It took an election of a President who started his political career in the 1970s to bring back all the gifts of that wonderful decade for a whole new generation of Americans to experience. The list in the four short months President Biden has been in office affecting history is eerily familiar . Gas shortages. Inflation. Poor job growth. Race tension. Drugs poring over the border. Middle East on fire. Communist dictatorships on the ascendance. American withdrawal from an overseas military debacle. Cratering American confidence in its institutions. The difference this time is all of this was on purpose. What would possess a country with the natural abundance of materials, talent , and freedoms of America to willingly subvert its own innate proclivity for success? The simple answer is leadership exhaustion, requesting we simply learn to accept that maintaining exceptionalism is too daunting. It appears it has taken a leader in obvious personal decline to show the rest of us how we can find happiness in a national decline. As the left sagely informs us with its post modern weariness for personal initiative, Buck up comrades. Soon it will be curtains, and no one will feel left behind.
The malaise of the 1970s, was officially named by President Carter as the country’s pathologic diagnosis towards the end of the decade. It appeared the American experiment was out of ideas and out of energy. This was not an entirely unpredictable outcome of the awesome responsibility the conclusion of World War II forced upon the United States, to have a traditionally isolationist people take on the mantle of leadership of the free world. This uncomfortable responsibility was as a consequence of exiting the war with the country’s massive manufacturing infrastructure intact, fully 50% of the the world’s economic capacity. The cold war for dominance between the Soviet Union and the United States forced a perpetual state of proxy wars as a direct confrontation in the nuclear age was simply unthinkable. The constant pressure to address external challenges left the US vulnerable to internal restlessness and contradictions given its own long standing inequities in civil rights, environment, and infrastructure. The solitary injection of self esteem coming from the spectacular accomplishment of the national crusade of landing a man on the moon and returning the crew safely within a single decade of the sixties, left the nation surprisedly bereft of energy for the next technological leap forward. Assassinations of political leaders and an excruciating political debacle in Watergate that took down a President and left the assumed Constitutional stability wobbly and bruised, was followed by ignominious loss of Indochina despite the painful investment tens of thousands of lives and a trillion dollars. The country seemed lost from its moorings, friendless, and feeble against an ascendant Soviet empire.
Gas prices soared along with interest and jobless rates. Cities became dens of uncontrolled crime and pollution. A generation of young people had seen the American promise of a better life with each succeeding generation a hollow facade. The President of the United States in his frustration stated the obvious. The problem was with people and their malaise, and his only advice was to …hunker down.
The amazing, recurring characteristic of America since its 1776 has always been its stubborn counterintuitive resiliency at times of apparent mortal peril and despondency. The winter of 1777-78 found the American army in frozen taters at a point of virtual collapse at Valley Forge while the greatest military power in the world inhabited all the major cities. 1781 saw the spectacular reversal of Yorktown with Cornwallis surrendering his entire army and with it the last tendrils of hope of maintaining the British dominance of the colonies. The British took their revenge on a helpless United States in 1812 burning the White House down humiliating the fleeing US President Madison. 1814 cumulated in the obliteration of the British at New Orleans by Andrew Jackson and the removal of British influence forever between Mexico and Canada. By 1861, an irreconcilable view of the country’s reason for being and the core rationality the founding documents led to a horribly violent schism and the deaths of three quarters of a million Americans. Massive loss and destruction, and the martyrdom of a President proved insufficient to prevent the eventual hard one reconciliation and the inexorable forces that finally corrected America’s great flaw a century later. The spectacularly horrific thirty years of two brutal world wars bracketing a world wide depression seemed to risk the very existence of the American experiment against massive economic and totalitarian forces. Yet by 1948, the American Colossus stood economically unique in the world, and opportunity for every American seemed to have finally attained the wildest dreams of the genius founders.
The culmination of the events of the 1970s were similarly felt by the elites to have finally positioned America in a post modern position of having its destiny determined by others, and many of the elite felt America deserved its fate. Yet, once again, from an entirely unexpected source, a so-called second rate film actor turned politician named Ronald Reagan, an American renaissance was borne so great that it was to last almost 40 years, the tide incredibly bringing down the Soviet empire, freeing hundreds of millions of people, and restoring the American capacity for risk and innovation, birthing and developing the Information Revolution.
The past ten years seem to reflect how this tendency for American rebirth sticks in the craw of the American elite. President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” struck at the heart of America’s seeming providential awakenings. For socialist ideology, a history of repeated massive failure on the world stage only deepens the resolve of the leftist need to destroy American exceptionalism, for as long as it exists, the narrative to simply accept the delivered justice to the masses by the terminally educated who know better about the appropriate societal strata. The flaming orange comet that was Donald Trump only incited a great desperation to destroy American resilience once and for all, and get it line with the other countries that had left striving for greatness behind for simple co- existence. Trump had to go, and with each unbound, irrational success he had in somehow restoring Americans taste for the hard work of recovery, the elites task became more determined, and more deadly in targeting.
Succeed they did, and now the Presidency is in the hands of a shell of a husk of a carton of a man who in his prime was sub-prime, and in his deteriorated state, simply a blank canvas upon which the agenda can be painted and the narrative to be guided. This time, they hope, it really is over. Gas lines, exploding interest rates, unbounded debt, existential crises, and a floundering flounder of a leader.
This time, they got us beat, don’t they?
Could America achieve one more Awakening from this debacle?
President of Hillsdale College – Dr. Larry P. Arnn (attrib.wikipedia)
The war on culture has been a many decade siege with an inexorable direction of attempted domination of the narrative by the left in almost every phase of life. Classical natural law advocates and conservatives imbued with the notion that an unfettered forum of ideas without prejudice is the best means of preservation of individual rights and concepts regarding liberty, charity, opportunity, and progress, have been progressively exiled into the cultural wilderness. It has been an assumption by conservatives that the pillars of life framed by the American nation’s reason for being as defined in its founding documents, the several thousand year multi-generational devotion to the religious concepts of a good life, and the cumulative success the nation has had in overcoming its flaws through at times bloody trial in defense of individual liberty, would resist any superficial, emotion driven narrative of attack aimed at destruction. Despite the undeniable history of horrors propagated by the left in the hysterical excesses and overreach of the French Revolution, the many models of enforced servitude, vicious exploitation, mass death and imploded economies of the totalitarian left in the twentieth century, and the pathetic poor cousins of socialism surviving into the 21st, the model of domination continues apace and has designs of global command. The original model was victory through politics, the brutal techniques of the totalitarian parties, the National Socialist and Communist, eliminating all that stood in their way. Their ultimate failure was their insistence upon a forced overnight conversion of all under their reach, that inevitably brought an aggressive response by freedom loving peoples sickened by their violent inhumanity. The newer method is significantly more nuanced, but equally as committed to ultimate victory. The left’s focus has not been on arguing the rational facts and philosophies that underpin the country, but instead, like a slow virus, infecting the forums for learning that have always been the source of revelation to their nations where truth, opportunity, and human progress reside. The strategy has been the progressive takeover of cultural narrative, through owning the curriculum through every level of education, overwhelming the diverse voices in the entertainment industry, and turning the news and social media platforms into a propaganda amplifier that ghostlights all contrary opinion or resistance to the narrative. The virus is now extending into every form of employment, ballot, and institution, such that people must now fear their non-aligned personal belief or expression could potentially eliminate their very means of life and productivity. The darkness of the twentieth century driven by these forces, only barely overcome, appear about to return to full dark flower in the twenty first in the greatest of democracies.
It doesn’t mean that everybody is willing to go quietly into that dark night. A considerable cadre of talents are recognizing the war for what it is, a coordinated attack on the very principles of freedom and rationality that lead to a good and just society. They are beginning to fight back into the heart of the beast, the grip on today’s mind that is the education system and heart that is expressed in the entertainment industry. Public education has taken multiple generations of the nation’s youth and filled them with national self loathing, elimination of rigor, and narratives of victimhood. The result is an insecure, dependent, and passively aggressive society that feels no hope for the future without supervision, and no foundation of thought to help find their own way. Hillsdale College, in Michigan, led by its President Dr. Larry Arnn, a historian and educator, has trailblazed a contrarian path to modern education that allows it to swing well above its size in the national consciousness. Hillsdale, by refusing any governmental funding of education, has been able to steer clear of the progressive mandates, and define itself by a rigorous and classically based learning process and curriculum for its students. The little college that could is producing graduates that understand the mechanisms of debating problems and forming answers for their own lives standing upon the shoulders of the great minds and ideas that have come before them. Hillsdale is slowly injecting life and transforming the moribund conservative response to the radical left’s takeover of education, and others are taking note and building on the model. For fostering proudly and defiantly through his campus the best that western civilization has to offer to a fertile young mind through education, Dr. Larry Arnn is Ramparts People We should Know – #35.
Larry Arnn was born in tiny Pocahontas in rural northeast Arkansas, but due to his intellect and drive, had the education of the elites. Graduating from Arkansas State, he immediately widened his educational horizons by attending prestigious graduate school for his masters and Ph.D at Claremont near Los Angeles under the famed philosopher educator Harry Jaffa. This led to elite appointments at the London School of Economics and Oxford University. This brought him to the job that has defined his intellectual reputation as an expert in the life and career of Winston Churchill, when he was hired as Director of Research for Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s official historian. Returning to the US, Arnn became one of the original founders of the Claremont Institute, one of the first conservative academically driven think tanks, and in 2000, became President of Hillsdale College, a small Michigan college that has always set its sights on classical education and under Arnn, a national powerhouse in conservative circles as a educational ramparts for debate, education, and talent extending out into our institutions. The little college of Hillsdale under the leadership of Larry Arnn importantly however for our future hasn’t stopped there. Hillsdale has determined to project its philosophy of education backward as well as forward, developing a K through 12 curriculum and onboarding for charter schools that are establishing themselves all over the country. The schools are directed like a laser at countering the modern esthetic that children’s education should be self directed and without rigor. Dr. Arnn through the college has developed online learning for adults as well that provides self study in philosophy, history , and religion that reinvigorates the whys of a fulfilled life and society. The wonderful lectures are available for all to see and absorb. Churchillian vigor and respect for past greatness having much to teach us about our present imbues the diverse Hillsdale platform for learning. We are all the better for it.
Larry Arnn is Ramparts People We Should Know – #35 because he, among all people acknowledges that strong ramparts built upon the confidence that comes with knowledge are necessary to resist the ever more emotional and taunting pressure of the left to overwhelm society. The left is pushing a world of fealty to false gods , or risk a life of condemnation and being ostracized. It will take many, many more Dr. Arnns that confidently say no, stand athwart, and trust in the intellectually sentient being that is man to want more from life then simple existence. We need to take his example, and encourage more of the same from our leaders. Our leaders need to start standing up for what is right and good, and stop with their nonsense of avoiding offense. If you can lead, lead. If you can give, give what you can. There is no time to doddle on the job ahead.
The news this morning February 17, 2021, of the passing of Rush Limbaugh was a gut punch but not a surprise to his many millions of fans. With his brave announcement last year acknowledging a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer, the inevitable denouement of a terminal disease was ordained, and Rush knew it and faced it without ambiguity. He spent the last year doing what he had done for thirty years, projecting the voice of a great unrepresented populous into the national discourse, making it impossible to ignore by the elites, who yearned for the day when he, and they, would go away. The day has come. Most obvious is not the great emptiness of his passing, but of a great silence, because into the breach there was only one spiritual voice, the Great MahaRushi, reaching out to millions who felt somebody stood up for them and their quant, old fashion values of liberty, individualism, and patriotism. It is now gone.
The magic elixir that was Rush Limbaugh was never really understood by the elites, even those who stood to make millions from the popularity of his program. Limbaugh was Twitter before there was Twitter, the Internet before there was Internet, connecting people in a shared experience three hours a day, year after year. With Rush coming to the national stage in 1988 from a short run as a talk jockey in Sacramento, California to a small but national platform in New York on the ABC network, the idea of an opinionated point of view projected over the duration of three hours maintaining audience interest was unheard of. Opinion was something left to the back pages of newspapers, informing people the “correct” way to think on issues and was considered unseemly and definitely unprofitable in public discourse. Conservative opinion was treated like a zoo animal, to be viewed from a safe distance as absurd esoterica on programs such as William Buckley’s Firing Line. The assumption I suspect of the producers at ABC hiring the Missouri born rock and roll deejay was that it would fill a couple months of air time creating publicity, until they could think of something else. The rapidly developing truth of the matter was that no one foresaw the pent up demand, because no one had really wanted to know it was there. Ronald Reagan had been an enigma to them, appealing to a massive group of people that crossed party lines and therefore identified as “uncontrollable”. With Reagan gone, the assumption was this transient cultural anomaly “died” with the end of his Presidency. Limbaugh perceptively interpreted Reagan’s special connection with average Americans and converted it into a daily revival meeting.
The syndicated show started as a few score of syndicated stations, and rapidly grew into the behemoth of over 600 stations in 50 states reaching over twenty million people daily. Five days a week, every week, the middle of the day was tied to a spot on the dial of an assumed defunct technology, radio, over the previously archaic radio AM frequency in nearly every town in America. People listened at work – in their cars, in trucks, down highways, at construction sites, on tractors – fulfilling their good feelings for the day with a complete dose of Limbaugh’s unique mix of unfettered opinion, biting satire, and out and out entertainment. A phenomena in the 1990’s were the development of “Rush” rooms – places in restaurants or work cafeterias where people could eat and drink and in a communal fashion share exclusively Rush. The most liberal of cities had to face the reality of talk radio breaching the liberal consensus, for the simple reason it made money, and if the station had Rush, it made massive money, and a bunch of careers. Alternative media was born, and Limbaugh invented it. Limbaugh opened the revival all those years with the stirring opening notes of the Pretenders’ anthem “My City Was Gone” and a statement he was reaching out “across the fruited plain” to all of the millions who sought him out, the first telling recognition and smack back at the developing elite snobbery regarding that ‘backward’ land mass between the coasts they derided as “Fly Over Country”. The elites could not possibly stand him, because progressively they could not stand being restrained by those who would not submit to the post-history world of globalism, special interest groups, and international consumerism.
The undeniable impact of Limbaugh was his singular effect on trumpeting the 1994 “Contract with America”, Newt Gingrich’s multi-point take down of Washington elitism as a strategy for nationalizing congressional elections. Limbaugh’s incessant mantra for support for the radical conservative idea brought untold political power to bear, and what had been casually derided as a blustering, buffoonish “shock jock” schtick, became revolutionary political science, with the Democrats losing what had been over 40 years of uninterrupted congressional supremacy – the stunning outcome of over 60 seats turning republican and Gingrich vaulted into the Speaker’s chair. Limbaugh was greeted by the incoming representatives with thunderous applause and ‘honorary” membership in the class. He was credited by most with being the difference maker, the revolutionary. From that point onward, no political national campaign to could hope to progress without securing their “Limbaugh” flank.
Limbaugh grated at the misconception that he was a Republican front; he saw himself as a conservative and saw no rational alternative from the democrat side of the aisle. The ever more progressive fracture of the common sense middle left him labelled as a party insider to the media and frequently he felt stuck supporting candidates he felt had abandoned his conservatism. He tolerated Bush, grated at McCain, and overlooked the formless Romney to support the fiscal conservative Ryan. He began to see real heat from Washington elites when he stated that if their anointed messianic figure, the new President Obama, was to govern on a socialist agenda, he hoped he would fail. Obama had already been re-invented as a uniting figure, having cracked the invisible race barrier to power, and Limbaugh’s alternative opposition was something that could not be tolerated. The attacks regarding Limbaugh’s frailties became personal, and incessant. A rehab stay for opioid addiction resulting from his multiple back surgeries made his private medical history somehow fair game for a “crusading”district attorney. His sudden deafness left his unique gift- the art of communication, in maximal peril. He soldiered on, performing the almost impossible task of doing a talk show for three months unable to hear his own voice, until the technology of cochlear implants saved his gift, and our access to it, for another decade. He became an elite outcast, but his loyal audience never buckled and continued to grow.
Limbaugh kept his one of a kind cultural bonafides thirty years into his career, when he recognized, before almost all others the phenomena that was Trump. In 2015, confronted with a packed slate of Republican candidates that dominated the establishment conversation, Limbaugh instead listened to his audience and realized that the irregular newbie politician Trump connected with the “fly overs” like no other candidate. To the amazement of many, Limbaugh started promoting the Trumpian movement long before there was any semblance of documented electoral support. As with Gingrich’s revolutionaries of 1994 and the Tea Party of 2010, Limbaugh saw through his audience a yearning and loyalty to the brash Trump that no other establishment candidate could hope to achieve,. Limbaugh presciently saw in Trump a real chance at defeating his arch nemesis Hillary Clinton, and her drive to install the permanent marriage of crony capitalism and the eternal government ruling class. November, 2016, Limbaugh was once again right regarding the American pulse, and the pundits left breathless at the stunning Trump win.
The Trump years for all their achievements left Limbaugh having to defend the combustible Trump with a diminishing set of rhetorical weapons through vicious counter attacks led by the marriage of political opposition and a media no longer hiding their uniform bias against all the Limbaugh principles of a successful American society. Two impeachments, a devastating pandemic, and Limbaugh’s ominous diagnosis left both Limbaugh and Trump terminally wounded. Trump spasmed into post-electoral incoherence and was washed from the scene not by the millions who supported him, but a ludicrous clinging to a “rigged” election and the pathetic band of capitol interlopers that thought they were somehow protesting an injustice. Limbaugh fought the ever more devastating effects of radical chemotherapy, sapping his strength, and eventually succumbing to the irresistible force of the malignancy. February 2nd proved to be the last on air time for the great one.
And now he belongs to the ages. El Rushbo has led his last revival and we have been allowed into the great radio tent of liberty, attending the “Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies” for the last time. The ever present three hour conversation lead by El Rushbo and his Excellence in Broadcasting Network across the American fruited plain with millions of us Americans who harbored the quant notion that the founders had been on to something great, is no more. The great heart of liberty, individualism, and optimism for America’s future through its original calling, has been silenced. Somehow, we at the Ramparts, absent our great captain, will carry on. Thank you Rush , for all the hours and laughs, restored convictions, and pride in this great country we shared – together. God Bless.
It is a testament to the concept of towering intellect when your ideas, only partially preserved over the ancient recesses of time, contribute to the fundamental core of our understanding of just about everything 2400 years later. That is the essence of the man Aristotle (384BC – 322BC) who lived in Greece at the time where the means of measurable information was minuscule and the depth of thought and reason by those observers of their world immense. In the ancient world, Greece swung way above its tiny weight in relative resources and manpower on the basis of its celebration of the intellect. In the realm of reason, giants lived – Socrates begot Plato and Plato begot Aristotle. Aristotle was uniquely among them a true polymath. Everything interested him; he spent his 62 years learning and expounding on diverse topics such as zoology, physics, logic, the arts, psychology and economics. Of particular note was his interest in the meaning of everything, that world where the human intellect goes to understand the why things are, and have come to be. The world of metaphysics is not for the casual afternoon of contemplation. The arguments that form the foundation of a logic explaining existence, causation, effect, time and space have absorbed the greatest of our perceptive thinkers over the eons. Understanding the abstraction of things helps to bring clarity to the underlying essential truth, independent of the point of observation. Aristotle, reaching across the 24 intervening centuries, has much to tell us about our current intellectual vacuousness and lack of rigor and casualness regarding truth.
Aristotle perceived a world that existed not as some abstract projection of reality, but as full of real substance under constant tension from the sum of its parts. In a beautiful contemplation well beyond my power to deliver or do justice in a few sentences, Aristotle dealt with the basic conundrum of whether it is possible that something could ever emanate from something else; how is it possible that something could seemingly come from nothing, an impossibility if existence is real and not a projection or simulation. The first concept was that which exists, or actual, has the potential to change, but requires that its specific, associated potential to change be actualized by another entity, or actualizer. In simple framing, as described by Edward Feser in his wonderful treatise, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, a hot cup of coffee left out over time cools, yet, while hot, its coolness does not yet exist, but must come into being affected by another. The hot coffee, though hot, has a potential to coolness, but requires an outside force, an actualizer- i.e. the cool air around it, or the ice cube you drop in it. The air has the potential to cool the coffee but only if it has sufficient potential for coolness actualized by the air conditioner that acts upon it. The air conditioner’s potential to cool air is actualized by the freon that circulates within it. The freon’s potential to circulate is actualized by the motor that actualizes the circulation of the freon. The motor’s potential to actualize the circulation is actualized by electricity, the flow of electricity actualized by the power plant, and so on and so on. The potential each entity has to change is actualized by an actualizer, and so change occurs all the time through actualizers moving upon the actualized until one gets to the point of existence from non-existence, at which the first actualizer must be self actualized or could not exist , its existence always actual and not affected by change. That self actualized entity moves causation without being acted upon because it is inherently fully actualized and therefore devoid of potential to be acted or moved upon. It is the core of all existence, Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover.
I am not so foolhardy to think that the above paragraph talking superficially about a cup of coffee remotely orients one towards Aristotle’s concepts regarding an Unmoved Mover, a fully actualized, “unique, immutable, eternal, immaterial intellect that is the uncaused ultimate cause of everything other than itself”. Aristotle was not concerning himself with questions of man’s reason for existence or the possible existential relationship of the thinking being towards the devine. He was concerned with metaphysics, not divinity.
The logic however has much to teach us about our society’s looseness with truth, and current disdain for the accumulated thought of the generations that came before them. Post modernists and their reliance on narrative to describe the world around them rather than any rationally derived understanding of underlying truth leads to the vacuousness of today’s lives and crisis mongering. Approaching the search for truth as a device that must be actualized by a narrative or not exist at all, is codified in all our modern misunderstandings of man as both the maker and breaker of our age’s ills. Man is ultimate, and ultimately destructive. We must therefore remove ourselves from yesterday’s mistakes, and accept our burden to cleanse the ignorant past. The narrative expresses itself as “settled” or “unmoved” by alternative potentials or actualizers. The world’s climate existed in ideal form before man, and man’s effect upon it is conclusive and ultimate in its “change” toward the worst. Wealth is finite, and therefore one man’s accumulation of wealth actualizes another becoming poorer – redistribution is the only “settled” science to restore appropriate balance. Sex is fluid; the concept of “man” or “woman” is an intersectional perception not a biological truth. God does not exist, because if He did, there would not be inequity and evil. Science is fully realized truth, and any rational outcome simply awaits the unveiling of that truth through more science. Our failings as a society are systemic, and inherent because of our biases, not our individual potentials. The settled narrative substitutes for truth. Our politics are devoid of consensus, because that would require rationalizing cause and associated effect. We fall for conspiracy theories, fragments or distortions of facts, collective blindness and fear mongering that fits our narrative, because the more complex, nuanced underlying truth is potentially going to challenge us and take us to places we do not wish to go.
Aristotle taught his students, including his most famous pupil, Alexander the Great, that ultimately the universe functions far beyond us, upon its own logic, on its own timetable, and with potential outcomes dependent upon the forces that actualized the potential. Human beings can only attempt to conceptualize the larger truth, but are owners only of their place in existence, awaiting the actualizing of their potential by the untold number of forces that are actualized themselves in an innumerable series of interactions. It is left to each human the intellect that perceives the appreciation of what was possible, what was actualized, and what was inevitable. It is our unique gift among species.
It is left to the Unmoved Mover alone, to be responsible for it all.
Conceived with two of the greatest foundational documents in history on the principles and means to “redress grievances”, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with its associated Bill of Rights, the country instead has determined to dissolve itself into a morass of retribution and moral incoherence.
Faced with the realization of a concluded verdict on an electoral process that transmogrified into the mother of all sorriest excuses for electoral integrity, a randy group of self absorbed “protesters” acted upon their outrage, predicated on the thinnest of veneers of understanding of the above rights , to invade the capital building and pathetically try to overturn the result. Their deluded president, convinced that what was obvious to him should be obvious to all, railed against the legitimacy of the process that for more than two hundred years has maintained the stable and peaceful transfer of power associated with the world’s oldest democracy.
What we are now left with is a hot mess. A emboldened congress with the weakest of mandates nevertheless feeling empowered to blow up the documents that have served us so well in times much harsher than the current one. Can’t cotton the current President? Impeach him again. Don’t recognize the damage done to the confidence of the voter by destroying the link between the integrity of the vote and the will of the people? No matter, make the offending processes permanent.
Most grievous of all, offended by the thoughts of others to disagree with your opinion, make the contrarian opinions disappear. Make their platforms for expression disappear. Make their words and ideas invisible. And if possible, isolate, humiliate, and ostracize from the perfected society.
It’s this last unpardonable sin that will outlive all the emotional immaturities of the current mood. Freedom of expression, freedom of speech itself is the bedrock of what elevates humanity from the other species. Discourse, however objectionable and at times painful, is what sentient, thinking beings do to solve problems, improve understanding, and avoid conflict. It is the most precious jewel of the freedom of man, and stands for that singular reason in the very first statement of inalienable rights and the first principle of the declaration of rights in the constitution. It is the core of what stands to protect all from what Churchill so perfectly tomed as the risk of “sinking into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister and perhaps prolonged by the lights of perverted Science.” Our current world stands at such an abyss, where small groups of elites feel empowered to censor, silence, dismiss and if necessary remove any opinions that does not fit their world view. On colleges, debates have been removed for their supposed power to injure the sensitive and intellectually vacuous who can not tolerate dissent from another’s truth. In academia, history is being rewritten to intrepret actions on modern prejudices rather than as a mechanism to better understand ourselves from our accumulated past. On social media, voices and their thoughts are banned by “committees for the public good’, so powerful that the President of the United States was banned from defending his views. In Congress, “science” on social justice, climate change, and individual speech will soon be settled. Sites like Ramparts may find themselves no longer able to articulate a defense of “western civilization” without civic minders determining acceptable content. The Orwellian world, once thought science fiction, is upon our doorstep.
If we let it happen. If we don’t recognize that what is lost in our recent travails is not a labile, undisciplined populist and his temporary hold on the bully pulpit, but access to the very rights that allowed this man to speak his peace, and the rest of us to think and contemplate our place in the world and our future against other versions. Strength does not come from fearing another’s views or ability to persuade, but rather our ability to think for ourselves and push back if need be.
Christopher Hitchens was an irascible atheist with contempt for those who feelings were hurt when he spoke his mind, but we miss him now more than ever because he was a warrior for free speech and could articulate better than most why even the most hateful speech protects the search for the noble and the ultimate truth. The video below is worthy from beginning to end as a raw introduction to free expression. Prepare to be insulted by Mr. Hitchens and his,at times, nasty opinions about religion. He would have it no other way if it stimulated you to read more, think more, converse more, and ultimately express why his views miss the eternal truth that sources the happiness he always searched for and never found. Let’s return to learning what we need to know, and confront the current tyranny against expression. It is, ultimately, an age old tyranny as fragile and frail as the comfortable lies it attempts to sustain. It will strengthen our resolve and our confidence for what we now see clearly as the great challenge of our time.
It may be years before we really have a full understanding as to what really happened in the 2020 American national election. It will considerably sooner than that, baring some spectacular unforeseen discovery regarding the integrity of the vote, that Joseph Biden will be certified the winner of the Presidential election, having laid claim, by far, to the most votes for President in the history of American election history. Frankly, with the count continuing at this time, Biden has accumulated almost 10 million more votes than the previously most prodigious vote collector for President, 2008’s Barack Obama. Barack Obama, a uniquely attractive candidate presenting as a historic first in the country, will now no longer even be second highest. That place will be held by the presumptive loser of 2020, President Trump whose 73 million votes will be four million more than Obama’s 2008 total. In a country that has consistently averaged 55% to 60% eligible voters casting ballots in the last 8 previous national elections, 2020 is on path to see 72%. States such as my Wisconsin may see 90% eligible voters voting. It seems that the race between a 74 year old irascible demon in Trump and a 78 year old establishment pol who barely campaigned in Biden created a level of enthusiasm exclaimed through voting never before seen in American history. In the Age of Covid, it seems the real secret to Americans fully participating in their democracy is a full blown pandemic.
The results of this massive turnout defied all polling. The polls not only got things wrong, they got things historically wrong. For weeks, polls conclusively showed a blue wave – a massive Biden victory of 8-12% popular vote, electoral college landslide, probable flipping of the Senate to Democrat control, and a gain of up to 25 seats in the House of Representatives were projected. Instead, a vote differential of 100,000 votes in four states may prove the difference between a Biden and Trump Presidency, the Senate nominally remains in Republican hands pending the result of two run off Senate elections in Georgia, Republicans have gained between 10 and 15 seats putting Nancy Pelosi Speakership in peril, and not a single state house legislature converted from republican to democrat. The blue wave, in a spectacular, historically high vote, became a blue drubbing. A serious disconnect between the ability to take the pulse of the electorate through profiled polls has come to full realization with the 2020 vote.
So what have we learned from the apparent repudiation of President Trump as the leader of the country and the massive support for the party realizing his agenda throughout the land? What have we learned about ourselves, subtly woven in between the lines of narrative driven by an ever more biased social elite and their media that spend four years working ceaselessly to drive the stake in the Trump phenomena?
The electoral process has become corrupted: The steady conversion over the past 200 years of a nation organized originally as a republic into a country driven progressively and overwhelmingly by blunt democratic tools has eroded the careful balance that secured the integrity of the American political experience. Integrity has been under assault after assault with weakening of the bond between the discerning voter and their ballot. Once a process oriented to voters with direct stake in process, the expansion of the voting rolls to “count every vote” has led to increasing loosening in the weight of a voting decision on election day. Variability of requirement for proof of identification, shortening of residency period, lack of confirmation of up to date voting rolls, same day registration, overturning of legislative standards by court rulings within days of the election, and loosening of absentee rules has almost completely subsumed the one person one vote accuracy that has been the traditional election standard assuring the presumption of integrity of outcome regardless of party. In 2020, the steady drip of corruption of the election day concept reached a zenith with mail in balloting, extended over months, allowing for a rich environment for ballot harvesting. Sold as a necessity of the Covid crisis defining in person electoral actions “unsafe”, a tsunami of mail in ballots were sent out state after state using addresses of voters unfiltered for the out of state residency, subsequently moved, or even the dead months prior to the election. Defined as easily the most at risk method of voting based upon international democratic standards for voting integrity and the risk of corrupted ballots, states used Covid as the excuse to flood massive quantities of ballots to unseen individuals. According to the American Spectator, 2.6 million of the 3.1 million mail in ballots sent out in the key swing state of Pennsylvania were cast for the election – almost 90% of all ballots sent out. Mail-in votes historically have had high percentages of ballots thrown out for inappropriate identification and other issues. In the 2020 New York primary, fully 14% were thrown out for such reasons. In Pennsylvania for the national election of 2020 – 0.3% were thrown out of the count. That’s 0.3%. In each of the crucial swing states, mail in voting created massive after hours swings in the voting tally on November 3rd, long after the closed polls should President Trump with commanding leads in Michigan, Wisconsin, and particularly Pennsylvania. Internationally, democracies have moved away from using mainstream mail in voting for its inherent corruptibility. The United States created the most massive electoral mail in whirlwind in 2020 and it determined the outcome of the Presidential election. Historians will have to decide if the outcome was corrupted in a manner that subverted the will of the people. What is the extent of effort to support permanently this conversion in electoral standards in the United States? Search Google for mail in vote fraud in the United States election, and the top ten searches will state how it didn’t occur. Google doth protest too much.
Money now rules the roost: The 2020 US national election broke all records for spending by the political parties. Over 14 billion dollars were spent in the election to support candidates, twicewhat was spent in 2016, and 6.6 billion of it on the Presidential election. Democrats outspent Republicans over 2 to 1. William Proxmire, Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1957 to 1989, re-elected a staggering 5 times, ‘in his last two campaigns refused contributions and spent only 200 dollars on his re-election paperwork and mailing back unsolicited contributions’ (wikipedia). The Democrat challenger to Lindsey Graham in South Carolina 2020 Senate race spent over 100 million dollars – losing by the race by 10%. The Democrat challenger to Mitch McConnell in Kentucky spent 75 million to lose by 20 % points. Money was so flush that Joe Biden maintained almost universal imprint in front of the voting population despite hardly campaigning in person anywhere for the three months prior to the election. The massive investment in Facebook, Twitter, Google and other social media sites was married to an almost wall to wall radio and television ad coverage and a media presentation that secured better than 90% negative Trump stories through the election period. Money poured in from every conceivable deep pockets contributor into almost every conceivable race. Mike Bloomberg bragged he spent almost 150 million dollars in Florida alone targeting Trump’s defeat. Other billionaires poured through every loophole in soft money to assure their will. The investment may have been the difference at the top of the ticket in defeating Trump. That will likely be enough a learned lesson to help the rich elite forget the abysmal return on their dollars in the rest of the election.
America is changing: The generation of baby boomers that has dominated American politics for 30 years reached its expiration date with the 2020 election. This may sound oxymoronic having apparently just voted in the oldest President in the history of the United States at 78 years of age, but Biden’s presumptive victory truly defines the end. Biden’s price for being selected for candidacy was his willingness to be a passive foil for the real modern energy of the party, staying in his basement, declaring no detail or principles to be judged upon, engaging in no campaign rallies and selecting the most left leaning senator in his party for the vice presidential slot. Despite his often bombastic braggadocio in regard to his career, he will find little ground to define a separate agenda from the younger, aggressive inner circle who pulled him across the finish line. The eighty year old Speaker of the House Pelosi previously discovered this sad reality with her inability to control her caucus in the House of Representatives, resulting in a sharp leftward turn, and the subsequent sacrifice of multiple so called moderate democrats in the 2020 election. Biden and Pelosi have received their lifetime achievement medals in the election results, and I expect a rapid loss of influence for both as they try to subvert the revolution, and are cast aside.
There are multiple other signs of a changing America, no more so then the dramatic infusion of black and hispanic votes in support of Trump. The initial statistics suggest up to 18% of black males and over 34% of Hispanics were part of the Trump voting wave. Despite four years of the media’s hysterical accusations of a supposed “racist” core of Trump defining his decisions, and Trump’s bombastic call for containing the border risking the alienation of hispanic voters, a dramatic conversion of multi-ethnic voters to America First philosophy as evidenced by the stunning Trump support was instead the lesson of 2020. The Democrat Party has placed everything on the victim card and the need to divide America into ever more socially segregated tribes. Hyphen- America was designed to be future majority of inter-sectionalized victim groups connected only by their supposed hyphenated alienation from the promise of America – African-American, Hispanic-American, Gay American, Trans-American, Female American, etc. The saving force sold by Democrats was that in socialist equality of outcome, all the inherent inequities would be more fairly adjudicated by a just government rather than the vagaries of individual differences and available destinies. Prominently, the first crack in the fifty year wall of African American voter uniform fealty to the ‘government party’ showed real movement in 2020 as a burgeoning middle class in the black community no longer wanted their individual success defined by others as owed to others, rejecting the quid pro quo. Hispanic Americans rebelled against the condescending attitude of Democrat elites that suggested that the common root Spanish language automatically linked all cultures philosophically. Cuban and Venezuelan descendants in Florida, having escaped miserable conditions forced upon them in their socialist homelands were in no mood to see their American homeland stumble into the same tired claptrap of the socialist mantra. Those of Mexican descent in Texas swung hard toward Republicans as they soured on the constant influx of new illegals that threatened their hard won individual gains. No longer interested in being categorized, multiple ethnic groups pushed toward Republican identification as they defended the American promise as they lived it. More and more identified with an incentive to shed their hyphenated prison, and express their individualism as Americans, culturally linked to their past, but ever more American in their forward thinking. The result of the election was a new Republican core, multi-ethnic, middle class, and more linked to the American promise than the sclerotic party itself had ever recently self identified. The Washington elites of both parties and the traditional Democrat strategies that had assumed the class distinctions and party loyalties were forever had their preconceptions shattered. The effects of Trump’s audacious smashup of assumptions regarding Americans, America, and its trajectory in the world will far outlive the result of the election.
The Age of Trump: Whether the election is eventually certified for Biden or not, the winner will be… Trump. Trump’s effect on the American political scene is unlike any politician since Reagan. The massive crowds that came out to be part of the experience of the peculiar Trump phenomena are unlike any previous populist iteration in that they meet and share their mutual enthusiasm whether Trump is there or not. The massive idolatry of Obama required his physical achievement of having succeeded at breaking the glass ceiling minorities felt defined the Presidency, and disappeared the second he left the position of power. The halting semblance of the Tea Party movement of 2010 was a mere foreshadowing of the massive and ever continuing Trump wave. Truck and boat rallies and Trumpathons were spontaneously organized and self driven through social media, to the horror of elites, who could not control the width and breath of the organic enthusiasm for what Trump had unleashed. What the gathering hordes found most attractive in Trump was his utter lack of contrived organization, and his completely open invitation to Anyone to take part, regardless of society’s applied label, who wanted to believe in the American promise again. He was seen as relentlessly fighting for them. His probable loss only reinforces the image he has cultivated, that elites were out to get him to prevent him from succeeding in accomplishing the rebirth of the American promise that millions wanted to once again live out. His ‘break eggs to get things done” oversized personality horrified the traditional moribund inhabitants of Washington – but was recognized by millions as to having actually got things done as he had promised. Reagan had organized his thoughts regarding the epic struggle with Communism into the most simple of concepts – “We win, they lose” – and pulled off the impossible in less than a decade. Trump understood better than anyone has since Reagan the power of simple direct messaging – exclaiming “When you win, We win”, and millions have taken up the mantle. The chance of anyone reducing Trump’s influence on this ever larger American phenomena with or without him in the White House is between slim and none, and slim left town.
The American Promise: 155 million American voters have now joined the battle. Which America comes out of the 2020 electoral experience and the Covid pandemic ? A surrender of individualism and uniquely American virtues of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the shared social global contract of the collective? A rebirth of the strength of each individual’s contribution and opportunity to control their own destiny? It is clear that the assumed arc toward an ever more “progressive” future of subservience for security is no longer accepted as inevitable by all. Whatever happens, we are likely entering a tumultuous period, where echoes of Lincoln’s premonition that a divided house can not stay divided – it must become all one thing, or all the other – will be the ultimate question. For the first time in my adult life, thanks in no small measure to Trump, both sides now fully understand each other’s intentions. Believe it or not, that is one of the more hopeful signs of a truly promising future for this great country and its people, as America remakes itself, over and over again.
I have no idea who will win the election for the Presidency of the United States 2020. The polls in the last week would suggest some tightening but the key swing states remain in the Biden column, or too close to call. In a truly bizarre, unprecedented strategy to an election, the Democrat party determined that the “hate” for the persona of Donald J Trump was so great that, the best election would be Trump against generic democrat, or more specifically, Trump versus Not Trump. Any democrat candidate with a core value would open the discussion to an actual in depth analysis of their position on issues. A “generic” democrat would have a marshmallow core, absent of any formed opinion other than “build back better”. In Joseph Biden,they found a 47 year political caricature of the ‘experienced’ Washington insider, absent of achievement, enmeshed in the process of the deep state, desperate for one last grasp for the ring and willing to represent any opinion necessary to be generic. The supreme contrast with an over opinionated Trump could not be more stark. At this point, Trump is holding rallies before thousands of enthusiastic supporters who see him as the holy crusader for their personal sacrifice and ignored contribution to the fabric of American success. Biden is holding rallies before tens of people who work for the campaign, as enormous work has gone into removing any semblance of a Biden directed future, in favor of his cloaked deep state minders that will actually reorient the future. It is just what the Democrats and jilted insider republicans have been working tirelessly for four years. If you see what we have done to Trump, you will be careful to stay out of the way of what we are about to do to you.
It just might work, and the money and polls are betting that the public just wants to make the constant turmoil stop.The tactic may have created a Stockholm syndrome among the voting electorate. Just tell me what to do, to make it all go away.
But after all, this remains the national election of the most powerful, and freest nation upon the earth. If the decision is to divest from the current leader to an unknown future, an in-depth review of what has transpired with this leader, and what would be given up, is the mark of a sophisticated electorate. What is objectively clear and indisputable after perceptive analysis, is that Donald J Trump has been …. a very consequential President. I’m not kidding. Despite all the bluster of how chaotic and dysfunctional the Trump administerial style has been reported as, the results objectively reviewed are impressive, cross all the facets of judgement in both domestic and foreign policy achievements, and perhaps most amazing of all, align with candidate Trump’s 2016 promises to an unprecedented extent. If you voted for Trump in 2016 based upon what he proposed to accomplish, you saw fruition in spades. In four short years, under assault from almost the first day that would have dislodged and defeated a lesser man, the President has gotten it done. It is said that Trump’s personality fundamentally is the gasoline that drives the hatred that could lose him in 2020 election. If so, it says more of us as an electorate that can not discern the simple, telling truth, that a democracy works best on holding a politician accountable for what they do, not what they say. Take the pugnacious Trump persona out of the equation and what is left is, one of the best four year stretches of accomplishments in decades.
America is Back : For 20 years since the dot.com bust, the consensus by several administrations was that America was in a period of progressive economic decline and obsolescence. America, beset with a mythic past that “covered over” foundational sins, was inherently unfair, and coolly dismissive of inequities, was best served by accepting the decline and turning inward toward a ‘many out of one’ future – the antithesis of E Pluribus Unum. President Obama stated the inherent contradictions would require ‘getting used to’ a moribund economy with growth of one percent or less as far as the eye could see. Despite doubling the national debt, Obama clamped down on any economic tools that would potentially fuel an American entrepreneurial driven economic response , the only means to conceivably finance the growing burden demanded of the productive American. Convinced of the need of America to be a global cooperator rather than a leader, any unique American advantages based upon its specific principles of free will and incentive would have to be suppressed.
Trump immediately drove a stake in that corruptive thinking through two massive philosophical conversions away from the mindset that strangulated business and innovation. First, a revolutionary removal of the regulatory choke hold of government bureaucrats on business, and second, reduction of business capital gains taxes more in line with America’s competitors. Within 18 months of attaining office, a historic American driven economic recovery was spectacularly under way, with a unique combination of growth across all economic sectors and profound reduction in unemployment in minority populations that had heretofore been unable to share in the middle class bounty available to others. President Trump’s unyielding instruction to his negotiating teams to put America First reoriented strategy in trade agreements such as NAFTA, the Pacific Rim agreement and relations with America’s chief competitor and economic advisary, China. The underlying goal of restoring America’s manufacturing prowess, returning supply lines for crucial supplies such as pharmaceuticals, and bringing home factories has begun to finally swing the trade pendulum back toward the US, to the benefit of the long suffering American middle class. Then, despite a self induced sudden catastrophic contracture of the economy by greater than 30 percent overnight as a consequence of the pandemic, the media driven, unfairly derided Trump management of the crisis upon closer objective inspection stands tall,with nearly overnight creation of logistics and restoration of resources to address the virus, emergency underwriting of individuals, small business and healthcare to prevent economic collapse, and shepherding of a manhattan-style project to formulate a vaccine through private enterprise in a previously inconceivably short period of time. Trump has managed in two quarters, despite daunting odds, a V shaped recovery that is the envy of the rest of the world.
America is Free: America is free to make decisions in its own interest because it is energy independent for the first time since the 1960’s. President Trump released the Keystone pipeline for building, removed America from ludicrously unbalanced shackles of the Kyoto Agreement, unharnessed the fracking revolution from artificial suppression, and in three short years created an America that is the leading energy producer in the world and, incredibly, a net exporter of oil and natural gas. This spectacular turnaround has had untold positives beyond the expansion of a multi-million employment industry. Most critically, it has released America from the choke chain of Middle Eastern despots, removing the responsibility of America to defend the oil lanes and be subservient to local toxic entanglements. Suddenly a way forward out of endless spillage of American blood and treasure to mitigate Middle East conflict and Palestinian intransigence has presented itself in huge opportunities for stability in the region for the first time in decades. And of that Kyoto Agreement? Well, America has managed through conversion to natural gas to meet all the expectations of being a signee in regard to carbon reduction, without having its hands tied like so many of its European partners, as signees, consigned to the impossible mandates of an agreement that leaves the largest carbon emitters, China and India, off the hook.
America is Restoring its Founding Principles: The revolution of the enlightenment was embodied in the principles of the crafted document known as the American Constitution. America’s unique self corrective tendencies to orient towards justice and protect the rights of individuals to self actualization was fortified by this profound document and its carefully constructed individual rights and delineated limitation of government power. Despite the derision of the elites regarding President Trump’s supposed superficial understanding of constitutional law and pugnacious personality, compared to many of his predecessors, he has acted with far better Constitutional instincts. Despite demands by many opponents to act as dictator in the pandemic crisis, Trump respected the limits of federal power and allowed individual states to orient their own unique responses to the crisis. Faced within days of entering office with a special prosecutor investigating a concocted treasonous claim devised by his corrupt election opponent and her deep state collaborators, Trump, without claiming executive privilege as so many previous administrations had, fully cooperated in unprecedented fashion with the investigation, until progressive facts identified the nefarious goals and conspiratorial actions of his accusers. Trump has in four short years re-oriented the entire judicial branch of government back toward constitutional principles, bringing three originalists to the supreme court, and hundreds of lower level judges, in line to return the interpretation of law back to the principles of justice rather than attempting to divine intent or ‘balance the scales’ with a hand towards personal feelings. The rights of every individual to get a fair trial based upon the presumption of objective understanding of the rule of law has received a dramatic injection.
America is a Nation again: No promise resonated with the voting population of 2016 as did Trump’s assertion to “build the Wall” on the southern border. The underlying reality was that a porous border with Mexico had created innumerable pathologies. America’s generous proclivity to accept with open arms those who yearned for a better life had over the decades had deteriorated into an intolerable influx of uncontrolled invasion of masses of illegals circumventing the requirement to accept not only American residence but American responsibilities of citizen-hood, rule of law, and community responsibility. Border states and progressively non-border states became inundated with millions of people using services in education and health care, ignoring laws and collapsing local authority. Big Business and Big Farming loved the influx, allowing extremely cheap labor through illegals without having to provide the other means of benefit support associated with employment of a citizen. Jobs were either exported, or lost by citizens who had entered the legal way. The porous border allowed massive increases in dangerous human, and especially child, trafficking, influx of drugs , and the crime upon innocents associated with it. Trump’s derided solution was to simply build a wall, and realize all the secondary benefits of simply returning rationality and control to immigration. Despite massive efforts through congressional obstruction and litigation to derail the wall, 400 miles have now been built of the 700 miles recommended to restore control. The effect has been dramatic with over 90 % reduction in illegal transit through effected communities behind the new wall. The overall effect of course, is the increasing value of a legitimate immigration process, and the increased dignity and recognition of American values by the recipient, and markedly increased accountability to the worker by the employer The elites who condescendingly assume that hispanics have come to America with a different set of inspirations from that driving all previous immigrants, will be progressively shocked at how popular the re-orientation of the immigrant experience toward American freedoms and responsibilities is among the Hispanic community like all previously driven to immigrate. Freedom accepted with an earned place in the American Dream is a bedrock of the American story. The entire political class, Republican and Democrat alike, was paralyzed to act, until Trump came along and through sheer will, got it done.
America is a Respected Power again: America faced an existential foreign policy crisis at the beginning of the Trump Administration. Despite having an unrivaled military projection and prowess, American power was under siege and threat from multiple missteps and miscalculations. The previous 16 years had left President Trump a set of profoundly weak positions. The entirely understandable push of the Bush administration to respond to the threat of Islamic terrorism had morphed uncontrollably into a series of endless military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan based upon a woefully mis-guided desire to reorient the cultures of both cultures toward modern western democracies and values. Trillions of dollars and thousands of lives had not improved the circumstances on the ground beyond the removal of a tyrant in Saddam Hussein. The Obama administration naively assumed the failure was in America’s lack of apology for perceived slights, determined to restrict America’s influence through apology, and reorient control of the region to Iran, the advisary of the Sunni Arab nations and a mortal enemy of America’s own ally, Israel. The result of Obama’s ludicrous Iran agreement was increased belligerence of Iran despite a treaty designed to give it markedly increased hegemony, unimpeded development of ballistic missile capacity and an avenue to a nuclear weapon within ten years. The distain in the region was palpable and led to the pathologic rise and expansion of ISIS, the re- entry of Russian influence in the region through Syria, and a revolutionary expansion of radical Iranian influence in the person of the Revolutionary Guards led by Qasem Soleimani.
In three short years Trump has completely reversed the losing hand. ISIS was driven back, and crushed, and its genocidal leader Al-Baghdadi killed. Syria risked return to chemical warfare and Trump responded with a destruction of their airfield designed for delivery; Russia had mercenaries threaten American troops and Trump immediately eliminated the threat. The disastrous Iranian deal was abrogated by Trump and sanctions returned ; Soleimani ignored Trump’s warning to stay out of Iraq and when he ignored the warning, he was eliminated, with massive loss of face to Iran in the region Their desperate, pathetic response was to accidentally shoot done one of their own commercial aircraft.
Trump determined to completely upend the traditional diplomacy of the middle east to demand concessions from Israel in order to get Palestinian cooperation; he simply informed the Palestinians that the world had moved on, and encouraged them to improve their position rather than demand Israel’s contrition. The Palestinians, assuming the usual American eagerness to be seen as conciliatory, refused. Rather than accepting the traditional view that the Palestinian question remained the lodestone of any peace initiative, Trump simply pivoted directly to the Arab nations progressively aligned against the threat of Iran, and worked with them to see that their self interests in a modern world would be most bountiful orienting toward a positive relationship with the economic powerhouse Israel, rather than staying with tactics that had failed for decades. The result is stunning – direct recognition and bilateral business relationships between three Arab states and Israel, and counting – the first substantial movement toward regional peace in three decades.
Europe, positioned to despise Trump, has been forced by him to reexamine their relationship with America and Russia. NATO had increasingly become a paper tiger defense with nations completely abrogating their responsibility to adequately support, much less upgrade, their defense capacity. Russia convinced Germany to become beholden to the Russians for energy needs with the Baltic Sea pipeline. Trump demanded that Europe meet its 2% GDP commitment to NATO, or risk ending the seventy year American commitment. He hectored the Germans into ending their commitment to the pipeline. He ended the laconic support of Ukraine with blankets provided by Obama in response to the Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and provided real defensive weapons, stopping Russia’s threat to Ukraine’s survival and demanded the Europeans do their part as well to sanction bad Russian behavior. Russia is not about to roll over in their own neighborhood but they now realize the American push has restored the European backbone.
On the Pacific rim, China for decades had sold the world on the idea that economic bounty would eventually calm its radical communist core and allow a progressively modern attitude in international relations. Instead, for two decades China took advantage of its favorite nation trading status to steal intellectual property, maintain unequal trade deficits, ignore environmental responsibilities, decimate their Hong Kong, Uyghur and Tibetan communities, threaten Taiwan, militarily intimidate its neighbors in the South China Sea, and corrupt American academia and politicians. This has showed itself blatantly in their Covid deception, releasing onto the unknowing world a global pandemic, and working to gain monetary access influencing the potential next American President Joe Biden. Trump has for decades demanded a more balanced trading relationship with China, improved behaviors, and has been engaged in a trade war. The result is the first time in decades that anyone has stood up to the Chinese. The Pacific Rim countries have been the most thankful, and Trump’s contrarian approach has gotten people from both parties (excepting Biden) to take a new look. The outcome will clearly extend beyond four years.
Trump has achieved the amazing outcome of projecting power and achieving American goals without starting a single new conflict, and closing the door on a few old ones. For that alone, he deserves the laurels of greater Presidents.
The Cleanest President Ever: There can be no argument against Donald Trump being the most investigated President ever. The effort to investigate every pore of his being began even before he was President and continued every day of his Presidency. His business relationships, international actions, taxes, personal relationships, and actions with the deep state were dissected by the opposition candidate, a special prosecutor, 10 opposition prosecutors, an impeachment committee, the FBI, the CIA, and the entire weight of the American media – and they found….Nothing. Not a thing. After all the viciousness and character assassination, the history books will show an opposition candidate participated in her own dirty tricks to hide her corruption, an attempted coup from deep state ne’er do wells’, a 40 million dollar prosecutory disaster that only ended the reputation of the special prosecutor, and an impeachment attempt that ended up uncovering the actual corruption in Biden that they tried to find in Trump. You want a President who has been vetted beyond any doubt as to his motives? You got it in Donald J Trump.
Donald J Trump, flaws and all, has proven to be one of the more consequential Presidents in history. He deserves, more than most, another swing at the plate. I don’t know what the outcome of November 3rd(or beyond) will be, but if performance not personality is the gauge of American leadership, then Donald J Trump should win in a landslide. He has completely surprised me, and something I would never have said four years ago, I will say now. I will vote for him unreservedly.
Certainly, nothing tops the U.S. Presidential election of 2016 for sheer stunning surprise. The 98% ‘Sure Thing’ as trumpeted by the New York Times, was firmly shared by essentially every poll. All the learned pundits sagely furrowing their smug brows over the calamity candidate that was Donald Trump, predicted years in the wilderness for the Republican Party for having recklessly gone down the path of nominating a braggadocio dumpster fire. Hillary Clinton spent her last week locking down money for her “cause” and measuring the drapes of the oval office, while the dumpster fire Trump worked tirelessly in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The November 9th,2016 morning after hangover for the experts was something to behold, as the stunned country woke to find the dumpster fire candidate, the President of the United States – and it wasn’t that close.
So, here we are in 2020 with less than a month to go and it looks like almost a mirror image of the October, 2016 story. The President, despite four relatively impressive years of accomplishments behind him, is in a world of hurt in polls, and amazingly still considers himself the ‘Outsider’. Despite the gravitas that would normally go with position of President, Trump continues to rail against the ‘deep state’ as if he was the challenger, careening down the public avenue with his bullying style, brash mouth, and juvenilely disciplined twitter feed. The establishment candidate is Joseph Biden, an elderly gent that sits on the front porch of the country eerily like a 1920 Warren Harding preaching a return to normalcy, pleasantly confused, and avoiding at all costs, any actual interactions with public. The polls, well, they have coalesced even more in the Biden camp then those enjoyed by Hillary, projecting a 10-15% national lead and a landslide in the Electoral College. Once again, we are told the coronation is a done deal.
What are we to believe, the polls, or our own lyin’ eyes? The one definite clarity provided by the last five years of the Trump phenomena is that there is no way to predict the Trumpnado. Has the country gotten its fill of the Trump sales pitch, or is it only getting started?
2020 presents many dilemmas for the earnest political watcher. The United States used to have an election day, and the momentum swings were clarified by a single event in time, and a single accounting of the population. The Covid pandemic has been a godsend to those who see democratic elections as a political journey not an event, and seek to harvest whatever vote count they can, over as many days as they can, until the outcome is adjusted in their favor. Provided by the pandemic with political cover to flood prospective voters with mail in ballots, some 20% of swing state voters have already voted weeks before the election, allowing campaigns to determine who has voted and who has yet to vote among their supporters, allowing continual harvesting of the residual crop, hoping to lock in a majority victory before the actual election day. The Covid crisis remains foremost as a scare tactic to suppress election day votes, in hopes that the traditional laissez faire democrat voter can be accounted beforehand, and the traditional election day republican voter convinced to sit this one out and avoid risk of the virus. The difficult thing to predict is whether a two month long voting spree will actually create some unpredicted enthusiasm gap. The door to door get out the vote registration effort by Trump’s campaign has been spectacular, the effort by the Biden campaign, mirroring its moribund leader, has been non-existent. Has the country grown beyond the idea that all politics is retail, and a simple passive internet and mail push will do the job? Will late reactions and events instead drive new core value voter enthusiasm for late in person voting that will overcome the complacent vote from home effort?
The Donald Trump response to his Covid -19 infection was classic Trump. He caught the virus and literally beat it into submission in five days. The anticipated ‘deathwatch’ by mainstream media, hoping for a ‘just desserts’ moment for the heretofore disease-insolent Trump, instead, now have to deal with the release of the Trump Kraken from the depths of the illness, fully rejuvenated, and twice as motivated. The extreme juxtaposition of the basement hiding Biden and the resurrected Trumpnado over the next few weeks may be just the positive juice the Trump candidacy needed for impact on election day.
Elections have always been determined by economic factors, personal sense of well being through law and order, and confidence in the candidate. Trump’s balderdash has had the apparent poll measured effect of having people weary of the constant drama, and wistfully but passionlessly envision a more “normal” alternative in Biden. When push comes to shove, does Biden’s near catatonic campaign style, generally absent from the fight, and when present, laconically emoted in front of minuscule crowds, sufficient to have people forget the constant radical violence, the proposed massive tax increases, the return to open borders, and the unsettling of the world order on the Obama model? When push comes to shove, can Trump somehow articulate his successful formula without the constant turn to self aggrandizement and self pity, that steps on every advantage he has in his actual stands on issues versus Biden?
We must look to the unpredictability this year produced by an electorate that no longer has a defined middle. Is Trump hatred a voting strategy that overcomes a litany of socialistic nonsense? Are there sufficient “shy” Trump voters that would possibly surmount the uniform congealing of polls pointing toward a Biden landslide? Or as the polls seem to imply, its time to turn out the lights, the party’s over?
No one was able to foretell the outcome of 2016 through polling. For 2020, therefore, as Peter Townsend of the Who so presciently wrote, we “Won’t Get Fooled Again”.
There’s a lot of October left. The drama has only begun.
If you relied on mainstream media projections of the world today, you would only know a pandemic world of shut down, economic malaise, chaos, and violence. The leading foil for this calamitous vision is certainly the lizard king himself, President Donald John Trump. Four years of projection of the president as a bully, ignoramus, naive tool of dictators, and incompetent has been critical to the effort to remove him from office, first, through deep state insurrection, innuendo, and then, impeachment. Somehow the President had managed to withstand the onslaught. only to have the coup de grace, the Covid pandemic, demolish the hard won domestic victories of the first three years, and put him at the mercy of an entirely unpredictable opponent, a virus . The promoted image of the President has been one of only superficial animal instincts and cunning – entirely devoid of a plan, a vision, a stable direction.
The reality on the world stage is quietly one of the more effective stewardships of American foreign policy of any president in my lifetime. The lizard king has managed on multiple fronts to create momentum that would, under any other leader of acceptable presentation to the media image makers, be seen as historic in scope. Under assault from a huge southern border migration begun in the previous administration, threatening to permanently make the border disappear and criminal trafficking to explode, propagated by enormous media pressure based upon a narrative of Trump as hater, the President achieved implausibly instead an almost complete stoppage in cross border illegal traffic that had evaded two previous presidents , negotiating a “Remain in Mexico” accord with Mexico itself to halt the flow. Trump harangued successfully NATO partners in providing more financial support for the common defense, likely saving NATO from a self induced dissolution based on largesse and detachment, and pivoting to more engaged mutual defense partnerships with Poland, India, Australia, and Japan. Trump dramatically re-ordered the unholy marriage of climatology and globalist socialist ambitions with U.S. withdrawal from the Paris accord, and removed almost overnight American energy vulnerability with support of fracking. The President stopped a western decades long subservience to Chinese economic malfeasance of trade imbalances and intellectual theft threatening to enucleate western economic strength and resolve. Most impressively in the Middle East, Trump in three short years succeeded at successfully moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem, reversing the calamitous Iran agreement, smashing ISIS, and eliminating the two most implacable monsters of terror to the region, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Qasem Soleimani. Most effectively, he has managed all these achievements with a dramatic lack of commitment of military forces to new American military adventures, a first since World War II.
The above achievements alone would be an impressive foreign policy record for any President, much less one who is roundly derided as absent any intellectual depth or patience. Now, August 13, 2020, brought an even more unexpected and spectacular achievement. The United Arab Emirates became the first Arab nation in nearly 30 years to enter into mutual recognition with the state of Israel. The “Abraham” accord, negotiated with the assistance of Trump’s Middle East team led by his son in law Jared Kushner, managed to go where even the previous Egyptian and Jordanian pacts decades ago failed to go – complete bilateral recognition across diplomatic, economic, tourism and trade sectors. The agreement has completely upended long standing notions of supposed diplomatic expertise, and opened a long closed door to real progress and peace in the region.
For decades, US and global diplomacy leaned almost entirely on Israel to concede on multiple fronts to hostile Palestinian demands in order to “affect’ an environment suitable to solving the implacable Israeli-Palestinian “problem”. The Palestinians were viewed by the Arab and external world as the aggrieved party, with constant pressure on Israel through sanctions, UN resolutions, terrorist actions, and border wars to trade survival for etherial “recognition”. It was considered gospel – no progress without Palestinian agreement, and no Palestinian agreement without abject Israeli surrender. Israeli doves bought into the charade – at one point Israeli Prime Minister Olmert offering to the Palestinians 95% of the West Bank, a physical connection between Gaza and the West Bank, negotiations toward some sort of refugee return to Israel Proper, and East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital. This nearly complete capitulation was rejected by Palestinian leader Abbas, as the underlying goal of the Palestinians was eventually restoration of all of “Palestine”. As has become the sage saying in the across the Middle East, “the Palestinians never waste an opportunity, to waste an opportunity”.
The Trump administration saw something that had eluded the Obama Administration – the Iran threat had flipped over long standing rationalities among Arab states to shun Israel. Iran’s revolutionary Shia desire to rout long standing Sunni dominance in the region had led to severe destabilization of the Levant from Lebanon through Syria to Iraq, and the southern Saudi peninsula in Yemen. With the acknowledgement by Arab states that their economic global leverage on the single resource of oil was rapidly diminishing and the need to convert their economies onto 21st century platforms to survive , the 13th century basis of Iranian theocracy and radical Sunni extremism was identified as an existential threat. Progressively the example as the way forward to the 21st century was their formerly implacable foe, Israel. Israel had proved itself the resilient nation of the region, powerful militarily, first world in technology and economic diversity, and a worthy advisory to Iranian belligerence. The US superpower could no longer be relied upon to be the military policeman, and Russia and China too flawed in power projection to provide any counterbalance.
The United Arab Emirates are the logical first signees to the Abraham accords. The Emirates have presciently prepared for the post oil world by investing in a modern future. The port at Dubai has become a world financial and trade center, a tourist mecca, and the pride of gulf development. The spectacular achievement of the Birj Khalifa, completed in 2010 as the tallest skyscraper in the world by far, announced to the world that the Emirates were going to be players on the world stage. Led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the United Arab Emirates have presented a challenge to their more powerful and richer neighbor Saudi Arabia and its ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, that being mired in a single resource economy and rigidly tied to the past perceptions is a recipe for obsolescence and regime vulnerability. Real earth shaking shifts in the tectonic plates of the Middle East are possible, and the UAE is unlikely to be the only Arab state that recognizes the opportunity that presents in an effective relationship with powerhouse Israel.
The Trump Administration was elected by voters who felt Washington had become sclerotic and incapable of seizing initiative in a changing world, and asked Trump to become the unbounded revolutionary for change. He has done that and more, both domestically and internationally, and in normal times would be seen as a pivotal and historical figure. Certainly, a Nobel Laureate for Peace. The elites will never be able to admit they were wrong about their rigid interpretation of a changing world, or the abilities of that labile ball of energy and initiative we call President.
For the first time in many years since the martyrdom of Anwar Sadat, one can look at the most unstable corner of the world, and say, There’s a Chance…
Hopefully the American electorate is more prescient than the elites on November 3rd, and gives this amazing story an opportunity to develop a real and lasting epilogue .
The national political conventions, such as they were, are over. The sixty day sprint to the national election is now underway and the disinterested and peripheral voters will start to pay attention. The election of 2020 for the presidency of the United States is essentially like no other in history, driven by the bizarre effects of a pandemic. The resultant virtual presentations of the national conventions accentuated the trend of the last few decades , exposing the concept of parties and their platforms progressively as a relic of the past, replaced by a celebrity cage match between the party standard bearers, the Presidential candidates. The candidates now embody the entire essence of the parties to the greater population. A defeat implies the death of any compromise, so divergent have we become of our perception of our country, its history, and its purpose, so deaf to each others’ arguments. The election of 2020 is the poster child for a survival election. Amazingly, both parties have placed their survival on the shoulders of the oldest two presidential candidates in history. Trump and Biden will soon face off like to very old bulls, marginally in contact with their former vigor, but looking to destroy the other at the first chance. The future of the world’s oldest continuous democratic tradition hangs in the balance. Let’s look at the comparison through some prisms that underlie the choice.
The Age Factor – How could there possibly be an age factor when both candidates are well beyond what used to be considered the age at which candidates were “too old” for the rigors of the office. Donald Trump at 74 years and Joe Biden at 78 on inauguration day are an indication of how hard the baby boomer generation is willing to fight to retain relevant power in the United States. The extension of life spans through the health care revolution and the boomers incredible doggedness regarding power has left us with these two Presidential candidates, a Speaker of the House who is 80, and a Senate Majority Leader who is 78, and three Supreme Court Justices age 72, 82, and 87. The consideration that all three branches of government are theoretically reliant on individuals born in the shadow of World War II reflect how poorly the subsequent generations have been in organizing their influence through the democratic process. Donald Trump in 2016, at the tender age of 73, crushed his sixteen other competitors for the nomination based upon the force of his personality and conviction, and the relative absence of theirs. In almost mirror image terms, the enfeebled Biden easily fought off 23 other candidates for the Democratic nomination of 2020, with the even older 78 year old Bernie Sanders his only viable competition. No single other factor explains more fully the unraveling of the politics of compromise and vetted policy than the abject failure of younger generations to successfully stand for mature values and ideas that would make this older generation with all its flaws appropriately obsolete.
The second age factor conundrum is the visibly different capabilities of the two candidates in essentially the same decade of life . Joe Biden, who entered Washington through the Senate in 1972 and first ran for President over 30 years ago in 1988, shows the corroded, enfeebled persona of someone who’s mental stamina and tolerance for stress has long since passed him by. He has shown little energy for the fight, holding court in the basement of his home, accepted no challenging questions, and on multiple occasions shown little residual capacity to frame a thought or link two sentences together coherently. In previous efforts at the office, he was considered even by his party as a dullard. Today he stands as a pale shadow of even that low standard. There is no compelling evidence whatsoever that he is up to the rigors of the office. Yet, there he is…currently leading the race. In opposition is the President, only 4 years younger yet a veritable whirlwind of energy and vitality, never shutting up, pugilistic, and confrontational, continuing the undisciplined tsunami of action that many find abhorrent and gross, and others a breath of fresh energy in a Washington that has lost all energy. It is fascinating that the politically savvy five decade practitioner of the Washington DC ruling elite finds himself pathetically wanting compared to the vitality of a similarly aged individual who has been the epitome of an outsider, an emblematic representative of the competitive real world his entire adult life.
Inversion of the Core – The 2020 election is framing up on a rather profound inversion of what has been the traditional power bases of the Democrat and Republican Parties over the years. The amazing reality is that the parties have almost entirely switched places. The Democrat Party always painted its core philosophy as the “party of the working man”. Buttressed by unions, traditionally looking to support the stability of middle class pensions and health care on the backs of the rich through tax policy, and traditionally supportive of local political machines and their patronage systems, the party sought to define itself as looking out for the majority of Americans who relied on others to be entrepreneurial and accepting of risk. The Republican Party oriented itself on the foundation of old Whiggism, patching together country club classic successful liberals, business leaders, fiscal conservatives, entrepreneurs, and evangelicals in a polyglot approach that celebrated an international presence and “adult” foreign policy, that required perfect electoral structures. The recent conventions have shown that this tradition power structure has, mostly through the stunning impact of Trumpism, nearly completely inverted. The Republican candidacy was framed at the convention by example after example of support for the common man and woman against the ruthless effects of modern society, an America first and inward focus, based on job preservation, protection against external invasion and corruption of traditional American themes, and protection against the radical forces that would throw it all away for internationally accepted ideals. The Democrat Party has promoted decades of progressive enhancement of dominant government structures injected with elite “experts” seeking to control the great center no longer felt capable of making “good” decisions without life long direction. It now finds itself the party of the “educated” elite, derisive of the class of people who work in mundane physical labor and without advanced degrees. The party is increasingly reliant on the barbell effect of the massive group of Americans that rely almost exclusively on government largess , and young people, who see the government as the only viable alternative to the crushing costs of individual risk, education, health care, with an increasingly absent desire and confidence in nuclear family structure. This spectacular inversion, propagated unwittingly by the clinging to power of the baby boomer generation, yet held in abeyance by that same power generation, showed the first inflections in the 2016 election bringing the stunning election of Trump, and may likely fully mature with the 2020 election, completely upending the traditional perceptions as to voters behaviors.
The Ghosting of American Exceptionalism- The third rail of American politics was always considered the perspective on the founding of the country. Through bitter squabbles and even civil war, the argument of each side was who reflected more fervently the American founders’ hard won principles. Such principles were once considered both foundational and exceptional – Equality, Freedom, Pursuit of Happiness, Rule of Law. All Men are Created Equal fueled the Civil War and civil rights struggles. Property and States rights led the South to feel it was the more apostolic side in the Civil War. Freedom and Pursuit of Happiness drove the economic behemoth that has dominated the world for the past 80 years. The Rule of Law led to a massive immigrant wave that has never wavered in hopes of finding a fair shake like no other on earth. Patriotism was universal and simply nuanced on interpretation. The progressive wing of the Democrat Party has now however leapt beyond the third rail and is leading a re-envisioning of the concept of American exceptionalism as a myth flawed to its very core and deserving of rebuke. Nationalism brings to these progressives the stench of a “corrupt” founding based upon subjugation, glass ceilings, racial overlording and outright theft. Borders serve no purpose when they exist to deny others access to the riches held by a select few, earned through exploitation. Joe Biden has had to absorb this steadily growing marxist influence on his projection of a “fairer” America. The violent and roughened edges of this projection are difficult to suppress when he has no core ideals any longer to fall back upon in making his case.
President Trump made his entire reason for running in 2016 this argument about American Exceptionalism. Despite his bombast, he’s been surprisingly respectful of the founding principles. He has avoided executive over-reach, massively shrunk the regulatory arm of government, respected state’s rights, and despite being savagely pummeled by a three and one half year effort to remove him from office through nefarious deep state and media driven assaults, he has maintained the rule of law. The larger question relates, in a massively changing electorate progressively propagandized on the ghosting of the past, as to how many voters are left that recognize, much less respect, the basis for his approach to governing and the core of his agenda.
The Politics of Anarchy – Even prior to President Trump winning the 2016 election, progressives turned steadily toward the lessons of radicals like Alinsky to protect and grow their power. Throughout the Obama administration massive money from radical elites poured into anarchistic groups like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and Antifa to stir an environment of constant disobedience and chaos projecting ever more radical solutions into the American blood stream. Obama, trained in the tactics of community activism, was comfortable playing the role of interpreter for America, insisting that the awkward militancy and occasional violence was a healthy release valve for a country that had been oppressive and unfair, and needed to “Change”. Behind the scenes, as Trump began to take flight and threatened his legacy of permanent progressivism, Obama worked to install internal and external mechanisms to protect his progressive gains and simultaneously destroy Trump’s threat. The external weapon was the organized “Resistance”, forever imploding the long nurtured idea of a loyal opposition and the legislative compromise. Internally, dramatic efforts committed to a veritable coup of Trump, were planted to stir intolerable pressure and chaos in hopes of frankly eliminating any capacity of the Trump administration to function.
Amazingly, despite chaos, media hysteria, an adversarial prosecution, and even impeachment, trump was left standing. It took an even more explosive chaos to ignite the final resistance desperation against Trump, the COVID pandemic, allowing the historically strong economy to shutter, the streets to empty, and the populous to grow restless. The perfect spark was the imperfect and superficial vehicle of video to explode a perceived great injustice to George Floyd, a perfect representation of a perceived collective injustice, that allowed the empty streets to be overtaken by radical anarchists, with no intent to let go.
Now Joseph Biden is left with the difficult dance of somehow hijacking the massive chaos and associated violence birthed, nurtured and excused by Democrat leaders and pinning it on Trump, while defending the continuing shutdown of the American domestic economy at least until the election predicated upon the increasingly flimsy excuse of the pandemic. Donald Trump’s style is pugilistic and undisciplined – a perfect foil to under react to the virus and over react to the violence – yet so far he has managed to walk that difficult tightrope. The idea that either candidate can survive the continuance of violence while controlling it is ridiculous at its core. Violence knows no rules of engagement, and both candidates are bound to be damaged and potentially, terminally so. The great majority of the electorate may determine to punish whichever candidate remains tied to the chaotic present, regardless of who is responsible, just to try to return to normalcy.
The Most Important Election Ever- Every four years a moniker is placed upon our national election as pivotal to the nation’s future. Time and again, the electorate tended to return to the middle from whatever unstable direction it perceive the country veering. The perceived presence of checks and balances contributed to the over-riding comfort American voters comforted themselves with in making their decision. The intensely unstable grounds of this election however makes it seem perhaps more important than most. The Democrat Biden is thought by even his own voters incapable of the rigors of the office, and positioned to be a “transitional” figure to a younger, more aggressive progressive agenda and leadership. The Republican Trump is thought by many intolerable, undisciplined and self absorbed, unworthy of extending his philosophy beyond the temporary damage of his first four years. The two candidates, like old bulls, push for a final dominance, profoundly unaware that there would be no winners in a country that may have lost its way and its mission.
Two old bulls, consumed with victory, heading potentially for slaughter, not the green pasture of tranquility. An American future, or lack thereof, hangs in the balance.
If you want that American future, step up to the Ramparts, and make sure you vote.
