Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Last Chance to Dump Trump

08 Thursday Dec 2016

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Photo: Courtesy of Gage Skidmore.

The recount attempts in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania are not yielding any prospects for a Hillary Clinton victory, so the left is holding out the forlorn hope that enough U.S. electors will bolt to deny Trump the presidency.

The New York Times editorial writer Elizabeth Williamson reports that one Texas elector has publicly stated his intention to ignore the popular verdict of his state and cast his vote for someone else.  Apparently, this has provided some on the left with at least a faint glimmer of hope.

Honestly, I’m surprised this is even being discussed, if only halfway seriously, in a source that purports to be the newspaper of record.  If Hillary had won under similar circumstances, conservative talk of denying her the presidency through some Electoral College ploy would be (1). laughed right out of an NYT Editorial Board meeting as muddle-headed right-wing idiocy or (2). condemned as the rankest expression of right-wing hate mongering and authoritarianism.

Yet, in what will likely be remembered as one of the most remarkable rhetorical turnarounds in U.S. political history, the left seems to be indulging in a lot of “wild” talk regarding secession, even though, until recently, at least, it has characterized such talk on the right as reckless, hateful speech.

Our Spoiled, Benighted Ruling Class

30 Wednesday Nov 2016

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burning-flagDespite repeated attempts by the left to depict Trump’s new domestic policy adviser, Stephen Bannon, as a witting agent of the alt-right and white nationalism, I see a different picture emerging.

I perceive an Irish-American patriot from the working class who, in the course of acquiring a Harvard MBA and a large measure of material success as a Goldman Sachs employee, gained intimate exposure to many among this nation’s ruling class and ended up detesting what he saw.

Following the 2008 crash, he saw his octogenarian father, Marty Bannon, a retiree,  struggle financially after he was forced to cash out his AT&T stocks – the bulk of his net worth – to tide himself over the hard times.  The elder Bannon was a self-made man who started out as a telephone lineman and worked his way up  his company’s corporate ladder. For Bannon, his father’s late-life financial crisis drove home a searing lesson in what he had come to regard as the “socialism of the wealthy.”   As the 2008 crisis demonstrated, many among the wealthy class are often insulated from deleterious market effects, while little people like has father are forced to bear the risks.

Other lessons were driven home.  One of Bannon’s proudest moments was when his oldest daughter, Maureen, qualified for West Point.  Yet, he soon discovered that among his daughter’s fellow West Point cadets, not was one supplied from the upper reaches of the country’s wealthiest citizens.

I was reminded of all of this last night watching reports of the desecration of the U.S. flag by snowflakes at many of the nation’s elite colleges and universities.

Virtually none of these kids will ever be forced out of a sense of economic necessity to darken the door of a military recruiter’s office. They will go immediately to a leading graduate school, to an elite investment firm, or to an premiere nonprofit or media entity as a writer or researcher . A few of them will go into national politics, feigning regret over their youthful indiscretion,  even as they formulate the policies that send the next generation of patriotic, working-class kids into the world’s danger zones. Ironic, isn’t it?

Many among the Left are still beating their chests over how an intellectual lightweight, corporate real estate brawler and TV showman who affected sympathy for the beleaguered working-class Americans prevailed over one of the nation’s best and brightest, one who had garnered the support of virtually everyone in this country who really counted.

It think a simple appraisal of what is unfolding among the self-indulgent, self-pitying snowflakes on many of this nation’s elite campuses would supply one compelling explanation for this electoral upset.

Finally, an End to the Culture Wars?

26 Saturday Nov 2016

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black-lives-matterI’ve speculated more than once on this forum that at least part of the interminable anger and chest beating among Hillary supporters in the election’s aftermath stems from the realization that they were so close to closing the ring on  all of us dumb, reactionary red-state yokels.

The cultural war had ended, our national overlords assured us. History would remember Hillary’s resounding  victory as a confirmation of that fact.  All of us Deplorables would finally be brought to heel.  Figuratively speaking, the dog collars would be attached and all of us would be marched down from the mountains onto the broad, enlightened urban coastal plains.

Of course, an unexpected thing happened on the way to oblivion:  Trump’s remarkable electoral upset.

Some cultural skirmishing apparently remains.  A few pundits even speculate that the Trump upset could mark a turning away and perhaps even an abandonment of the culture war.  Some think that Trump may turn out to be a political realist, concluding that it’s time to put an end to all this disharmony.

Perhaps Trump may even end up affirming an insight that our Founders conceived almost a quarter millennium ago: namely that we are simply too diverse a nation for a culture war to have been started in the first place. Cultural issues are best resolved at the state and local levels. Perhaps he will even conclude that we are all better governed by 50 different social policies rather than by a cookie-cutter policy imposed from Washington.

Simply put, maybe the end of the Culture War will require a looser American Union.

Granted, ending the culture war will not make all Americans happy, particularly those among our ruling class who are deeply invested either professionally or financially in this protracted struggle. It will not be an attractive option at all for many deep-dyed blue Americans who live in red states and, conversely, for ruby-red Americans who live in blue states. Moreover, returning genuine sovereignty to the states ultimately  may lead to a much looser federal union – perhaps even one from which New York, New England and “Cascadian” America may leave to federate (or, at least, work out forms of post-sovereignty arrangements) with parts of Canada.

 As I said, none of these options come anywhere close to a panacea.  But maybe Americans in time may conclude that to live and let live is preferable to a country in which tens of millions of Americans are, rhetorically, at least, at each other’s throats.

A Techless Revolution?

16 Wednesday Nov 2016

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samuel-francis

Samuel T. Francis, the paleocon intellectual who anticipated the MARs revolution a generation ago. 

I was with a close friend last night watching a Fox New interview with James Webb, who discussed the Democratic Party’s embrace of  identity politics and the role it has played in sapping the party’s historic support from the white working class.

At one point, my friend turned to me and observed, “Can you believe that it’s finally possible to watch these sorts of anti-PC discussions on television?”

He’s right, of course, and it reflects the fact that identity politics is a double-edged sword. Sooner or later, working-class whites inevitably would wise up to its unpalatable, if not frightening, implications and embrace a  version of their own identity politics – or so went conventional thinking.  Indeed the late paleoconservative intellectual and Washington Times columnist Sam Francis, who coined the term Middle American Radicals (MARs), foresaw this trend emerging a generation ago.  It emerged briefly around columnists Pat Buchanan’s short-lived celebrity candidacy in 1992.

Yet, I wonder:  Was Middle American Radicalism, which finally succeeded with Donald Trump, really an inevitable outcome?  A quarter century ago, this radicalism gained only a tenuous and brief hold under Pat Buchanan. But should we be surprised?  Unlike other other groups – African-Americans, feminists and LGBTs, for example – MARs lacked any discernible support among media, higher education, etc.

Only with the advent of alternative news outlets – Talk Radio, Fox News and, more recently and perhaps most notably, social media – has Middle American Radical sentiment managed to coalesce and to become self-aware.

Despite the entirely unexpected and unprecedented Trump victory, MARs face an unusually steep uphill climb over the next few years, certainly in demographic terms.

Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira accurately observes that the Trump/MARs realignment will likely turn out to be a short-lived political resurgence that is increasingly supplanted by the shift of college-educated Millennials to the Democratic base, one that already is augmented by the all but unwavering support of Asian, African-American and Latino voters.

Emerging tech supplied the means through which the MARs insurgency coalesced around the unprecedented candidacy of Donald Trump.  Now a soon-to-be President Trump must supply the vision to ensure that this insurgency is not remembered a century from now merely as a flash in the political pan.

Just What Is The Alt-Right?

15 Tuesday Nov 2016

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stephen-bannonPresident-elect Trump’s appointment of Stephen Bannon as his domestic security adviser has ignited a firestorm of criticism within the predictable quarters, namely mainstream media.

In the interests of providing a broad context for consideration and discussion, I’ve posted the Mother Jones article on Bannon. The whole subject of Breitbart and the alt-right is a complicated one, as most political movements are. The founder of Breitbart, the late Andrew Breitbart, was a Jew, a liberal Democrat who gravitated to conservatism while watching the Clarence Thomas hearings.

I’ll have more to say about this in future posts.  For now, suffice it to say that the alt-right label remains a fuzzy one, reflecting a loose association of many deeply disaffected conservatives of various ideological convictions. And to add an extra layer of complication to all of this, one of the conservative intellectuals singled out as a founder of the movement is Paul Gottfried, a Yeshiva University graduate and an unusually well-published university professor. In fact, Gottfried is acknowledged as having coined the term “alternative right” – or alt-right.

Adding an extra wrinkle to this story, Gottfried appears ambivalent about the role he played in the formation of this loose movement.

Troubling Statements

13 Sunday Nov 2016

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​I have heard quite a few recriminative statements from some in the aftermath of the election.  One of the most disturbing goes something like this: “All of you Trump supporters are going to have own up to the racist, misogynist and homophobe you have elected.” 

Frankly, statements like this are the reason why millions voted for Trump, because this sort of hectoring language is not very far from “To the Gulag with you!”  Some Trump supporters may lack undergraduate and graduate degrees, but they do recognize authoritarian language when they hear it.

We Need Systemic Federal Reform

13 Sunday Nov 2016

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Well, let’s see: rioting in the streets,  the possible breakup of our two-party system  into a multiple party system and growing calls for secession in major U.S states. When are we going to come to terms with the fact that we are two and possibly even three or more nations shoehorned into one?

When are we going to realize that a one-size-fits-all governing strategy simply can’t be imposed on us any longer? When are we going to embrace systemic federal reform?

The Democrats’ Federalist Redux

10 Thursday Nov 2016

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A depiction of Federalist support (Federalist States depicted in blue) in post-colonial America.

As my beloved 8th grade history teacher liked to say, history repeats itself.

One of the remarkable outcomes of Tuesday’s election is how the Democratic party seems to be transforming into a predominantly bi-coastal and urban party – a sort of 21st century updating of the Federalists and their successors, the National Republicans and Whigs.

Upscale, Gentrified and Urban

Much like them, the Democratic Party has become an upscale, gentrified  and urban party pitted against a country party, the GOP, which resembles in many respects Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, though, to be sure, it still maintains a significant urban presence throughout the American heartland.

Earlier this year, a number of astute pundits pointed out that the Democrats would be in exceedingly dire straits if they lost, which,at the time, of course, was considered a far-flung possibility.

A Democratic Reckoning?

Last Tuesday’s upset does portend a reckoning for the Democrats.  The bi-coastal and urban makeup of the Democrats was not so much a pressing concern while they were in power.  But without the patronage associated with the presidency and a sufficient foothold within the vast American heartland, they face acute competitive disadvantages for the foreseeable future.
I was reminded of the Democrats’ hard reality viewing the splendid interactive post-election map posted by the New York Times, depicting presidential voting patterns on a county-by-county basis. Running my cursor across a wide swath of “Flyover Country” from the Shenandoah Valley region of northern Virginia to the upper northwest corner of Nevada I crossed many counties with Trump support as high or even higher than 70 percent.

From Yellow Dog to Ruby-Red Pachyderm

Incidentally, in my native northwest Alabama, which used to be one of the most solidly and assertively Democratic enclaves in America, those margins ran even higher.  Seventy-nine percent of voters supported Trump in my native county of Franklin.  In neighboring Colbert County, once a heavily unionized and arguably the state’s most consistently Yellow Dog Democratic county, Trump support exceeded 69 percent.

The Democrats dominated local politics when I attended high school in the region in the late 70’s, though large percentages of people supported GOP nominees in presidential elections, notably in 1964, 1972 and 1980.

Now even that has changed.  The GOP in northwest Alabama and in most of the rest of the state dominates politics at all levels, municipal to the federal.

What remains of the Democratic presence Alabama Alabama is in the predominantly African-American sections of Black Belt Alabama and Jefferson County, of which Birmingham serves as the county seat. Most of the rest of the state is deep-dyed red. And that holds true for virtually all of the South – deep red heartlands, punctuated by large urban, predominately African-American areas, though, to be sure, cultural creatives with strong Democratic sympathies are evident in many of these areas.

This steep demographic decline isn’t limited to the South. Throughout much of Red State America, state Democratic parties are coming to resemble the GOP patronage parties that soldiered on in the South from the end of Reconstruction until the Reagan Revolution in 1980.

It is even possible to travel thousands of miles across the breadth of the American heartland without even passing through a blue county. And this brings me back to my original premise:  The present-day American political party system bears a remarkable resemblance to the emerging political system of post-colonial America. We are increasingly divided between blue cities comprised of highly educated cultural creatives and the deep-dyed red rural heartland.

Federalist Redux?

The short-term problem for them, at least, as I see it, is that they are currently shut out of some states in the South, parts of the Midwest and large parts of the Far West. To be sure, the GOP faces its own demographic challenges: the decline of its main base, whites,  its reputation among millions of millennials as an obscurantist know-nothing party and its comparative failure to make inroads into emerging demographic groups.

Even so, the Democratic party seems to face the biggest challenge – at least, in the short term: It’s separation from much of the American heartland and it’s all but total reliance on a coalition of affluent, highly educated urban elites and minorities.

For now, it seems, the Democratic party’s great Federalist redux doesn’t bode well for it’s future – it’s immediate future, at least.

Are the Democrats the New Federalists?

09 Wednesday Nov 2016

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Alexander Hamilton, Founder of the Federalist Party.

The prairie winds that swept across the great American heartland last night do not bode well for the future of the Democratic Party.

By becoming, however unwittingly, a bi-coastal party, the Democratic Party is arguably the 21st century equivalent of Federalists and their successors, the Whigs – an party of gentrified, well-educated urban elites. As my beloved 8th grade history teacher used to say, history has repeated itself. In a remarkable way, the 21st century American party system resembles the proto-party system that emerged in the years following constitutional ratification, pitting an upscale urban Federalist Party against a country party, Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans.

 

Earlier this year, a number of astute pundits pointed out that the Democrats would be in exceedingly dire straits if they lost, which,at the time, of course, was considered a far-flung possibility. I think that this is an important point to bear in mind. Things only worked for the Federalists when they wielded power and the political patronage that comes with it. Without this patronage and without a sufficient foothold within the vast American heartland, they will find themselves at an acute competitive disadvantage.

Racism or Anti-Cultural Marxism?

08 Tuesday Nov 2016

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trump-rallyI’ve been intrigued by repeated media and social media outbursts about the racism in Trumpian ranks.  Certainly there is some racism in the ranks – I won’t deny that.

But much of what is perceived as racism isn’t about race per se but rather about how race and, for that matter, gender, have been used within the last quarter century as a principal weapon of cultural Marxism.

All revolutions and social struggles release a sort of nervous energy that never dissipates. The intense libertarian/Jeffersonian energy that was released during the American Revolution, while perhaps waxing and waning over the last quarter millennium, has endured and even mutated significantly. In a sense, the civil rights movement bears a striking resemblance to the libertarian/Jeffersonian tradition – not surprising given that the movement is partly the ideological offspring of this libertarianism – and, like its progenitor, released its own energy a half century ago.
To put it another way, the civil rights movement is mutating too, and one of the effect of this mutation is that racism and other forms of intolerance are being defined up, in a manner of speaking, to more ambiguous forms of human behavior. This is where it has taken on very palpable cultural Marxist hues. It’s no longer considered sufficient simply to accept Martin Luther King’s  expressed hope – now immortalized in high-school and college history textbooks – that all men and women one day will be judged by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. One is expected to not only to tolerate but even to embrace a whole array of attitudes now days. Many see this as a form of proto-totalitarianism that is increasingly being expressed in unusually virulent and disturbing – not to mention, Kafkaesque – ways, particularly on many college campuses.
Are the vast majority of Trump voters aware of these cultural Marxist trends?  Of course not.  But they see these disturbing social and cultural trends unfolding in society, particularly on college campuses, and they’re screaming, “Enough!” And, predictably, they are met with the charges of intolerance and bigotry.
That is one factor among several that have accounted for the Trumpian revolution – or counterrevolution – or whatever one chooses to call it.
Call me a deplorable and irredeemable bigot or whatever other term the left develops to stock its rhetorical quiver, but the majority of rank-and-file Trump voters are seeing these cultural Marxist trends playing out in society, and they are concluding that this is not the way they define being an American and living in a free country. I believe that the vast majority of Trump voters are as committed to civil discourse as anyone else, but they refuse to submit to anything resembling an Orwellian social order.
They may not be as educated as the average Hillary voter, but  they perceive emerging trends that simply do not bode well for liberty, at least, as they have understood that term all their lives. And, predictably, they’re pushing back.