RUTHFULLY YOURS

Today, the bipartisan ruling class, which the electorate was trying to shed by supporting anti-establishment candidates of both parties in 2016, feels as if it has dodged the proverbial bullet. The Trump administration has not managed to staff itself—certainly not with anti-establishment people—and may never do so. Because the prospect of that happening brought the ruling class’s several elements together and energized them as never before, today, prospects of more power with fewer limits than ever eclipse the establishment’s fears of November 2016.https://amgreatness.com/2017/08/31/2016-election-not-reversible/

But the Left’s celebrations are premature, at best. As I explained a year ago, by 2016 the ruling class’s dysfunctions and the rest of the country’s resentment had pushed America over the threshold of a revolution; one in which the only certainty is the near impossibility of returning to the republican self-government of the previous two centuries. The 2016 election is not reversible, because it was but the first stage of a process that no one can control and the end of which no one can foresee.

Trump’s troubles

The Left’s optimism is not unfounded. Trump, in his Afghanistan speech, told his voters that he is reversing a campaign promise because he was instructed that his, and their, basic instincts on foreign affairs are wrong. Similarly influenced, he is continuing to use unappropriated funds to subsidize insurance companies that practice Obamacare even though a Federal Court held this to be unconstitutional—far from undoing it as he had promised. Nevertheless he complies with rulings by single judges that overturn major political commitments of his. Unforced errors, all.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the Republican majorities in the Senate and House reject responsibility for failing to repeal Obamacare and even for failing to pass ordinary appropriations bills. They take every occasion to distance themselves from Trump, notably imputing to him insufficient disdain for racism and other political taboos. When Corporate America withdrew from the president’s business council, it premised this officious separation on implicit accusations of the same sort. In short, the Republican establishment now joins Hillary Clinton in leveling “deplorable” allegations against Trump and, above all, of his supporters. Nevertheless, Trump agreed to endorse that establishment’s candidate in the Alabama senatorial primary against one of his own supporters. Counterintuitive.

Not incidentally, he well-nigh cleansed his White House staff of people who had supported his election, and put it in the hands of persons who just as easily could have been in a Clinton White House—people who agree with the press that their job is to control Trump. Secretary of State Tillerson’s remark that the President’s words on America’s values are merely his private opinion epitomizes this transfer of effective power.

With the Left in full cry, the Republican majorities in the House and Senate put no legislative obstacles in the way of the “resistance” to the 2016 election. These Republicans, having now effectively demonstrated that the arguments that won them four consecutive election cycles were insincere, can no longer reprise them. Believing that the 2016 elections were an anomaly the effects of which they are containing, that Trump will pass and the “resistance” with him, they move from putting distance between themselves and Trump to defining themselves against him and with “moderate Democrats” in concert with whom they hope to enjoy their powers.

Trump himself, far from leading public opinion from the bulliest of pulpits, limits himself to “tweets” of 140 characters, which observers from all sides characterize as “plaintive.” In short, the ruling class’s “resistance” met feeble resistance—that is, insofar as it concerns Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is not and never has been the issue. With or without Trump, the nightmare of those who resist the 2016 election was, is, and will remain the voters who have chosen and will continue to choose candidates who they believe are committed to reducing the ruling class’s privileges and pretensions.

It’s the contempt, stupid!

That is why the “resistance” has increased rather than diminished the 2016 election’s import as a revolutionary event. To ordinary Americans, the winds that now blow downwind from society’s commanding heights make the country seem more alien than ever before. More than ever, academics, judges, the media, corporate executives, and politicians of all kinds, having arrogated moral legitimacy to their own socio-political identities, pour contempt upon the rest of America. Private as well as public life in our time is subject to their escalating insults, their unending new conditions on what one may or may not say, even on what one must say, to hold a job or otherwise to participate in society.

As I have argued at length elsewhere, the cultural division between privileged, government-connected elites and the rest of the country has turned twenty-first century politics in America into a cold civil war between hostile socio-political identities.

The Left-Wing Trump Haters

About a third of the Democratic party (15–20 percent perhaps of the electorate?) loathes Trump, from reasons of the trivial to the fundamental.

The hard-leftist hatred is visceral; it is multidimensional; and it is unalterable.

Trump is rich, crass, showy, a white male, and 70. As the anti-Obama, he punches every progressive button in existence. A candidate like Trump was not supposed to exist any longer in the 21st-Century Age of Obama, much less should he have ruined the anticipated progressive Obama-Clinton 16-year regnum. Trump’s accent is outer-borough and seems to exemplify for Trump haters the gaucheness of the golden trump name stamped all over New York. The Europeans have utter contempt for Trump, and that embarrasses leftists especially.

Unlike some Republican politicians who wished to be admired by cultural progressives, Trump prefers baiting the Left and its media appendages, as if to remind them that he prefers to overturn the entire progressive project of the last eight years — if not on ideological grounds (Trump not so long ago voiced a number of centrist and liberal views), at least out of tit-for-tat animosity. Unlike a restrained presidential Bush or a sober Romney, the president answers in kind — and trumps — the boilerplate leftist charge of “fascist!” and “Nazi!” leveled against him.

The Trump haters dominate our media and the universities, the entertainment industries, Silicon Valley, the billionaire green classes, the foundations and the brigades of professional foot-soldier activists, identity-politics operatives, and the Bernie Sanders shock troops. They are frenzied because they think their 1,000 cuts have finally hit arteries — only to see Trump revive in Nietzschean fashion, emerging stronger for the wounds. To come so close to ending this nightmare only to realize they are at the alpha and not the omega of their efforts intensifies their hatred.

Ritually cutting off Trump’s head, blowing him up, stabbing him to death, hanging him, beating him to a pulp — these all are the rhetorical bookends of the Left’s efforts to subvert the Electoral College, the Russian-collusion mythologies, the impeachment and 25th Amendments psychodramas, and Trump’s hoped-for physical collapse under the stress of pure hatred. The calls for Trump’s assassination or maiming, if, mutatis mutandis, aimed at Obama would have earned long jail time for dozens; now assassination porn becomes an object of emulation.

Yet Trump hatred only solidifies the Trump base. It also reminds independents and wavering centrist Republicans that in a Manichean fight (and the Trump haters seem to envision the current landscape as just that), one inevitably chooses sides. If the choice is reduced to a crude rant at a public Trump rally or the rioters at Claremont, Berkeley, and Middlebury, a screaming Madonna, the “pigs in blanket” chanters of Black Lives Matter, and the masked marauders of Antifa, the Trump haters probably lose.

The Loyal Opposition, Sort Of

Mainstream Democrats in politics are bewildered as much as repelled by Trump. They find him scary because their party that professes contempt for wacky Trump supporters somehow finds conservatives in control of all the traditional levers of political power, from the local to the state to the national level. There is no more Blue Wall, and Democrats know why.

Trumpism is insidiously predatory and picks off Democratic working constituencies like wolves do wandering sheep from the herd — with nocturnal howls to fair trade, reenergized industrialization, energy production, immigration enforcement, realism aboard, and infrastructure investment.

Likewise, savvy Democrats fear Trump because they had long preached that “demography is destiny” only to learn that lots of minority bloc voting in solidly red or blue states was not as electorally potent as a riled working white class in key swing states. The knowledge that the outsider and supposed fool Trump grasped that truth while both his Republican primary rivals and Hillary Clinton did not proves especially irritating. Hillary is now reduced to daydreaming about what a tougher Hillary might have said to Trump during the debate, incoherently bragging she was not intimidated as she proves that in fact she was.

Tu quoque is a classical Latin term for “you too.”

It is sometimes considered a logical fallacy: you do not defend your position, but instead point to someone else’s that is worse—in the fashion of a guilty child seeking to avoid parental discipline by claiming his unpunished brother “did it worse.”

But in truth tu quoque is a legitimate argument—if one both defends his position and also points out the hypocrisy of his inconsistent accuser.

Take Trump.

Over the last two weeks, Trump, the messenger, may have tweeted a few silly things (the recycled John J. Pershing pig-fat bullet tweet) and was considered slow in appreciating the political atmospherics of the rioting and violence in Virginia and North Carolina.

Are his supporters therefore supposed to abandon Trump as the hysterical media demands? Hardly. Here are six reasons why not.

1) Presidential Caring
Presidential morality is not quite an Old Testament open and shut case. In politics it is defined by paradox, irony, and unintended consequences.

Jimmy Carter, despite his smugness, was a more classically moral man (marital fidelity, usually speaking the truth, financial incorruptibility) than was Bill Clinton—a rogue, liar, serial adulterer, grifter, and utterly corrupt. (By the same token, Herbert Hoover’s private life was saintly compared to FDR’s).

But one does not have to be a Clinton enabler or apologist to concede that Clinton’s sometimes centrist tenure did more good for the country than did Carter’s legacy of sanctimonious incompetence, naiveté, and self-righteous stupidity. Who then was the more ethical in helping more Americans?

We can accept that pious Mitt Romney was a more moral person than is Donald Trump. But Romney would likely by now have offered calibrated amnesty, stayed in the disastrous Paris climate accords, and not moved so swiftly against unfair trade, even as he spoke compassionately, soberly, and professionally.

Trump’s immigration reforms will eventually benefit the underclasses in a way a President John McCain would never have considered. Trump, for all his character flaws, cared about the lost middle classes in a manner his much more careful and judicious Republican primary rivals did not.

Trump’s third-way paradigm may seem like rank opportunism from a political chameleon, but its practical effects were a moral and ethical concern for those heretofore assumed to be losers of their own making, a struggle working class lacking the panache of the wealthy and romanticism of the distant poor.

2) The Coach is Not the Team
A president, it is true, is the iconic head of a nation. But it is his administration, not the chief executive per se, that changes the country. The nation did not just vote for Barack Obama alone, but—knowingly or not—also for the likes of Eric Holder, Ben Rhodes, Loretta Lynch, Samantha Power, John Brennan, James Clapper, Sonya Sotomayor, and Susan Rice. Obama’s picks were predictably progressive, Trump’s were unpredictably conservative and far more competent.

The administration and its agenda is not Donald J. Trump’s alone. It includes appointees such as Neil Gorsuch, Nikki Haley, John Kelly, James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, Rick Perry, Mike Pompeo, Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, and dozens of others. While Trump tweets broadsides against his nemeses, the Trump Administration is undoing eight years of progressivism in a way it is hard to imagine other Republican presidents might have attempted.

In the first eight months of the Trump administration, the economy is improving, people are more confident about their economic futures, the country is becoming safer abroad with a renewed sense of deterrence, and the government is not seen as the enemy, but the enabler, of commerce. There is a certain moral quality in all that.

3) Progressives Are Not Democrats
The political opposition to Trump is not the Democratic Party of Harry Truman or JFK—or even that of George McGovern, Walter Mondale, or Bill Clinton.

Rather the alternative is now a harder-core, progressive movement led by Keith Ellison, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Tom Perez, and Elizabeth Warren that cannot register even slight discomfort with the extremist rhetoric of kindred leftist Black Lives Matter or Antifa thuggery in the streets. In their view, the explanation for the past eight years of Obama’s economic stagnation, loss of deterrence abroad, and redistribution is that Obama did not go far left enough.

Thus under their progressive leadership, the transformation to European socialism would have been nearly completed. Think of an IRS of Lois Lerners, a Justice Department of Eric Holders and Loretta Lynches, an EPA of Al Gore clones, a Supreme Court of Sonya Sotomayors, and a State Department of John Kerrys—cubed.

To avoid that, millions of Americans are quite willing to “call balls and strikes”—the much caricatured tactic of supporting Trump’s agendas, but calling him out when his impulses, inexperience, and ego result in crudity or inanity. If it comes down to a war between those who smash statues of Columbus and those who object to such mob violence, the iconoclasts in the street and those who support them in the progressive party lose.

4) Bluestockings Cannot Win
The Republican Party was calcified intellectually and ethically. It had lost two consecutive elections to Barack Obama. Despite eventual control of Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court (due to grassroots activism and Tea Party exuberance), the government grew ever larger in the last decade, taxes rose, regulations increased, and political correctness engulfed even more of our lives from the universities to the ways we’re permitted to discuss political issues such as illegal immigration in public. Before Obama doubled the national debt, a Republican president had done the same.

Apparently, as long as violent leftists label their victims “fascists,” they are free to set fires, smash windows and beat civilians bloody. No police officer will stop them. They have carte blanche to physically assault anyone they disapprove of, including Charles Murray, Heather Mac Donald, Ben Shapiro, me and Milo Yiannopoulos, as well as anyone who wanted to hear us speak.

Even far-left liberals like Evergreen State professor Bret Weinstein will be stripped of police protection solely because the mob called him a “racist.”

If the liberal shock troops deem local Republicans “Nazis” — because some of them support the duly elected Republican president — Portland will cancel the annual Rose Festival parade rather than allow any Trump supporters to march.

They’re all “fascists”! Ipso facto, the people cracking their skulls and smashing store windows are “anti-fascists,” or as they call themselves, “antifa.”

We have no way of knowing if the speakers at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally last weekend were “Nazis,” “white supremacists” or passionate Civil War buffs, inasmuch as they weren’t allowed to speak. The Democratic governor shut the event down, despite a court order to let it proceed.

We have only visuals presented to us by the activist media, showing some participants with Nazi paraphernalia. But for all we know, the Nazi photos are as unrepresentative of the rally as that photo of the drowned Syrian child is of Europe’s migrant crisis. Was it 1 percent Nazi or 99 percent Nazi?

As the “Unite the Right” crowd was dispersing, they were forced by the police into the path of the peace-loving, rock-throwing, fire-spraying antifa. A far-left reporter for The New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, tweeted live from the event: “The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists being led out of the park.”

That’s when protestor James Fields sped his car into a crowd of the counter-protesters, then immediately hit reverse, injuring dozens of people, and killing one woman, Heather Heyer.

This has been universally labeled “terrorism,” but we still don’t know whether Fields hit the gas accidentally, was in fear for his life or if he rammed the group intentionally and maliciously.

With any luck, we’ll unravel Fields’ motives faster than it took the Obama administration to discern the motives of a Muslim shouting “Allahu Akbar!” while gunning down soldiers at Fort Hood. (Six years.)

But so far, all we know is that Fields said he was “upset about black people” and wanted to kill as many as possible. On his Facebook page, he displayed a “White Power” poster and “liked” three organizations deemed “white separatist hate groups” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. A subsequent search of his home turned up bomb-making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition and a personal journal of combat tactics.