On Monday WND published a column in which Joseph Farah suggested that it doesn’t matter that Donald Trump is not a conservative. What does matter is this:
Trump threatens to destroy, once and for all, the Republican establishment, which even some of the contributors to the National Review assault on him would agree represents as much a danger to the republic as the Democrat establishment… Trump, should he be the nominee … is the only Republican candidate who could potentially realign the national political landscape and win a Reaganesque-style landslide – even winning states thought, for the last 28 years, to be impossible for Republican candidates to win.
The notion that Trump will destroy the GOP establishment is already proving to be questionable. The elitist faction money powers assigned to the GOP are already considering their options. They are doing what Trump has done throughout his career: reading the wind and tacking in whatever direction promises to keep their coffers at full sail. Yesterday Trump was touting his great relations with Pelosi, Reid and Charles Schumer, and promising to continue them. Whatever his deluded supporters from the GOP base may fantasize, a Trump victory will very likely continue the GOP quislings’ pattern of betrayal. He is literally vowing to “revert to type.”
He means to extend the era of bipartisan cooperation during which the GOP quislings he supported and helped to finance betrayed everything their Party is supposed to stand for. In particular, Jerry Falwell, Jr. and others who endorse Trump will end up greatly embarrassed by the consequences. As we contemplate that fact, we should remember that before he repackaged himself to enter the race for the GOP Presidential nomination, Trump was, in every respect, one of the elitist faction money powers mentioned above. He has only retooled his rhetoric as part of the effort to con disaffected GOP conservatives out of their votes.
But before he embarked on his “long con” he consulted the elitist faction’s liar-in-chief, Bill Clinton, who had successfully worked a similar game in respect of “conservative” Reagan Democrats to win the Democrat Party’s nomination for President in 1992. Did Bill Clinton think he (Trump) could pull it off? Perhaps he did, since after their consultation, Trump went ahead. However that may be, Trump’s fellow elitist faction money moguls kept their distance. Whether or not Trump convinced Clinton, they would wait and see how things developed.
Now they appear to be moving toward the view that Trump’s ploy is working. He did everything possible to cast himself in the role of “anti-establishment” bully boy. He went from calling the “border security first” approach to amnesty for illegals “mean-spirited” in 2013, to inveighing against illegal immigrants in the most mean-spirited way imaginable in 2015. Nor has he shied away from personal attacks on his adversaries. Indeed, he has made a point of saying whatever he could to buttress the impression that he is “in the face” of the so-called “establishment” GOP leaders and candidates. On this account, he has succeeded in lighting rhetorical fires, that are sucking oxygen out of the atmosphere for other contenders hoping to be the focal point of grassroots disaffection.
Like all thoroughgoing demagogues, Trump substitutes personal emotion for persuasive reasoning whenever possible. He may cite facts, like the statistics about the disproportionate crime rates among illegals, but only as props on the way to kindling an emotional bonfire. Only one truth matters to an unprincipled demagogue: what truly rouses the emotions he means to manipulate.
So Trump moves ahead, without explaining his sudden and severely incredible conversions on issues like abortion, homosexual marriage and amnesty for illegal immigrants. He is counting on bonfires of emotion to distract from his true purpose, which thus remains hidden in the shadows. Yet now and again, some sign of it appears. Rush Limbaugh notes that he’s no Ronald Reagan. Limbaugh and others point out that his poll numbers are inflated with potential crossovers from the Democrat Party. Now articles begin to appear suggesting that his peers among the elitist faction money powers are starting to consider how to place their bets.
Joseph Farah’s column reflects the true goal of this strategy. It is to win a victory that realigns the political landscape with a “Reaganesque” landslide victory for the Republican Party. But unlike Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, the focal point for the victory, is not fundamentally conservative in any respect. Trump is an unprincipled pragmatist. He is not, as Reagan was, a man of convictions, his presently stated views tested and matured by years in the political wilderness. He’s a recent and purely rhetorical convert, who has in no way proven that he can be trusted to keep to the positions that are suddenly, by his lip-service, ascribed to him.
Trump’s appearance on the scene confirms the success of the elitist effort, ongoing since at least the second decade of the 20th Century, to eliminate the features of America’ s constitutional self-government that distinguished it from failed “democracies” in the past. The key such feature was elections, aimed at encouraging the people at large to find and lift up the best of their acquaintance to represent them in the conduct of their institutions of self-government.
Elections are, as Aristotle noticed long ago, an effectively aristocratic institution. But if they are to serve their aristocratic purpose, voters must choose in light of a true standard of better and best. America’s Founders counted on the fact that Christianity’s true moral ethos, prevalent among voters in the new United States, would provide it. All the way up to and through the Civil War, and during the period of westward expansion and economic development that followed it, America’s history seemed bent on proving their faith justified. But during the 20th Century that changed.
Christians allowed a specious understanding of empirical science to get away with asserting that science and the Christian religion stand somehow opposed to one another. They therefore retreated from the premise of Creation, crucial to the logic of rights set for in the Declaration of Independence. But confident Christian faith was the first foundation for the ideas of right and justice on which America’s experiment with decent human self-government were founded. Therefore, as Christians retreated, that experiment commenced to fail. Will 2016 be the year in which that process ends, confirming America’s final turn to oligarchic tyranny?