America is in a new political world. Combine Donald Trump's victory in 2016 with the über-left's attempts to delegitimize his presidency, and a significant underpinning of popular government is seriously imperiled.
New times call for new strategies and tactics. Sadly, the Left already knows this, and it's time those of us on the political Right to catch up.
Let's start with Trump's successes in capturing the GOP's presidential nomination and then emerging victorious on November 8th, 2016. Since both represent changes of degree, and not of kind, Trump's emergence as GOP presidential nominee and especially as America's chief executive, do not represent change as profound as the American Left's transmogrifrication, especially since Trump declared as a candidate for the GOP nomination in mid-2015.
Since at least the end of the Reagan presidency, Republican politics at the top has been controlled by inside-the-Washington-beltway elites who denigrate conservatism in any form. GOP insiders never cottoned to Reagan and the Reaganites, but had to tolerate them because, when it came to the things elites really care about -- power, status, insider-influence, etc. -- Reagan and his backers brought home the bacon.
Beginning in 1988, however, and with every presidential nomination through 2012, the Republican inside-the-beltway establishment dominated the party's machinery sufficiently to deny the GOP's top spot to someone who appealed especially to ordinary people outside the Washington Beltway. Bush #41, Dole, Bush #43, McCain, and Romney were more moderate and therefore attractive to GOP insiders than were others who sought the party's nomination, but fell by the wayside: Patrick J. Buchanan, Mike Huckabee, Fred Thompson, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, et al. (I list these men without necessarily endorsing them.)
The race for the GOP's presidential nomination in 2016, however, broke new ground. For whatever the reason -- the final story hasn't been written -- the candidate or candidates who might have had the Republican insiders' support, such as Jeb Bush, were beaten, and Donald J. Trump, who is anathema to GOP elites, emerged victorious.
Although some among the GOP elite announced they would vote for Hillary Clinton, and others, even those who claimed conservative credentials, joined the #Never Trump crowd, the Donald won the 2016 presidential election. In the process, he might have brought about at least a temporary voting realignment. Time will tell if Trump can hold, for example, working-class whites, and/or if some well-educated suburban women will continue to distance themselves from the GOP.
By now, it should be obvious that Trump's successes in garnering the GOP's presidential nomination, and even more so in winning the presidency, has the potential to rearrange the Republican Party's power structure as well as its basis of electoral support.
Now let's consider how Trump's successes have affected leftists, which may be the most profound transformation of the American political world.
Can anyone deny that what we have witnessed since Trump announced his presidential candidacy is one illustration after the next of Trump Derangement Syndrome?
Never mind how the denizens of the mainstream media (MSM) have comported themselves since Trump won the GOP's presidential nomination, and especially since the 2016 election. An analysis of how low the MSM have sunk must await another essay.
Let's focus on the Democrat Party's elites and their acolytes inside and outside of government. Their collective shenanigans are tearing holes in the American body politic that will be a long time in closing, if ever.
To set the context for what has become of Democrat elites and their supporters, let's harken back to how American politics at the top fared from 1800, the first election in which the in-party -- the Federalists -- lost the White House to the out-party -- the Jeffersonian Republicans -- until 2008, when Barack Obama won the presidency, and the Republicans were out at the White House after eight years in power. A few, including Trump, focusing on Obama's birth certificate, worried about whether he was constitutionally entitled to be president, but most Republicans practiced politics-as-usual.
Even though historians tell us that John Adams's loss to Thomas Jefferson in 1800 was a bitter pill to swallow, come Mr. Jefferson's inauguration day, Adams peaceably, albeit not necessarily happily, left Washington, thereby setting a precedent for over 200 years. Defeated at the polls, the in-party -- whether Federalist, Democrat-Republican, Whig, Democrat, or Republican -- peacefully surrendered the levers of presidential power to the opposition party's winning candidate. Other than southerners after 1860, a defeated party accepted the victorious candidate's legitimate right to the presidency, licked its wounds, and tried to figure out how to win the next time around.
Not so in 2016. Virtually from the moment the MSM was compelled to announce Trump's victory, Democrat elites and their über-left allies have denounced Trump as illegitimate, "not my president." Protests, many of them violent, broke out, followed by Democrat elites' boycotting Trump's inauguration, along with a seemingly never-ending stream of unsubstantiated charges that Trump won because of hanky-panky by Vladimir Putin and the Russians. (Since November 8th 2016, the Democrats have demonized Russia. Shades of Joe McCarthy!)
Although Mrs. Clinton and Obama initially acknowledged Trump's victory, that recognition did not last.
Obama did leave the presidency on January 20th 2017, but that won't be the end of him and/or his minions. Not only is Obama staying in Washington, DC, just a couple miles from the White House,media reports indicate that he is seeking to undermine Trump's presidency. Obama's Eminence Grise, Valerie Jarrett, is moving in at the Obamas' new residence to help in the campaign against Trump. In addition, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch has delivered a message encouraging anti-Trump protesters to continue. So has Hillary Clinton.
Perhaps the "icing-on-the-cake" is Tom Perez -- Obama's Secretary of Labor and a man of the far, far left-- being tapped as the new chairman of the Democrat National Committee, and immediately picking Keith Ellison -- a black Muslim member of the House of Representatives from Minnesota with a record of virulent anti-Semitism -- as a chief lieutenant. Perez's and Ellison's victories indicate that Democrats have learned nothing from 2016, and will continue pursuing a course of leftwing extremism.
Hillary has congratulated Perez and Ellison, suggesting she supports far-left tendencies in the Democrat Party.
When it comes to politics, the U.S. is clearly in a new world, one in which the usual give and take of popular government has given way to one organized faction's refusal to accept the results of a presidential election and willingness to tear the country apart to regain power.
What are Trump and the Republicans going to do? Practicing politics-as-usual won't work so long as the Democrats and their loyalists refuse to play that game. Democrats are waging war, not playing tiddlywinks.
Tit-for-tat-violence will be destructive of popular government. As satisfying as it might be to some -- many? -- rightists, matching the Democrats blow for blow will, sooner or later, end America's experiment with "government of the people, by the people, for the people."
Trump and his supporters will have to walk a narrow line, but they must adjust to America's new political world. Trump seems to know this. Do the Republicans?
No comments:
Post a Comment