A Most American Election
The war for a new independence
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissention, which in different ages & countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.
George Washington, Farewell Address
This was a most American of elections. Identity groups, manufactured by Democrat leaders almost a century ago, showed significant signs that they don’t operate as mindless minions to the political class. The populist Republicans, to be distinguished from “conservative” Republicans, have cracked through that hard protective shell the Democrats constructed around anybody who’s not white, not Christian, and not socialist.
Based upon the ballot tallies thus far, Trump and the Republicans increased voter approval in almost all demographics, cutting through race, religion, gender, education, economic class, and age. Trump increased vote totals for himself over prior elections in all but one state. This was a realignment election to a certain extent. If half of the nation had not been preconditioned on the “fascist” nature of Trump, the vote would have, without doubt, reflected the stouter desire for a complete wrecking of our current governmental structure. But be aware: This was not a Republican wave; if it were, the control of the House would have been known the night of November 5th. Rather, it may have been an election that eschewed both parties.
George Washington was the first and only president to be elected without a political party promoting his candidacy. He warned us of the ills of political parties, as they tend to accumulate power in order to dictate their preferential policies. A political party, imparted Washington, “serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.” It seems that Washington peered through a crystal ball and saw America’s future two hundred and twenty-eight years later.
I wrote in a previous column:
This is no longer a struggle between liberals and conservatives; there is nothing liberal in the hard tactics of these [Democrat] fascists. Censorship. Chaos. Destruction. Death. That is not the liberal idealism that I remember. And we are no longer conservatives. What is left to conserve?
Labeling someone a liberal or a conservative has little significance. George W. Bush ran as a conservative but he labeled it “compassionate conservatism.” So, before Dubya came around, conservatives were blood thirsty tyrants? Thank God he and Karl Rove rescued us! Neither Bushes were conservative, as it turned out.
From the moment FDR dispatched Harold Ickes, his secretary of the interior, to begin clawing away Black support from the party of Lincoln, the Democrat Party has been addicted to the power that the sugary high of identity politics brings. They wanted more.
Enter The Great Society: “I’ll have those n*****s voting Democratic for 200 years,” said LBJ.
When the Democrats embraced The Great Society, they embraced a new slavery centered around poverty. Once public assistance was based upon an unwed mother with a dependent child -- that then increased with more children -- an epidemic of fatherless children was woven into our social fabric with whole generations trapped inside programs that offer very little opportunity for escape, especially saddled with substandard education. It has become the plantation to where blacks were guaranteed to never be returned. It also gave Democrats a near monopoly on the Black vote.
Once that was enshrined, the Democrat Party went after all disaffected identity groups; already embracing labor unions, they went after Hispanics with Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association; they embraced the Equal Rights Amendment that never passed but provided feminist capture, and so on. All are welcomed on the Democrat plantation, except for conservative white males.
All of these groups had legitimate grievances and in embracing them, the Democrats became the party of the people and pushed the Republican Party into embracing chamber of commerce interests and Wall Street; easy to do since, devoid of political ideology, they were already the country club party. It became very easy to sway public opinion toward the Democrats and they enjoyed near unanimous support from middle America.
The party attracted an intellectual elite that coordinated the party’s base to enact a populist-style uprising that isolated what was left of Barry Goldwater’s rebirth of the conservative movement. Now, dictated by this elite, anyone opposing Democrat policies became a racist, misogynist, xenophobe, homophobe, or any combination thereof. These elites brought with them a feeling of moral superiority and unlimited cash, especially from the emerging information technology industry. It was cool to be a Democrat; Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon, media joined in and the party became a party. There were, however, mounting pressures on this Democrat coalition to hold the middle; eventually and predictably something would have to give way.
The Democrat Party became a machine -- like bulldozers strip-mining a gold deposit -- but, just like other people’s money, gold eventually runs out. With the embrace of transgender “rights,” the Democrats tried to extract that one last ounce of gold left in the mine’s discarded tailings.
The building blocks of minority groups eventually would stumble toward irreconcilable differences. That was exposed in this past election. The Democrat’s accumulated power -- that now, ironically, included multinational corporations and Wall Street -- was stretched too tight. The last effort at grabbing a disaffected group splintered popular appeal to the party. (It seems even soccer moms don’t appreciate their little princesses getting smacked around by boys pretending to be girls.) Locking down the minority vote with platitudes eventually led to a question: What, exactly, have the Democrats done to improve the everyday life of their most ardent supporters?
The Democrats have been playing musical chairs. The small, disaffected groups -- whose media-amplified volume is higher than the sound they make -- grabbed the chairs when the music stopped. Moderates and even a few progressives were left standing on the sidelines.
Both parties have pulled apart the middle in order to attempt a total realignment of power. In this election cycle, it worked out for the Trump Republicans.
The realignment isn’t complete. The Republicans have to preform and the party apparatus must venture into the den of the beast in order to prove to Blacks and Hispanics that this is not just a Trump coalition but a new party that will work to make life better for all Americans.
Unfortunately, the Republican party elders don’t want this coalition. They enjoy their power emanating from the Imperial City. Won or lost elections really don’t have any impact on these people and they are the same powers behind the Democrats. These power elites have formed their own coalition and so our political landscape has become the elite capture of power as middle America tries to hold on to what little wealth they have remaining. The money interests know the Democrats no longer have a winning coalition and so they have a dilemma: do they switch back to Republicans with the hope the elites in the party will welcome their power, or do they stay with the Democrats with the hope of a Republican failure at governing?
The outlook for Republicans is not remotely assured. The party elite control the Senate and the House’s grasp on power is tenuous at best.
Vivek Ramaswamy summed it best: We are at our 1776 moment. The revolution was declared, the first battle has been decisively won. Trump and the America First movement will try for a knockout but more than likely it will become a war of attrition. Our best bet might be for everyone to swear-off political parties and pull together as Americans first and foremost. By George, the revolution is upon us and this was, indeed, the most American election of our times.