Bookworm Room

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

Thinking out loud about Trump and the state of conservativism in America

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Donald TrumpI’m still trying to wrap my mind around the whole idea of Donald Trump as the presumptive Republican candidate for president in the 2016 election. In analyzing his (to me) unexpected victory, it’s easy enough to point fingers at the media, which gave him unlimited air time; at Fox, which turned into his personal campaign channel (and lost its rating status to CNN as a result); and at those cross-over Democrats in open primaries who, out of principled conviction or pure mischief, gave him the delegates he needed.

Nevertheless, Thomas Lifson, one of the smartest men I know, is on to something more profound when he says that Trump represents a sledgehammer that voters have taken to an irredeemably corrupt political system:

Let’s face it: America has been locked into a downward spiral under the permanent grip that a corrupt system has had on power. Politicians bent on reform, representing voters demanding it, arrive in Washington, DC only to discover the impossibility of breaking the hold on the levers of governance of lobbyists, bureaucrats, and politicians in their pockets. Washington, DC thrives, becoming the richest city in the country, as most of the rest of the nation stagnates and declines. Businesses discover that it is far more important to cultivate government support than to innovate. Rent seeking becomes the path to riches.

Ted Cruz, who deserves enormous credit for suspending his campaign last night, swallowing his anger over Trump’s escalating personal attacks on him and his family, has demonstrated the futility of reforming the federal government from the inside. A man of fierce intelligence and determination, he ran into a buzz saw in the Senate, and became the most hated man there in decades. He stood up for principle, but was unable to move Congress in his (and conservatives’) direction.

A strong majority of Americans across the ideological spectrum understand how broken the system is. Something like two-thirds of the electorate realize that the federal government is working to protect those who grease its wheels and feather its nest. Nobody exemplifies this corrupt system better than Hillary Clinton, now the Democrats’ presumptive nominee (again, barring black swan events).

Separate from Trump’s politics, which are an ever-evolving swirl of conservative and Progressive ideas, Trump didn’t just criticize the existing system, he alternatively savaged and exulted in it. He rode roughshod over political correctness, but he also boasted that as an active participant in America’s political corruption from the other side (the business, not the political side) he knew how to deal with it. He simultaneously represented himself as both player and destroyer.

Looking at Trump’s political views. . . .  Let me begin again, given that Trump’s political views change with the polls and the interviewer’s questions.  He also lies about them, as he’s done regarding illegal immigration. He railed against it, but he’s always been an amnesty kind of guy.  Still, given what seem to be his sort of fixed political views for the time being, here are what I see as the most optimistic scenario of a Trump presidency:

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A splendid rant about Trump, Clinton, The American Republic & The Ides Of March

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Wolf Howling gave me permission to re-print in its entirety his splendid, insightful, intelligent, informed, far-reaching, and tightly-written rant about everything that’s wrong with the American political system as we head into the 2016 election.  Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you:

Trump, Clinton, The American Republic & The Ides Of March

The Ides of March -- Caesar's death

Caesar: Who is it in the press that calls on me? I hear a tongue shriller than all the music cry “Caesar!” Speak, Caesar is turn’d to hear.

Soothsayer: Beware the ides of March.

Caesar: What man is that?

Brutus: A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.

Julius Caesar Act 1, scene 2, 15–19

On the 15th of March, 44 B.C., the Roman Republic signed its death warrant when the Senators conspired to kill Julius Caesar. It was perhaps the most famous political assassination in history. It certainly was an inflection point in world history, marking the demise of the Roman Republic and its degeneration into rule by emperors. Somehow, I think we are seeing a variant on that history play out today on both the left and the right. The election of Trump could well spell the end our Republic. The plot to steal the nomination from him at a contested convention would surely be the end of the Republican Party. And the refusal to indict Hillary would be a de facto end to our nation as a nation of laws existing under the Constitution.

The nation has just suffered through nearly eight years seeing what rule by a progressive left ideologue looks like — a combination of extra-constitutional rule, cronyism, and identity politics reaching to its ludicrous conclusions. We have an economy that is failing a declining middle class and has been propped up — barely and only — by a Fed running the printing presses non-stop and now considering negative interest rates. And Obama will leave the White House in 2017 with America in a much more precarious position in terms of national security — his insane deal to give Iran a glide path to a nuclear arsenal being the suicidal cherry on top.

Much of what the Obama and the progressive left have accomplished has been enabled by a Court system whose progressive members consider themselves a politburo not bound by the Constitution or democracy, by closed public sector unions that pump incredible sums of laundered taxpayer money back into politics on behalf of progressives, an education system that indoctrinates for progressivism, a system of crony capitalism that operates to disadvantage the middle class and crush entrepreneurship, and by a progressive regulatory bureaucracy that operates outside of the Constitution, passing rules – none voted on by Congress yet still with the force of law — that are working fundamental change to our nation.

I will admit to high hopes coming into the 2016 election. If you look hard at most of these issues, you will see that they are systemic problems that can only be solved by affirmative political action. Reining in the court system requires action by Congress, as does ending closed sector public unions and putting the regulatory bureaucracy wholly under Congressional control. And I had high hopes that this year, the pendulum would swing far enough to the right that we could elect a conservative for President who would address these systemic issues. Cruz, I thought and still think, understood all of these issues and would be most likely to address them. That said, we had 17 candidates on the Republican side at the start this year and almost all of them would have made decent presidents, if not as effective as Cruz. Rubio understood the national security picture best of all of them. Fiorina understood the problems with cronyism, regulation and Congressional accounting. Carson was an honorable man whose heart was in the right place. Even the weakest of the lot, Kasich and Bush, could have been expected to govern at least as milquetoast centrists, addressing none of the systemic problems but at least making none of them worse.

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