longstanding industries such as mining, logging or ranching.
The urban, cosmopolitan elites have declared war on rural America and anyone who still supports its traditional religious and social values. They have increasingly used every tool at their disposal, from the entertainment industry to the judiciary to the administrative bureaucratic state, to actively attack traditional America at all levels. They no longer seek to persuade gentle acceptance of diverse lifestyles, but, rather, they seek to belittle, destroy, and impose.
Traditional Americans want to be tolerant, accepting, and forgiving, even about things that they do not necessarily approve of. However, their tolerance requires reciprocity from the elites. Yet, the elites will not extend their protection or tolerance to traditional America in return because, for most elites, in their heart of hearts, their raison d’Etat is the complete destruction of traditional America.
The elites have declared an outright war on traditional America. A funny thing about war, though, is that when attacked, the attacked usually fight back.
Donald Trump may be the nominee of the Republican Party, but he is not truly a Republican. He is merely a well known outsider that traditional America, still a significant segment of the population, has chosen to send to Washington D.C. His supporters want to give him the position of examining our national institutions and their clandestine relationships with the elites, much like an outside auditor or forensic accountant who is tasked with rooting out corruption in a business enterprise. His supporters intend for him to be a true representative of what they have come to understand is an electorate that is currently unrepresented in Washington: the average traditional American.
If the elites do not allow Donald Trump to win the presidency, his supporters are not going to fade away. They will not surrender or come to doubt themselves and their causes. Reviled, attacked, belittled, ridiculed, and cheated, they will become more angry. They will become more convinced that the system is rigged against them. They will know that the system is hell bent on destroying them, their children, and their way of life. They know that they are still the majority in the country, despite Hollywood’s best efforts to marginalize them.
Traditional Americans understand that the globalist cosmopolitan worldview that serves Americans last, is only embraced by a relatively small number of elites in a few coastal cities and the Washington Beltway and by a woefully outnumbered federal bureaucracy. They know that traditional America actually contributes the soldiers, sailors, pilots, policemen, sheriffs, deputies, and guardsmen, who are their sons and daughters, not the children of the elites. They know that they, themselves, are the ones who produce 100% of America’s food, energy sources, water supply, the electrical grid, and even the manufacture of guns, ammunition, tanks, and every weapon system.
The coastal elites who wish to impose their “Brave New World” on America only manufacture words, pictures, and fairy tales. They create entertainment and compose words in thick books that we call “laws”, but nothing more. They are not even the people who put the ink into the printing presses which produce the books. The Jacobins in France realized the same thing as they gazed upon the powdered wigs and perfumed lace of French monarch Louis the XVI’s court. The poor Kulak farmers realized the same when the Russian Czar sent them off to fight faraway wars. The Germans who elected Adolph Hitler did not recognize their own country after the Weimar Republic’s cultural and economic transformation of the 1920s.
To be certain, not every German wholly supported Adolph Hitler’s plans. Not every Frenchman supported Robespierre. Not every Russian was a Marxist. Not every Iranian supported the Ayatollah Khomeini. But they knew that their government no longer supported them, and, in fact, reviled both them and their values. The elites in those regimes had squandered their legitimacy and bloody regime changes ensued for the worst. Everyone, moderates and elites alike, ended up suffering greatly the consequences of regime changes after their governments pissed away their legitimacy by ruling contemptuously and sneering at their citizens’ values.
The only way at this point that the government of the United States can regain legitimacy in the eyes of the people is the election of Donald Trump. The people would then know or at least believe that, for this one time only, the elites failed to get what they wanted. Thereafter, most people would believe that they still have some say in their governance and would return to the slumber of their lives, secure in the belief that they were still represented in Washington, at least by their votes. The pressure in the pressure cooker valve will have been released safely.
On the other hand, if Hillary Clinton is elected and the elites are perceived to have prevailed yet again, the anger of traditional America will only grow. Its willingness to resort to ever more radical measures to stop the national infection will grow. In desperation and then resolve, previously unacceptable leadership and previously unacceptable ideas will become acceptable because ever more radical measures will appear necessary under the circumstances. The more moderate earlier votes will be seen as having been insufficient.
Despite tremendous efforts to demonize him, Donald J. Trump, the vessel for the hopes of traditional America’s influence in Washington, is a 70 year old New York real estate billionaire. He has had three beautiful wives and is immensely proud of his children and their accomplishments. He has a multitude of ties to the existing order and is utterly invested in the ongoing success of the United States’ institutions and continuity of government. In reality, and under the circumstances, he is the safest possible vessel of populist nationalism that the planet has ever seen in the entire course of human history.
If Trump should fail to win the election, traditional Americans will be denied the token assurance that they desperately need that they still have influence over their country’s direction. If denied this time, their next choice for leader will not be as tame as Trump. The part of America that holds the real power, logistics, blood, and steel will soon willingly fall in line behind someone more vociferous and extreme than Donald Trump. These Americans will fall in line behind someone with no ties to the existing order and someone who will have no qualms about completely replacing it.
Somewhere out in America, in Kentucky, or Tennessee, or Texas, or California is a middle aged man, who has not enjoyed Donald Trump’s superlative success in American life. He is angry, but very well spoken. He has watched his values belittled and been marginalized for most of his life. He has watched his peers, classmates, and neighbors, who belong to particularly protected classes, be elevated above him unfairly, through scholarships, job opportunities, and promotions. He may have lost his job or been denied promotions not because of his lack of merit, but because of his failure to be a member of a protected class.
For 40 years, this man has endured ongoing humiliation. For the last eight to ten years, he has had to watch his faith and his values not merely slighted, but insulted and attacked. His quiet resignation at having to attend a small state school or a modest community college instead of an Ivy League university because he was not a part of the protected classes has slowly transformed in him into fury and hatred. He is now willing to condone and take more extreme actions that, when he was in high school in the 1970s or 1980s, he would have condemned. While not a hater or racist by nature, government policies and a contemptuous elite have made him into one.
If Donald Trump is not elected in 2016, people will start to listen to this angry, but eloquent middle aged man. Because the pressure release valve that is Trump has not been used, the pressure has been allowed to continue to build up. People who would have otherwise dismissed this alternative as too radical and too violent will start to listen to him. He will channel their anger, their frustration, their diminishing prospects, and their years of endured insults from a sneering, superior elite. Many people will take to this man and will consider his radical notions as somehow now “necessary” or “unavoidable” since their lot continued to worsen and their way of life attacked even when they voted for more moderate medicine in every past election.
This man’s disguise will be that he will NOT have a moustache, but, nonetheless, he will be America’s own version of Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Maximilien Robespierre, Saddam Hussein, or Ayatollah Khomeini. He will be thrust into power by election or by revolution, and he will be allowed to do things that a less furious, less belittled, and less betrayed population would never have previously allowed. He will target the cosmopolitan elites not for political defeat, but for incarceration and extermination, all to the cheers of the farmers, miners, cobblers, gunsmiths, electricians, plumbers, soldiers, and policemen, who will crowd in the square before the guillotine.
If you hate, loathe, and fear Donald J. Trump, a 70 year old New York billionaire real estate guy, think of the grim alternative coming down the pike, and you had better be willing to crawl over broken glass to vote for Trump now. And you had better get a couple of your friends to put down their wine glasses and kale chips long enough to come with you to vote for him as well.