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Bonfire of the Sophisticates (Part 2)
(Note: This is the second of a two-part essay, the first part centered on the proposition that the Republican party, through its own self-destructive tendencies, has reduced conservatism itself to little more than an academic exercise.)
The second proposition is as follows:
Donald Trump is less an instrument of political vandalism than of utter and complete exasperation.
There is a certain lunacy that we’ve come to expect from the left. For example, Tricia Bishop, the Baltimore Sun’s deputy editorial page editor, opined recently that she fears licensed gun owners more than she fears gun-wielding criminals:
I’m less afraid of the criminals wielding guns in Baltimore, I declared as we discussed the issue, than I am by those permitted gun owners. I know how to stay out of the line of Baltimore’s illegal gunfire; I have the luxury of being white and middle class in a largely segregated city that reserves most of its shootings for poor, black neighborhoods overtaken by, ‘the game.’ The closest I typically get to the action is feeling the chest-thumping vibrations of the Foxtrot police helicopter flying overhead in pursuit of someone who might be a few streets over, but might as well be a world away. But I don’t know where the legal gun owners are or how to ensure that their children, no matter how well versed in respecting firearms, won’t one day introduce that weapon to my daughter.
The poor dear, whose heart no doubt bleeds (metaphorically of course) for those poor chaps in the “black neighborhoods,” but whose pointed head would rather consign them to defenselessness in the face of armed criminals to assuage her angst in the relative safety of her middle class enclave, is boringly typical. But as I say, we expect that sort of condescending twaddle from the left. We don’t expect it from our own side.
“The problem with the Tea Party, I think it’s just unsustainable because they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country. It will die out,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, who probably still wonders why it was his presidential campaign that died out instead. Meanwhile, Graham’s sorority sister, John McCain, refers to those few senators who actually tried to make good on their campaign promises as “whacko birds.”
And of course, every Republican big wig, medium wig, and toupee immediately set their rugs on fire when Donald Trump serenely ignited national interest in illegal immigration and the government’s bipartisan refusal to follow the voters’ wishes. Both Trump and his supporters were branded as racists for calling attention to the mayhem that would not have occurred and those whose lives would not have been cut short had the government simply enforced its own damned immigration laws and controlled the nation’s border. That the concerns being raised by Trump were neither fictional nor petty was underscored with the ghastly killing of Kate Steinle by an illegal alien who had been deported five times, returned, and was released from jail to roam about freely.
Fox News examined a patchwork of local, state and federal statistics and concluded that 11.7 million illegal aliens within our borders account for 13.6 percent of those sentenced for serious crimes, with 12 percent of murder convictions, 20 percent of kidnapping convictions, and 16 percent of drug trafficking convictions. While the federal government removed some 315,943 criminal illegal aliens from the US in 2014, they simultaneously released into the general population 30,558 criminal illegal aliens who had amassed a combined 79,059 criminal convictions among them, including 86 homicides, 186 kidnappings, and thousands of sexual assaults. They roam freely.
The nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies has concluded that the majority of what our government euphemistically calls “Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC),” which unfortunately include criminal gang members, have been simply lost by the feds. Of the 84,820 UAC cases filed between October 2013 and August 2015, only 29,307 were completed. Of those, 17,382 UACs were ordered removed from the country — except that 14,014 of those cases were tried in absentia, meaning the minors never showed up for the hearing, and thus remain at large. A total of 313 UACs were permitted to stay in the US, while 11,610 applied for asylum or Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, and their cases apparently continue. That leaves 55,513 cases still pending, meaning that out of 84,820 UAC cases filed, only 3,360 UACs have actually been removed. But there’s nothing to see here, says the political-industrial complex, move along you knuckle-dragging racists, and stop listening to Donald Trump.
Only this time the people aren’t buying it. They’ve seen European utopianism come crashing down, or rather blown to bits, after Germany admitted 1.1 million asylum-seekers last year. On New Year’s eve, some 500 men, including some newly-arrived asylum seekers and many other immigrants, groped, robbed, and raped hundreds of women, in Cologne and other cities, in what appeared to be a coordinated assault. Vigilante mobs then roved through the streets and attacked men of foreign appearance, leaving at least two in the hospital. Neo-Nazis went on a violent rampage in Leipzig.
A few days ago in Canada, a couple of guys named Mohamed shot up a Calgary nightclub, prompting Mark Steyn to write:
Occam’s Razor would suggest that Mohamed and Mohamed shot up that bar for the same reasons as their fellow Mohameds turned a Paris rock concert into a bloodbath and the German New Year into an auld lang rapefest – because the infidels (rockers, boozers, women) have to be intimidated into accepting the supremacy of Islam.
Americans look at this, and at the shooting in San Bernardino, and conclude that importing tens of thousands of Muslim refugees, a great many of whom appear to be healthy military-aged men, is probably not a good idea. Yet again, right on cue, they are chastised not only by the usual cadre of open borders enthusiasts, but by those ostensibly on the same side of the aisle. Even if a few bad actors slip in, the sophisticates assure us, it won’t be many — a statistical anomaly, really. We are supposed to forget that it took only 19 “bad actors” to slaughter over 3,000 innocents on 9/11, or that a mere two fanatics killed 14 people and wound 22 more in San Bernardino, or that it took only two barbarians to detonate a bomb at the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring over 260 others.
Americans are increasingly looking at both major political parties and seeing a gaggle of well-heeled and well-protected elites who think it a demonstration of their own intellectual and moral superiority to play Russian Roulette with the lives, property, and safety of others, and they have simply had enough. They’ve had enough of people staring at them as if they just sprouted a third eyeball when they suggest that those who hold public office really ought to keep their promises. They’ve had enough capitulation, enough inaction, enough excuses, enough of playing loose with their lives, safety and property, and enough mockery. They are angry, yes, — and they are desperate, as if trapped in a runaway car, flipping all the switches and mashing all the pedals in the hope that something, anything, will please, Lord, bring this thing to a stop before it sails over a cliff. To wit, my final proposition:
It isn’t about Trump, Cruz, et al. … it’s about the American people.
Has anyone stopped to notice that when the old guard rants and insults Donald Trump, his poll numbers climb? His followers identify rather closely with him, so that insulting him becomes tantamount to insulting those whose votes a politician might need. It’s been entertaining to watch representatives from the consultant class speak of both Trump and his supporters in terms they would never use on Barack Obama or his devotees, and then wonder why the voters rebel. Republican consultant Rick Wilson, whose Twitter feed suggests that he is trying to replace Bill Maher as the nation’s preeminent vulgarian, went as far as to write a sexual slur against Trump supporter Ann Coulter that would make Bill Clinton blush. “But hey, don’t forget to vote for us in November,” they say. Not very bloody likely, comes the response.
So they rant, they slander, they insult, and they exhibit some of the worst qualities they assign to others, moving more people into the Trump column by the day because — because why, exactly? Because, one gathers, it wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. The conservative candidates were supposed to divide their votes, leaving the last moderate standing as the presumptive heir to a string of moderate losers in November. As lug-headed as voters are are assumed to be, it appears they finally caught on. From which, the GOP has learned positively zilch, zero, zip, nada, nothing.
In the Republican response to the State of Trump speech Monday night, Governor Nikki Haley delivered another sterling lecture to the benighted citizenry:
During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices. We must resist that temptation.
No one who is willing to work hard, abide by our laws, and love our traditions should ever feel unwelcome in this country.
At the same time, that does not mean we just flat out open our border. We can’t do that. We cannot continue to allow immigrants to come here illegally. And in this age of terrorism, we must not let in refugees whose intentions cannot be determined.
We must fix our broken immigration system. That means stopping illegal immigration. And it means welcoming properly vetted legal immigrants, regardless of their race or religion. Just like we have for centuries.
And what, Governor Haley, if their religion, or at least their subsection of it, requires that they convert or kill us? What if they reject American constitutional law in favor of Sharia? And, as Mark Steyn patiently reminds us:
That’s not actually true. By “centuries,” Mrs. Haley means half-a-century – since the 1965 immigration act. Before then, America, like all nations, reserved the right to pick and choose which non-citizens it wished to admit.
The point in this discussion, however, is that Americans have figured out that it isn’t really Donald Trump, or Ted Cruz, or Ben Carson, or Carly Fiorina who is being lectured. It’s the American people themselves. It’s the ones who get up early each day, who work hard and play by the rules, but are constantly being told that they are insufficiently trusting of a government whose IRS and EPA abuses them; or of a health care system that not only features skyrocketing premiums, but that imposes fines if they can’t afford them; they are called nativists and worse if they are found insufficiently welcoming to people from regions that call for death to America; they are deemed racist if they don’t submit to the false narratives of those who defy the law and attack those who who enforce it; and they are expected to subsidize their own harassment as they watch their incomes dwindle and their country disintegrate while their interests rank somewhere behind that of criminal aliens and domestic wards of the state.
They are lied to by a bipartisan cabal of politicians, and condescended to when they voice their resentment. In the final analysis, it isn’t about Mr. Trump or any of the other outsiders. It’s about the American people themselves, whose ire has been raised and who are very likely to upset a great deal of the established order, for better or worse. Perhaps the sophisticates, with all their erudition, should have seen this coming?
This post was originally published on Jan. 16, 2016.
Published in General
I’m not a fan of Trump, but this sums up how I feel about nearly all of it in a way that I wish I could have written half as well.
(edited for an errant “the” in there, I blame a lack of coffee)
Yes, yes, and yes. Especially, the “for better or worse.”
Amen.
Excellent analysis.
Nice work, Dave. Trump’s appeal is counter-intuitive, in that the more things he says, history tells us he should have been all done as a candidate, yet the opposite is true. The only explanation on the left for this is racism, etc, the standard garbage. The explanation on the right, by the establishment right, is that the country is filled with rubes.
So, I guess, which is it? And why, in any case, would we consent to be governed by anyone who feels this way about their country, that it no longer represents them in any meaningful way? That, in fact, it might be purposefully mis-representing them?
We didn’t elect people to ram the unwanted thing down our throats, but that’s what we get, every year. And we still re-elect them. The entire process needs a massive shakeup.
Thanks for adding the point several of us around here and even Peggy Noonan have been making. Trump’s poll numbers and phenomenon have very little to do with Trump and much to do with Congressional Republicans.
I am frustrated that he appears the best we can do this cycle to raise up someone worthy of aggravating the majority of incumbents and their donor apparatus, but nobody else stepped into the arena.
Part of that may be how grueling the process is. You have to be a little crazy to want to put yourself out there and through this. There might be a million better people for doing this and for being President, but we have to choose from those crazy enough to say, “I’ll do it!” And Trump is the only one who says, “I’ll do it, and I don’t care what the big donors think.”
Excellent as always!
And I honestly think the consultants/elites/establishment or whatever you wish to call them don’t realize that they’re mostly to blame for Trump’s lead.
I’ve pointed out before that insulting voters doesn’t win them to your side but hardens opposition to your message but they’ve carried on serenely confident that only an idiot could disagree with them.
The other problem is the moral superiority complex you find with some supporters who believe their fanboyism is somehow better than others because of the object of their adoration. The idea that other people have come to their choice rationally just doesn’t occur.
Good article, agree with it. Half of the country is either crazy or simply doesn’t have a clue about anything beyond their immediate surroundings. The other half– third– is angry about the crazies and the ignorant and the rent seeking parasitical establishments of both parties who are quite happy as the ultimate decline will take longer than they and their children will live. But we’ve stirred up a man on horseback, a hero who will fix it, a populist demagogue who is in fact part of the pattern of decline, dysfunction and corruption. Not good, but understandable. It happens when countries reach this kind of stagnation and when interests harden into culture.
I think this one sentence is the biggest reason for the GOP break up. Why is it that folks like Cruz and Paul have to endure vicious insults from their own Party members when these same Party members will not do the same to Obama. I don’t recall Cruz or Paul, or any other non-Establishment elected GOP’er, going to the House floor and saying that the GOP’s answer to healthcare is that you die. I don’t recall Tea Party Patriots running an ad depicting Paul Ryan throwing “granny” off a cliff as a metaphor for his entitlement reform package. And I don’t recall Conservative campaign operatives coming up with an ad featuring a blue collar worker blaming Mitt for killing his wife when Bain outsourced the manufacturing job he had. Every single one of these are real examples and they are each from Democrats. Yet, who does Mitch McConnell want to punch in the nose? Yup, you guessed it. The Tea Party.
To quote an old chief of mine, “don’t come bitching to me about your problem unless you propose a solution as well.”
Forgetting the inaccuracies, what you’ve said is what we all know and all agree on. There’s still no solution there unless the base yelling to the establishment, “I’ll fix you; I’ll kill me!” is considered a solution. Burn it down and piss on the ashes may be the mood of the electorate (especially conservatives), but it is not a solution to the problems causing them to feel this way.
Absolutely nails it.
The sophisticates are in denial. They have a utopian vision for America, even while they are protected by their gates, their bodyguards and insulated in a myriad of ways from crime and the devolution of our cultural fabric.
Even if multiculturalism could be fast-tracked successfully in the case of our general third-world mass importation, adherents to Islam constitute a poison pill, and an actual negation of multiculturalism.
The paradox is lost on these dreamers. They don’t understand that their ideals are categorically rejected by those same people they expect to come here and work hard (they aren’t even using the term ‘assimilate’ anymore). In short, they are telling us we can afford to integrate people whose fundamental values are antithetical to ours, who actively refuse assimilation, and that we are bigots and xenophobes for highlighting this fact.
Within this river of refugees will swim jihadi sharks. This is unlike any other subset of immigrants in the history of the USA. Sure there are bad apples in any barrel, but this barrel contains apples that explode and can kill thousands, perhaps millions. There comes a time when we must shed our vaunted ideals and look at the reality. We can’t have our wonderful, open, blank-slate society in the face of this threat.
We reject this imbalance of the protected class making decisions subjecting ordinary citizens to wonton slaughter, rape, frotteurism, and general contempt, while they congratulate themselves for their virtue and magnanimity.
Let me leave links to a couple of interesting papers by Eric Weinstein.
First, “Migration for the Benefit of All: Towards a New Paradigm for Economic Immigration” [pdf] (which takes seriously the idea that low-skilled immigration leads to a transfer of wealth from workers to employers).
Then, “How and Why Government, Universities and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists and High-Tech Workers” (pushing back against the idea that Americans are unable and unwilling to do science and engineering).
While I agree that there needs to be a solution to this, I’ve never liked the idea that unless you have an alternative, keep your mouth shut. Just because I don’t know how to fix something doesn’t mean I shouldn’t point and say “Hey, I think something is wrong, this doesn’t seem to be working right.”
We’ve all known this since at least ’08. If we haven’t come up with a better solution than Trump at this point, then maybe the establishment has a point that we shouldn’t be trusted with ideas.
Cruz is an appropriate response to McCain, McConnell, Graham, et al…Trump is the electoral version of Heathers.
Solutions have been proposed for years. Enforce existing laws. Is that so difficult to comprehend?
Depends on your definition of “me”…
The method I was always taught was:
I think what Dave has done here is Step 1. Now, some might think, “We’ve all known this for years,” but I’m not sure that’s correct. Obviously, the sophisticates think that we, the American voters of the right, are the problem.
Trump, as an example, may be a terrible solution to the problem. But what alternatives have we been “offered?” We have Marco Rubio, who has shown his flexibility on the immigration issue (which is really a sovereignty and public safety issue). (Some say the same of Cruz.) And the rest are no sort of solution other than “more of the same (JEB!)” or “more wacky (Rand)” or “inexperience will heal us (Carson).” *
This is not a very good selection of alternative solutions, and most are addressing very different statements of the problem (or totally different problems) than what “has been obvious since 2008.”
* I do not necessarily agree with these short-hand characterizations.
To borrow wisdom from Victor Davis Hanson: Trump is the nemesis that has risen up to face the GOP’s hubris.
I no longer think Trump is crazy or, for that matter, a disaster. Yes, I said it. In fact, his presence is very healthy for the Republican Party. Finally, someone is speaking a language that one very large otherwise natural constituency of the Republican Party understands.
Take the China answer. I hear people describe him as saying he does not support a 45% tariff, blah blah blah, and then I do support a 45% tariff. Crazy, right?
Last night, I finally understood what he was saying and why I am convinced he is being consistent. He is trying to say that he would not impose a tariff, but he would threaten it as the logical counterpart to China’s devaluation, which is in effect a tariff on American goods that he estimates has a roughly 45% impact. He always talks about how we need better negotiators and that we have tremendous leverage. He is not making an argument about a tariff. He is making an argument about how to negotiate better deals. On that point, he is completely correct. He knows he cannot come out ans say I would never put in place a tariff because then he could never negotiate that deal. China would not believe him.
But many of us (myself included, at first at least), listened to him and analyzed it in terms of the babble we hear from pundits and “experts” all the time. We concluded he was being a demagogue or didn’t understand. But when I asked my high-school educated construction worker brother about it, he explains it to me in seconds. (With great pride I might add).
It’s amazing.
Amazingly the back and forth he had with Jeb about Boeing and China is actually true:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2015/09/23/boeing-to-build-its-first-offshore-plane-factory-in-china-as-ex-im-bank-withers/#2715e4857a0b4f863bae5252
Yes, yes, 10000 times yes. I am in the fed up number! I am Cruz guy, and I have liked Cruz for years, but I will vote for Trump if he gets the nomination. I will relish how pissed off the elites will be.
Trump is not one of them, despite his money. The elites have never liked him. I am not sure I like him, but this is what it comes to when the elites who rule us (and rule us they do, instead of serve), disdain us and hate us.
Did he start the explanation with, “Look, dumb#$$…”?
This is an interesting revelation, though. What does it say when the sophisticates so misunderstand, but one with a high school education understands with no problem? I think this is true of most of what Trump is saying.
Great article. Also highlights a key point as to how Trump would be different from, say Cruz, but similar to the establishment. Trump would never get rid of the Ex-Im Bank.
Also highlights how Trump probably does have a better grasp on what’s happening with the business climate than others.
Well done, Dave. The Republican establishment and the open borders crowd (but I repeat myself) can get stuffed.
The root of the issue is that Republicans don’t get social media, and are actively lighting themselves on fire.
If one peruses the twitter feed down and to the right of the ricochet home page. Why based upon that do people want to vote for a mainstream candidate?
That is the only thing I disagree with even slightly. It isn’t self-destructive. That would imply some internal conflict. Conservatism, to the national Republican party, has become a marketing strategy, a way to keep the rubes distracted while the Uniparty cements its rule. Two divisions of a company may be rivals, but as long as both are profitable and advance the overall strategy of the company, they’re not enemy enemies.
The upper echelons of the Republican party are not conservatives in any broad or principled sense that might lead them to introspection and self-criticism. They’ve been willing to play the part on TV to keep the voters acquiescent to policies and actions which are harmful to the voters themselves and to the country. The Democrat division of the Uniparty has support from black voters in much the same way.
Once the Tea Party arose, the GOP leadership recognized the insurgency as their enemy and have been fighting against them – us – ever since. The GOP leadership and all the candidates except Cruz (maybe) and Trump (recently, anyway) have already come out in support of immigration policies that will ensure decades of Progressive rule.
This election is for all the marbles.
You cannot rebuild on a rotten foundation. You must remove the old, yes burn it down and piss on the ashes, before you can begin to rebuild. Trying to patch up a rotten foundation for the last half-century is what has gotten us into this mess.
There’s much to this. I don’t see how the current direction of the party (or at least a very vocal third of it) rebuilds anything.
We are not in the rebuild phase yet. We’re just beginning the burn down and piss phase (and I want attribution when people use my phrase!)
Do you prefer Whiskey Sam or Chain Smoking Monkey?