Rod Dreher understands, and sympathizes, with the anger that is causing a lot of people to rebel against the Establishment and support Donald Trump. He’s just sad at recognizing that Trump is a phony and that rebellion is going nowhere.
I’ve been pretty explicit in this space for some time about how I think the Donald J. Trump phenomenon is based in something real. I mean, the grievances to which he speaks are not phantoms. What I find impossible to accept is that Trump is anything other than a voice of resentment. If he offered some kind of way to redress those grievances, to do something concrete about them, things would be different. If he had the moral probity and personal character to lead others to solutions, things would be different. I keep wanting to think he does, and have been trying to give him the benefit of my own severe doubts about him. But after last night’s deplorable show on state in Detroit, it could not possibly be clearer that Trump will deliver for nobody. If he wins the presidency, he is going to betray the people who believe in him. That’s who he is. …
My own “burn baby burn†moment regarding the GOP was learning last fall from Congressional insiders that the party’s leadership had no plans for religious liberty legislation post-Obergefell. They don’t want to have to be told by the media that they’re all bigots. And, plainly, their deep-pocketed donors are embarrassed by the church people who give the Republicans their votes. So, screw us, is the thought.
I understand that Republicans cannot achieve, post-Obergefell, what people like me would like to see them achieve in terms of protecting traditional marriage. That ship has sailed. The culture has shifted. It’s unreasonable to expect the moon.
But for pity’s sake, when the Republican Party cannot bring itself to defend religious liberty, and the right of church people who don’t sell their Christianity out to be left alone, what bloody use are they? …
We are …watching the ongoing dispossession of people in this country of their history, at the hands of progressives — and the forces of political conservatism are saying nothing about it. From the front page of the Stanford University newspaper yesterday, a report about a move underway to purge the campus of all references to St. Junipero Serra, a Catholic missionary who was a pivotal figure in California history. Excerpt:
Leo Bird ’17 introduced the resolution in the ASSU senate. Bird, who prefers to be referred to by the gender neutral “they,†said that they were motivated by what they saw as the discrepancy between Serra’s actions toward Native Californians and his legacy on Stanford’s campus.
“It really started out of conversations that I started to have my freshman year at the Native American cultural center,†Bird explained. “I started to get involved with Bay Area activism and started to recognize that there was this historical figure [Serra] that was represented that was sort of praised, honored, in a way that I felt really did a disservice to a lot of the California Native community as well as to my own identity, being here at Stanford.â€
“They.†Good lord. This is the kind of person who triumphs, over and over, because our universities and the elites they serve have gone corrupt and insane. Who stands up to this? They win and they win and they win. If people conclude that they are being dispossessed in their own country, and the Republican Party is effectively colluding with the dispossession, then who can be surprised by a backlash that takes the form of support for Trump? When the left wages culture war, as it constantly does, it should not be surprised that at least some conservatives see the only one on their side who brings any kind of fight to the battle is an extreme vulgarian named Donald Trump.
I’m not defending Trump. I’m trying to explain his appeal. Believe me, my heart wants the Republicans to be spatchcocked and grilled, but my head says that the country would take an unacceptable risk with Trump in the White House.
William Galston, in the Wall Street Journal, sees the recent shutdown struggle as evidence of a crucial internal struggle for the soul of the Republican Party.
More than a decade ago, before the post-9/11 national fervor set in, Walter Russell Mead published an insightful essay on the persistent “Jacksonian tradition” in American society. Jacksonians, he argued, embrace a distinctive code, whose key tenets include self-reliance, individualism, loyalty and courage.
Jacksonians care as passionately about the Second Amendment as Jeffersonians do about the First. They are suspicious of federal power, skeptical about do-gooding at home and abroad; they oppose federal taxes but favor benefits such as Social Security and Medicare that they regard as earned. Jacksonians are anti-elitist; they believe that the political and moral instincts of ordinary people are usually wiser than those of the experts and that, as Mr. Mead wrote, “while problems are complicated, solutions are simple.”
That is why the Jacksonian hero defies the experts and entrenched elites and “dares to say what the people feel” without caring in the least what the liberal media will say about him. (Think Ted Cruz. )
The tea party is Jacksonian America, aroused, angry and above all fearful, in full revolt against a new elite—backed by the new American demography—that threatens its interests and scorns its values. …
Supporters of the tea party… see President Obama as anti-Christian, and the president’s expansive use of executive authority evokes charges of “tyranny.” Mr. Obama, they believe, is pursuing a conscious strategy of building political support by increasing Americans’ dependence on government. A vast expansion of food stamps and disability programs and the push for immigration reform are key steps down that road.
But ObamaCare is the tipping point, the tea party believes. Unless the law is defunded, the land of limited government, individual liberty and personal responsibility will be gone forever, and the new America, dominated by dependent minorities who assert their “rights” without accepting their responsibilities, will have no place for people like them.
For the tea party, ObamaCare is much more than a policy dispute; it is an existential struggle. …
Many tea-party supporters are small businessmen who see taxes and regulations as direct threats to their livelihood. Unlike establishment Republicans who see potential gains from government programs such as infrastructure funding, these tea partiers regard most government spending as a deadweight loss. Because many of them run low-wage businesses on narrow margins, they believe that they have no choice but to fight measures, such as ObamaCare, that reduce their flexibility and raise their costs—measures to which large corporations with deeper pockets can adjust.
It’s no coincidence that the strengthening influence of the tea party is driving a wedge between corporate America and the Republican Party. It’s hard to see how the U.S. can govern itself unless corporate America pushes the Republican establishment to fight back against the tea party—or switches sides.
Michael Gerson discusses how Republicans are committing political suicide, attempting to apply the precise same strategy that cost the GOP its political competitiveness in California nationally.
According to a 2008 study by the Pew Hispanic Center, 49 percent of Hispanics said that Democrats had more concern for people of their background; 7 percent believed this was true of Republicans. Since the Arizona controversy, this gap can only have grown. In a matter of months, Hispanic voters in Arizona have gone from being among the most pro-GOP in the nation to being among the most hostile.
Immigration issues are emotional and complex. But this must be recognized for what it is: political suicide. Consider that Hispanics make up 40 percent of the K-12 students in Arizona, 44 percent in Texas, 47 percent in California, 54 percent in New Mexico. Whatever temporary gains Republicans might make feeding resentment of this demographic shift, the party identified with that resentment will eventually be voted into singularity. In a matter of decades, the Republican Party could cease to be a national party.
Even describing this reality invites scorn from those who regard immigration as a matter of principle instead of politics. But this represents a deep misunderstanding of politics itself. In America, political ideals are carried by parties. Republicans who are pro-business and pro-life, support a strong national defense and oppose deficit spending depend on one another to achieve influence. Each of these convictions alienates someone — pro-choice voters, economic liberals, pacifists. But Republican activists who alienate not an issue-group but an influential, growing ethnic group are a threat to every other constituency. The vocal faction of anti-immigrant Republicans is not merely part of a coalition; it will eventually make it impossible for anyone else in that coalition to succeed at the national level.
The good news for Republicans is that Hispanics tend to be entrepreneurial and socially conservative. While the general image Hispanics hold of the GOP is poor, individual Republican candidates can make significant inroads. In presidential elections, Hispanic support can swing widely. In 1996, Bill Clinton got 72 percent of the Hispanic vote. In 2004, John Kerry’s support was in the 50s. And Republicans do not need to win a majority of the Latino vote to compete nationally, just a competitive minority of that vote.
But even this modest goal is impossible if Hispanic voters feel targeted rather than courted.
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Meanwhile, J.R. Dunn explains why the unresolved illegal status of immigrant Hispanic labor works so beautifully for the left.
The history of the left in this country is a history of division. Whatever conflict was current — labor vs. management, class vs. class, race vs. race — there you’d find the left, stirring things up in order to derive as much political benefit as possible. A workable democratic system demands a willingness to seek consensus and engage in compromise. The left prefers Balkanization and permanent conflict.
For some years now, it has appeared that the Leftist formula had reached the end of its string. The corrupt and crime-ridden unions were on their last legs, hemorrhaging members even as they drove jobs overseas. Blacks were steadily moving into the middle class and becoming less susceptible to separatist rhetoric. An attempt to transform the university student body into a permanent revolutionary phalanx on the Peronist model had only partial success — students were willing to play while actually on campus, but after graduation they went on to more interesting pursuits.
So how to keep the pot boiling? The answer was to go find a new millet — or rather, to take advantage of the one next door, of the desperate people fleeing a serial kleptocracy, an uneducated, ignorant, and frightened mass open to all forms of manipulation.
This explains why illegal immigration is so important to the left. It explains why efforts to halt illegal border-crossings, a problem that wouldn’t challenge a six-year-old, are executed so half-heartedly and so often left unfinished (see the recent “virtual fence”). It explains the irrational response to Arizona’s effort to tighten up existing immigration law (not create new law — Arizona’s statute is no more than a reinforcement of existing federal law). It explains the insistence that any solution to the immigration problem provide for amnesty and citizenship for the millions of illegals already living within our borders. It has nothing to do with compassion, nothing to do with fairness, or practicality, or any of the other reasons offered by “reform” advocates. As is almost always the case where the American left is involved, what it has to do with is power.
The left wishes to use the illegals as a battering ram against the American polity, the same as they used labor, and blacks, and every other group they ever encountered. Illegals will become a new protected class, with privileges and entitlements denied the rest of the populace (including, ironically, current members of previous such classes). They will be discouraged from learning English, as occurs today under the doctrine of “bilingualism”, to assure that they remain a separate presence. A vast bureaucracy will arise to “assist” the new citizenry, funded with billions — oh hell, make that trillions, this is the Obama era — and staffed with sociologists, ethnographers, psychologists, and other disciplines unimagined today. All will be of the same political persuasion. A permanent crisis atmosphere will be generated around the new class. The “Amnestee” question will lead to endless problems and ramifications and act as a permanent indictment of the country and its policies. The native population (not to mention legal immigrants) will grow increasingly embittered and angered. The former illegals will be rendered even more miserable than they are today.
The solution is obvious. There must be no amnesty. Such an action would simply drop a permanent inassimilable presence in the midst of American society. Current law must be executed to the fullest, and where necessary (as in all the border states) reinforced with new state laws. Illegals now in the country must be encouraged to regularize themselves according to recognized procedure. They must not be allowed, for their sakes and ours, to become clients of the left-wing establishment. The immigrant problem must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, according to individual circumstances. The notion that there is an acceptable mass solution is pure fantasy.
While this may involve some hardship — and will certainly give rise to cries of “unfairness” — it is in the long run the best solution for all concerned. Even the illegals will be better off. Becoming a member of a left-wing client class may not be the worst possible fate, but it’s not far from the bottom either, as generations of welfare families can attest. American leftists did nothing for this country’s workers once the union vote-getting machines were established. The same can be said of blacks in the inner cities once the political machines were in action there. The goal of power is simply to perpetuate itself. Actually solving problems might interfere with that process.
Michael Barone rejects the craven advice so commonly being circulated these days urging the GOP to move toward the center.
I think Republicans today should be less interested in moving toward the center and more interested in running against the center. Here I mean a different “center” — not a midpoint on an opinion spectrum, but rather the centralized government institutions being created and strengthened every day. This is a center that is taking over functions fulfilled in a decentralized way by private individuals, firms and markets.
This center includes the Treasury, with its $700 billion of TARP funds voted last fall to purchase toxic assets from financial institutions and used instead to quasi-nationalize banks and preserve union benefits for employees and retirees of bankrupt auto companies. It includes the Federal Reserve, which has been vastly increasing the money supply. It includes a federal government whose $787 billion economic stimulus has so far failed to lower the unemployment rate from where the government projected it would be without the stimulus package.
To govern is to choose, as John F. Kennedy said, and those in charge of these new centralized institutions are making choices that inevitably favor some and hurt others. Unsurprisingly, the politically well connected tend to get the favors. Banks forced to take government money are now blocked from paying it back and in the meantime must direct funds where the government wants them to go.
Chrysler and General Motors bondholders have their property redistributed to the United Auto Worker retiree health-care fund (how the retirees help the companies make cars profitably is left unclear). Stimulus funds go to state governments with lavish contracts with public employee unions. And out of every dollar that goes to a union, a certain number of cents make their way to the Democratic Party.
Byron York published a nice tribute to Ronald Reagan recently in the Washington Examiner. The GOP would be well-advised to ignore people named Bush and to return to fidelity to the legacy of Ronald Reagan.
You drive up a steep, rough and winding road to reach Ronald Reagan’s ranch in the Santa Ynez mountains. For eight years, from 1981 to 1989, this place north of Santa Barbara was the Western White House; Reagan spent nearly a year of his time in office here. Now, what he called Rancho del Cielo is pretty much deserted.
But the ranch, tended by a lone caretaker, is still much like it was when Reagan was alive. It’s not open to the public; these days, the old adobe house and 688 surrounding acres are owned and carefully maintained by the conservative Young America’s Foundation. The group doesn’t have the staff or resources to conduct public tours, but they were kind enough to take me on a visit one afternoon last week.
The first thing that strikes you as you approach the house is how modest it is. The main part of the building was constructed in 1871. Even after Reagan added a couple of rooms when he bought it in 1975, the whole house only measured about 1,500 square feet. …
The house is nestled on the edge of a mountainside meadow. It’s idyllic, but if you drive about five minutes away, you’ll find another spot on the property, at the top of a hill, where the president could have built a new home, perhaps an impressive monument to himself, with fabulous views of the Pacific to the west and the valley to the east. Instead, Reagan preferred the little house by the meadow.
Walking around the ranch, you can’t help thinking about the current Republican party and its relationship to Reagan.
