This year’s election is a dream for the Left.
While the Democrats now openly espouse national socialism, the Republicans counter with their own nationalistic authoritarian.
Like the Democrat candidates, Trump is a vehement opponent of free speech, xenophobic (protectionist) on trade, pro-cronyism, and has no qualms about using the enormous ill-gotten tax and regulatory power of the state to punish those he doesn’t like, whether it’s a newspaper critical of him or a company that wants to build a plant outside the U.S.
And Trump is as good at the demagoguery game as any Democrat. The Democrats’ scapegoat for everything that ails and scares Americans is “the 1%”—a euphemism for anyone who is more successful and has more income and wealth than “the 99%”; i.e., “me.” Trump’s scapegoat is anyone who he doesn’t like at any given moment.
Clinton will appoint judges who will always side with the state supremacists over the private individual in economic matters. Some on the Right hope that Trump will stumble into appointing better judges who have some respect for the sovereignty of the individual and the proper limits of state power. But conservative judges are as anti-individual rights in the social sphere as Democrats are in the economic sphere. And will an authoritarian who rules on whim really appoint justices who will be likely to reign in his arbitrary power over the economy? Trumps attack on Judge Gonzalo Curiel gives us a strong clue.
Trump will patch together an agenda that here or there looks something like a right-wing (in the proper, pro-liberty understanding) platform. But that’ll be window dressing. Mirroring Obama, Trump is a thug who has no respect for the rule of objective law or the constitution. He would make a great Democrat—which, in essence, he is. But unlike Obama, Clinton, Sanders, and company—who are egalitarian-collectivist-statist ideologues, Trump is a statist without any ideology at all. He is an anti-capitalist loose cannon.
About the only reason to vote for Trump is that the Democrats’ statist agenda is so horrific from the perspective of respecting the irreplaceable value that is the actual, individual human being. Maybe, just maybe, Trump won’t be as bad as it appears he can be—and he may even stumble into some good policies, like replacing ObamaCare with true free market healthcare reforms rather than some other form of nationalized healthcare (which he has supported in the past).
But make no mistake: The principled defender of the moral value of the individual—the defenders of personal freedom and achievement, political equality, economic freedom, individual rights, a properly limited government accountable to the people rather than the other way around, of actually putting the people rather than the politicians in charge of their own economic affairs through free trade and markets—faces the bleakest election choice possible. There is no political counterweight offering a defense of capitalism, free markets, and individual rights and self-determination. So the socialist demagogues have a free reign in an intellectual vacuum, peddling the snake oil that turning over control of your life to the state is championing the people. America is becoming Animal Farm.
Yes, this year’s election is a dream for the Left. Perhaps not on every issue. But Trump and the Democrats are kindred authoritarian spirits. Trump will likely expand the power of the state, leaving some future Democrat president even more powers to control our lives than Obama has exploited. Being an anti-capitalist authoritarian who only wants to “make deals,” Trump as president is as likely to bend to Leftist pressures as to the conservatives. Make no mistake: America after a Trump presidency will have a government more controlling than what he started. The Left really can’t lose this year, even if they are too clueless to see it.
Can Trump Break the Social Authoritarian Conservatives’ Grip on the GOP?
2 comments:
I think the left had enough clue to see it soon after Trump announced his candidacy for the primaries. They knew that he, like any actual conservative, was their chump. They played him like a pan fish on a 4lb. test line while acting horrified at him. And they know the 'American' people, also their chumps. They only had to float lies and smears and, at the right times, innocuous facts, all successfully designed to create the desired impression of Trump who was more like them than an actual conservative is, so more easily characterized as desired. The people have been impressed. They've chomped on it and swallowed it, hook, line and sinker, asshole deep, without proof or evidence beyond noise made by broads hired to flap their jaws. Worked like a charm.
What if somebody like an Objectivist had upstaged everybody like Trump did, and got nominated by the Republicans? What if merely Cruz had been nominated? The Democrats, ACTUALLY horrified, would have done, what?
The worst part is that Trump's whiny campaign has given the Democrats a big pass on their horrific policies. Every inane Trump charge is a lost opportunity to attack the meat of the Democrats. His latest distraction is “rigged elections” (It’s one thing to charge specific instances of voter fraud where evidence supports it. It’s another to claim the entire election is rigged). Meanwhile, environmentalism, egalitarianism, a-constitutional judges, national security, and other important issues get swept under the rug with minimal scrutiny.
I believe any other GOP candidate would have made the election more about contrast on issues, to the detriment of the Democrats. This was the Republicans’ year. The Trump nomination blew it. Now the Dems may even win the Senate.
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