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What Is America’s National Identity?

October 6, 2017

What Is America’s National Identity? American Thinker, Rabbi Aryeh Spero, October 6, 2017

Transnationalists determined to weaken and denude America know their route to victory lies in condemning the Judeo-Christian ethic which has provided America with its identity and life breath; and those at war with Judeo-Christianism know that in bringing down America the Judeo-Christian outlook will have lost its most vital fortress.

The Judeo-Christian ethos is an American treasure, a morality, to be defended and preserved, a gift and legacy to pass on to future generations.

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Many were elated and approved of President Trump’s July speech in Warsaw, Poland acknowledging the central role Western civilization plays in defining who we are and what we believe. Our freedom and survival depend on defending it, he said. Beyond that, he celebrated Western civilization as something extraordinary: “What we’ve inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before.”

A vocal few, popular in left-wing opinion circles, condemned Mr. Trump’s remarks as an affront to multiculturalism, labeling his linkage of us with Western civilization, and our pride in it, as “tribalism, white nationalism, and racism”, claiming that references to Western civilization and ancestors are code words for the above-mentioned vices. For some, even the broad term “Western civilization” is offensive and prejudicial since, as with all definitions, it necessarily conveys something distinctive and thus circumscribed.

The question we should answer is: does a country or nation need an identity, a unique identity with salient features that distinguish it from other countries and nations? In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville gave a resounding affirmation to the need for a specific identity. He wrote that a corporate entity remains what it is as long as it operates by the principles upon which it was founded. When it changes those principles, it becomes something entirely different, and the success it had, based on its original formula, becomes uncertain and imperiled. It atrophies and declines. He spoke not against periodic tinkering but warned against fundamental transformation.

According to the wise and prescient de Tocqueville, we define an entity by its original principles and the values that created its success. These are the seeds that animate it and supply its people with special spirit. What, then, is America’s identity?

Some say it lies in our Constitution and Bill of Rights, which delineate the liberties that enshrine our peoplehood and, on a functional level, make possible a daily life open to achievement, aspirations, and human potential. Our way of life and the blessings that have come to us depend on everyone living within this Constitutional framework and by precluding its replacement or abridgement with another set of laws claiming to be a “higher morality” or temporarily more important, or by enacting waivers or special accommodation in the name of multiculturalism.

There are those today wishing to sideline the Constitution and our historic way of life by invalidating the men, and thus the ideas, behind it. Using charges of racism as the singular and only important lens in which to judge a person’s value, they nullify the totality, the overwhelming contributions, and extraordinary sacrifices of great men and women of a different era. Meanwhile, they grant themselves unassailable superiority and rigid final judgment simply because of their claims to victimhood or for espousing one of the many isms in today’s pantheon for self-righteous virtue signaling. A nation’s historic identity is being replaced by identity politics, culminating frequently in automatic indictment of historical figures simply because their race or moral values are now out of fashion.

There are those in America wishing to define us strictly as a nation of tolerance and inclusivity, this deification resulting often, as in Europe, in tolerating the intolerable and including everyone and everything to the point of endangering those in society not ensconced within rarified and protective gates. They think the best identity is no identity. But this vacuum and void, as witnessed in Europe, allows for other assertive or aggressive identities and mores to creep within and replace, zone by zone; for surely, strong and energized identities will replace the mushy identity of No Identity.

Though tolerance is a laudable theme, it is found elsewhere and is not an exclusive element of Americanism. The President was correct in underscoring the importance of Western civilization and how it connects and ties America and Europe. But America moved Western civilization beyond its previous European contours. It fashioned something more grand, a majestic idea, something that not only preceded the Constitution, but from the time of Plymouth Rock distinguished America from other Western polities, unfolding into the American civilization. It is the Judeo-Christian ethos.

Though its roots began in a religious and idealistic outlook, this ethos shortly developed into a civic attitude and philosophy, shaping the themes and civic perspective that were America’s foundation and key to our freedom and prosperity. It supplies a set of moral and philosophic principles regarding economic, social, personal, and political life. Among its distinguishing features are: personal responsibility, liberty, seeing man as an individual, a work ethic, rights from God, meritocracy, rights to property and how one makes his living, and freedom of religion and conscience. Together with these principles were the uniquely American ideals of fair play, rugged individualism, innovation, volunteerism, speaking one’s mind, and demarcating between right and wrong.

America is much more than a land mass between the Atlantic and the Pacific. It is more than just a country. It is a nation; a nation with an exceptional identity born in a transcendent idea. The Judeo-Christian ethos made us singular among the nations.

The civic Judeo-Christian ethos does not demand adherence to the details of religion or to a particular form of worship or religious creed, nor loyalty to a particular religion. The ethos is open to all, just as is Western civilization. That its founders and ancestors were mostly white is not a structural roadblock to all sharing in its outlook, except in the mind of racialists eager to impute racism in anything distinctive or weaponize against those with whom they disagree.

Transnationalists determined to weaken and denude America know their route to victory lies in condemning the Judeo-Christian ethic which has provided America with its identity and life breath; and those at war with Judeo-Christianism know that in bringing down America the Judeo-Christian outlook will have lost its most vital fortress.

The Judeo-Christian ethos is an American treasure, a morality, to be defended and preserved, a gift and legacy to pass on to future generations.

Categories: American culture, American identity, Clash of civilizations, Judeo-Christian ethos
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The New Civil War

August 19, 2017

The New Civil War, American Thinker, Tom Trinko, August 19, 2017

(Please see also, Anti-Israel Academics Launch Campus Antifa Group for Faculty. — DM)

The first “shots” in our new civil war were fired after Charlottesville when many Democratic leaders claimed that they had the right to use physical force against anyone they didn’t like.

While cowardly leftist leaders are trying to portray themselves as fighting Hitler they are really fighting anyone they don’t agree with. Remember that some Democrats said that Rep. Steve Scalise had it coming since he opposed gun control and that Democrats have been silent when left-wing violence was used to prevent Republicans marching in a parade in Portland.

Facing a continued loss of power because their radical agenda is toxic to most Americans, the Democrat leadership — which includes the MSM — have decided that they have the right to physically attack anyone who stands in their way.

Like their Nazi and Communist forefathers, today’s Democrat leaders are comfortable sending swarms of Brownshirts out to beat into submission anyone who stands between them and power.

Under Obama, Democrats renounced the rule of law by declaring that they could choose to not enforce laws they didn’t like and make up laws that Congress never passed. Now they’re saying that they have the right to attack anyone who dares speak out in disagreement.  Rep. Scalise wasn’t a Nazi or white nationalist, nor were the Republicans in Portland, or the speakers that Democrats forcibly prevented from speaking in Berkeley. Yet the Democratic leadership’s condemnation of all of those events has been muted at best.

While the first American Civil War was fought to protect that particularly Democrat institution slavery, the new civil war Democrat elites are starting to wage is about transferring power from the people to the rich white oligarchs, judges, and government bureaucrats.

As then, Republicans stand for freedom and Democrats stand for slavery.

The Democratic elite has issued a call to war by supporting and endorsing violence against people who don’t agree with them.

The left has gone from endorsing Nazis marching in a neighborhood full of Holocaust survivors to endorsing attacks on Nazis wherever they might appear. We all hate Nazis, but as Americans, Republicans believe in freedom of even odious speech, which is why we’re not tearing down the statues of that mass murderer Lenin that exist in America or the statues of Democrat Robert Byrd, who was a senior official in the KKK.

Republicans have uniformly, including President Trump, condemned Nazis and white nationalists. Yet Democrats are attacking us for not being sufficiently “woke.”

The time for pretending that Democrat leadership is patriotic is over.  It’s time to shout from the rooftops that the Democratic leadership is a fascist cabal intent on overthrowing democracy.

It’s unclear how many of those who voted for Hillary support the clear fascist policies of the Democratic party.  We know that those people tend to be low-information voters who get their “news” from the MSM. Hence, they live in a bubble of lies which make Democrat policies look semi-reasonable.

Even intelligent people fall victim to the Democrat Big Lies. A liberal physicist, for example, was shocked to learn that Osama greenlighted 9/11 because Clinton’s fleeing from Somalia taught Osama that Americans were cowards. He’d never heard that.

Similarly, today many Americans believe that Trump was defending Nazis because the MSM is lying about what he really said.

That’s why we need to be careful and not condemn all Democrats; many of them are honestly unaware of the facts just as the citizens of Nazi Germany didn’t have a clue about how WWII was actually progressing or how the citizens of North Korea thought for decades that though they were starving, they had it better than those poor capitalist South Koreans.

It’s clear that not all of those who voted for Hillary were actually voting for her agenda of taking power from the people and giving it to the elites.

Unlike the average Hillary voter who never heard most of the negative news about her, the Democratic leadership has sinister motives. For decades, they’ve been waging war against America. It started with FDR, a big fan of fascist dictator Mussolini, who began moving this country down the path to socialism with his failed big government policies. Few people remember that those policies didn’t work; it took WWII for the U.S. to recover economically from the Depression.

The next big step was disempowering Americans by giving near absolute power to the unelected Supreme Court. That court overthrew the laws of all 50 states by legalizing abortion for any reason at any time in pregnancy based on a “right to privacy” which is nowhere in the Constitution.

The Supreme Court also created numerous rights for criminals and redefined marriage over the votes of 55,000,000 Americans.

In parallel, the Democrats increased the power of unelected government bureaucrats to the point that they felt empowered to demand that Catholic nuns pay for abortions. To Democrats the 1st Amendment only applies to causes they, the Democrats, support.

Trump’s election was a visceral scream from America saying that we want our power back. That we don’t want to be ruled by pretentious, stupid, elitist fascists like Pelosi and the Clintons, or by RINOs whose first loyalty is to the state, not the people.

The Democratic leadership is now following Mao, who said that political power grows from the barrel of a gun, while Americans are being forced to defend the core American belief that power flows from the people.

Just as the original Democrats repudiated Lincoln for opposing slavery, modern Democratic leaders are repudiating his belief that the government is of the people, for the people, by the people.

The elite bicoastal ruling class is nearly all white and racist to the core, but they use lies about Republicans, spread by the fawning liberal media, to justify violence.

Today Democrats have crossed the Rubicon.  By saying that it’s okay for Antifa to shut down speakers they don’t like and physically assault anyone they don’t happen to agree with Democrats have renounced the rule of law and summoned the whirlwind of civil war.

Why have Democrats once again started a civil war to achieve their ends?

They thought they had everything sewed up. When Hillary won she’d pack the Supreme Court with fascists who believed that they could make up whatever laws they liked. Hillary would, like Obama, ignore the Constitution and further strengthen the administrative state while waging a war against non-Democratic whites and Asians and ensuring that Blacks stayed uneducated so they couldn’t see how Democrats were exploiting them.

But contrary to their expectations, the American people said no. We don’t want to be ruled, we want to be represented — which is why the Republican failure to get rid of ObamaCare is so offensive.

Even with the lying media spreading Democratic talking points 24/7 the majority of Americans want to be free, not enslaved — not told how much soda they can drink or what type of entertainment they can like — Democrats support violent misogynistic rap music while condemning Americans for liking NASCAR. The Democratic message calling on Americans to accept slavery because, according to Democrats, Americans can’t manage their own lives — the same line Democrats used to justify slavery– can’t win elections because American’s aren’t that stupid. As a result, the Democrat leadership has decided that their only way to power is violence.

If they can’t win in the battlefield of ideas, they’ve decided that they need to silence, by the use of force, any voices they don’t like.

The Democrat leaders have turned to the communists they so admire — remember Obama wishing he could rule like the dictator of China does? — and decided that what they can’t win by the ballot they can win with the baseball bat.

Unless we all take a stand now, this spiral of violence initiated by Democrats will lead to a truly horrible future, just as the Democrat’s violent defense of slavery was the cause of the greatest tragedy in American history. If Democrats had voluntarily abandoned slavery, we could have avoided America’s most costly war. Instead we had to fight to end the scourge of slavery.

Contact the Republican leadership and make it clear that instead of condemning Trump for his stand against all violence, they need to attack the Democrat’s support of violence.

There is still time to avoid a massive escalation of violence but if we fail to take a stand against the Democrat’s use of force we will see our streets running with blood.  We know Democrats don’t care about that, because they don’t care about the thousands of Blacks shot in Chicago each year, but we do because we care about all Americans.

Take action and pray that we are not forced to relive the Civil War in order to prevent Democrats from destroying our democracy.

Categories: "Hate groups", Administrative state, America Divided, American values, Big Government, civil war, Contempt for America, Democracy, Democrat agenda, Divided States of America, Eradication of American history, FDR's America, First Amendment, Future of Democrat Party, Identity politics, Leftists, Media - leftist, Media and Democrats, Media and Obama, Media and Trump, Nationalism, Obama and racism, Political warfare, Trump agenda, U.S. courts
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The Intellectual Case For Trump II: Trump Is The Culture Warrior We Need

April 22, 2016

The Intellectual Case For Trump II: Trump Is The Culture Warrior We Need,  The Federalist, , April 20, 2016

A candidate like Donald Trump should be impossible. A loud, unscripted, hard-edged reality show-style candidate with exceedingly flexible positions on many hot-button issues would be laughed out of contention for the Republican nomination in other years. A man whose serial gaffes and willingness to stick his thumb in the eye of the gatekeepers of good taste would be cooked before he stepped onto the debate stage. An utterly inexperienced politician, who describes our rights and privileges as particular to us as Americans rather than universal moral mandates, would be rejected by both parties at any other time in the modern era.

But in Trump’s case, these supposedly disqualifying positions and attributes have proven to be the basis for unexpected success. Why? In part, it is because he corrects massive ideological failures by the Right, which have enabled unmitigated cultural overreach by the Left, eliminating the social and cultural basis that permits a Western liberal order to exist.

For decades, the institutional Right has ceded American culture to the Left, in spite of many voices who pointed out ample areas where the Right could carve out a countercultural movement against leftist domination, or even co-opt some of modern culture for itself.

The cause of this is partially a denial of how swiftly the culture has moved Left, leaving the institutional Right under the false impression it is still fighting the culture war of the 90’s and early 2000s. The Right’s obsession with 90’s-era battles over sex, drugs, and rock and roll is more than just an anachronism: it represents a self-inflicted wound that ignored how the Left used the culture to repeatedly make the case for their vision of an ideal society. We now know the Left won that war, and in this context, Trump represents the first candidate for whom success could only come after a culture war apocalypse.

The Right of the ‘Young Fogies’

The culture wars permitted the Right to be taken over by what Jeffrey Hart—Richard Nixon speechwriter, sometime National Review editor, and all-around conservative giant—described as “young fogies.” Hart describes the phenomenon in an essay titled “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to a Modern American Conservatism,” in which he envisions as a dialogue between himself and a younger woman of the era. Here is Hart’s warning:

A lot of my students are not sold on conservatism.[…] They think conservatives are preppies who are against sex. […] In some visible cases, the main content of ‘conservatism’ seems to be a refusal of experience. We have more than our share of young fogies. I could name some names, but what the hell. In my view, young fogie American conservatives…place an altogether disproportionate emphasis on sex and sex-related moral questions. […] Some conservatives appear to confuse Victorian morality with the Western tradition, and even with Christianity.

Hart wrote those words in 1982, when candidates like Ronald Reagan were still winning young voters. But the “young fogie-ism” Hart warned against was already becoming a significant portion of the Republican brand, one that extended through the anti-video game, anti-rap, anti-sex, anti-sideboob, anti-violence handwringing that became an integral part of the Republican persona over the next two decades.

Trump is many things, but a fogie he is not. On the surface, Trump’s gold-plated lifestyle is nothing like the old Hollywood-style glamour of the Reagan White House. But for an era where most Americans have moved far beyond the culture wars of the past, where reality stars are our new tastemakers and Kim Kardashian is an icon mothers encourage their daughters to emulate, he offers an aspirational vision of wealth and accomplishment that appeals to the same combination of glitz and celebrity.

The Left Turns the Market Against the Right

Obsessing over the lost culture wars of the past is an error for the Right. But the real problem is that even if the Right hasn’t moved on from its previous losses, the Left has moved on from its previous victories. They remain focused on advancing their vision and building on their victories, to the point of eradicating any opposition from the public square. As a result, the character of the Left has fundamentally changed in a way that today’s Right seems quite incapable of grasping.

Hannah Arendt once quipped that the fiercest revolutionary becomes a devoted conservative after the revolution. This is certainly true of the Left, which has, since its culture war victories, co-opted much of the dogma of earlier conservatives and poisoned it. The old Left cast itself as transgressors against mainstream morality. This Left enforces and controls mainstream morality. The old Left championed transgressive free speech. This Left despises it.

Most importantly, the old Left cast itself as outside of capitalism. This Left is thoroughly corporatist, and only occasionally pretends otherwise. As a result, conservatives have stood by, oblivious and helpless, as the Left began to turn all our best weapons—especially the free market—against us.

This brings us to a second point: the inadequacy of the institutional Right at anticipating and explaining free markets. Conservatives and libertarians have been warning of capitalism cannibalizing itself since at least 1942, when Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter opened his book “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy” with disturbing news for his free market-sympathetic peers.

“I felt it my duty to take, and to inflict upon the reader, considerable trouble in order to lead up effectively to my paradoxical conclusion: capitalism is being killed by its achievements,” Schumpeter wrote. Much later on in the book, he observed even more cuttingly that “capitalism, inevitably and by virtue of the very logic its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.”

Cultural Neutrality Is Not Possible

Schumpeter was right then, and he is distressingly right now. The cancer of leftism has spread through capitalism even further than it had in 1942. The general assumption of the American people in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the collapse and bailouts of Wall Street is that they were witnessing failures of capitalism, and the Right has done little to correct this impression.

Trump’s brazenness in admitting to past acts of cronyism is another aspect that would, for any other politician, spell his doom. Instead, it has fostered a greater degree of trust from his supporters. This is because Trump alone seems to understand that capitalism has weaknesses at all, having been a capitalist himself. The greatest of those is the fact that capitalism—and its defenders—assume it can operate from a position of cultural neutrality. It can’t.

In the latest season of “South Park,” the titular town is overrun with advertisements masquerading as human beings: soulless robots who use gentrification and political correctness (“mental gentrification,” the show wryly notes) to eliminate actual human beings from the area. This idea that a certain species of capitalism might actually drive political correctness is daring and interesting, and relatively unremarked upon by those on the Right today.

The Left Treats Race and Sex as Brands

One of the key tactics of advertisers is to make consumers feel their life is missing something without whatever product the advertiser is selling. If you look at ads that attempt to showcase the difference between, say, data packages from different cell phone carriers, you’ll often see the competition depicted as holding back their customers from the awesome data package they could have because of greed, technological incompetence, or some other abstraction that, of course, the advertised carrier doesn’t suffer from.

Once someone buys a product, you want them to feel allegiance to it, a degree of brand loyalty that can sometimes resemble political tribalism (see Apple). The aim is to make customers believe that someone who consumes that particular product belongs to a community of other buyers, who just happen to be a particularly desirable community to be a part of!

When you distill it down to its essence, the worst forms of modern leftist politics play on all of these same tactics, playing down the ramifications of policy agendas to speak to a much deeper and emotional desire to be a good person. Did you vote for Barack Obama because you wanted to feel good about yourself, but still feel life’s missing something? Vote for Bernie Sanders, and he’ll deliver on the promise to give you everything you need. Not getting the wage you could be getting? It’s the patriarchy, so switch carriers and join our feminist army for Hillary instead.

The Left treats race and sex as brands, operating with messaging and tactics that are more than just organizing techniques: they’re a brilliant technique to capture someone without the insight to see through the pitch. The Left has realized it can succeed by creating cultural turf wars among different demographics as a substitute for a policy agenda that speaks to their real needs.

The Political Equivalent of Gawker

In this, they break from the past in many respects. Bill Clinton himself revealed how significant this shift was when he challenged Black Lives Matter. Clinton was advancing a policy argument in defense of his approach to crime in the 1990s, in the face of protesters who would hear none of it. His arguments were based on the facts, where the BLM protesters’ signs were based on the equivalent of brand loyalty to a cultural movement. No matter how correct Clinton’s case was, it inevitably fell on deaf ears.

The point is that the post-culture war Left has not laid down their arms. Instead, they have become the political equivalent of Gawker: a divisive industry seeking cultural flashpoints to exploit and highlight, devoted to manufacturing mutual hate for their own benefit.  They thrive on the click-war hate that pits groups against each other.

It is not enough that women face challenges within a post-feminist society—they must be told that half the country is participating in a war on their priorities. In an atomized culture, breaking down people to the elements of ethnicity, sex, and gender is the Left’s go-to method of redefining society according to their priorities.

This is a key point that cannot be ignored. Because of the modern Left’s sophisticated use of advertising techniques, they have done something with their hatemongering that the Left of the past could only dream of: they have made it profitable. In so doing, they have turned a capitalist tactic on the culture that sustains it, and thus, on itself.

The Right Needs a New Cultural Vision

The Right must fight back against that. Yes, free markets remain the best economic system ever created, and a necessary precondition for a free society, but not a sufficient one. Does this mean the state has to get involved? Not necessarily. Conservatives could use another weapon to limit the spread of this kind of poison, and that’s culture.

Unfortunately, what little of a cultural vision we possess on the Right is so dated as to be largely hokey and irrelevant to the experience of Americans today. Because this new Left has become the dominant culture, the Right is obliged to form a counterculture. But countercultures are no place for young fogies. Countercultures shoot sacred cows, scandalize “respectable” norms, and generally wreak havoc for the sake of breaking down the hypocrisy and weakness of the dominant culture. By and large, it’s still the young fogies who run the show, and expecting them to create a counterculture, let alone a counterculture that produces actual art, is ludicrous.

The Right doesn’t have to conjure up its own art from scratch. It can and occasionally has co-opted modern entertainment as well. After all, don’t films like Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” series make the most powerful statement about the tension between chaos and civilization since John Ford? Don’t Nietzschean fairy tales like “Breaking Bad,” “House of Cards,” or even “True Detective,” not to mention most video games, utterly brush aside the Left’s fantasies about Rousseauistic, universal human goodness? Well, yes—but once again, Hart’s warning looms large, and fogie-ism rears its head.

An excellent example of this is an article titled “A Counterproductive Alliance,” discusing the increasing friendliness to right-wing ideas among video game fans after the #Gamergate controversy. The gist of the article can be summed up as: “How will we maintain our air of moral superiority if people show up to CPAC in costumes instead ofblazers and bowties?” Never mind that #Gamergate and movements like it were the most successful backlash against political correctness: for some “conservatives,” sayingyes to potential allies was too much to bear if it meant hobnobbing with the sorts of people who’ve never read a Bible or owned a varsity jacket.

Beat Dominant Culture at Its Own Game

This leaves the Right in a vulnerable and very unenviable spot: the most anachronistic elements of right-wing politics have rendered us too unimaginative to create a counterculture of our own, and too snobbish to appropriate the elements of the dominant culture that could serve as building blocks.

What’s a conservative who wants to stop culture, and thus politics, from being dragged to the far Left do? Answer: He or she has to hope that some part of mainstream culture co-opts the Right. Pray, in other words, that some Prometheus comes along who’s willing to steal fire from his fellow cultural elites to give to the Right’s forgotten constituencies, even if it annoys their more refined leaders.

Perhaps, say, some titanic elite figure who knows leftist pop culture’s weaknesses from the inside, and is willing to lose his cozy insider status to go at it like a wrecking ball? You know, the sort of person with enough cultural cachet to turn an episode of “Saturday Night Life” into an hour-long infomercial for his political vision, rather than a source of endless sneering gags about Republicans? The kind of person who can get away with barking orders at MSNBC hosts? That kind of person?

Oh look, it’s Donald Trump. Trump, alone among the 2016 Republican candidates, has been willing to seize the banner of the Right in the current culture war, and plant it straight in the backs of his fallen leftist antagonists. Trump did this the way countercultural warriors are supposed to win fights: he beat the dominant culture at its own game by rejecting their assumptions about what was allowed.

Hoisted on Their Own Petards

Compared to Trump at his most mocking and satirical, Gawker is tame. Compared to Trump at his most daring and impetuous, even the most ruthless of Hollywood’s antiheroes look peevish. Compared to Trump’s seemingly oblivious moments of benevolence, Upworthy looks mawkish and saccharine. Trump has made destroying the young fogies on the Right and Left the greatest thing on TV.

If the leaders of the Right are scared of Trump because he will say anything; the Left is scared of Trump precisely because he will say anything. He does not play by the rules, and that makes him less predictable and more dangerous. What Ronald Reagan and Trump have in common is obvious: an incredible capacity to use the media to captivate the American people. One learned this in Hollywood, the other in reality TV, but both deployed this skill to great effect.

There is, of course, a big difference, as well: everyone knows Reagan cast himself as a sunny, heroic figure. Trump, on the other hand, is taking his cues from his time as a pro-wrestling heel personality, i.e., a comically larger-than-life villain. But there’s a neat thing about villains, or at least well-done ones: they get to show where people’s ideas of good and evil fall flat. Trump does this brilliantly to the Left. He has taken the humiliating mockery that the media has trained so effectively on “hicks,” Christians, and Republicans, and turned it round to expose the smug, mostly leftist Babbits and young fogies of the Acela Corridor as no less ridiculous.

That’s a good start for someone who wants to make America great again, rather than letting America succumb to its eventual, leftist-driven death by a thousand clicks.

Categories: 2016 elections, American culture, Democrats, Donald Trump, Leftists, Rightists
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