All who have worked in a particular field know that their field has a public and private reality, much like Hillary Clinton’s words and gestures. Whether it be the boardroom braggadocio of stockbrokers on the hunt for the next whale, or mechanics sizing up the chump walking through the door, reality is that to a certain tolerable and unavoidable extent we accept that what goes on inside an industry is different than what it projects to the public.
This is true most of all in politics, as WikiLeaks has given us a small glimpse into. Through the insularity of its culture and its shelter from critique or consequence, political corruption has become so great that the time has come for an outsider to take the helm and right ship.
A little graft, a little corruption, yes. Unavoidable. We can’t be purists. But when it gets so out of hand that it threatens the existence of the whole racket itself, and all the interests tied to that racket—our government; law, stability, the America world order that rests upon it—an outsider is needed to come in and drain the swamp.
Whatever practices Trump has developed in his real estate business, there is nothing to indicate he would look upon widespread government corruption with leniency. He does not have the reputation of a sleazy slumlord or a sharp speculator. His work has been in building and long term operation of facilities, creating value, building a brand synonymous with quality, not in bilking people for rent in roach infested tenements or buying up properties to be condemned or timing the market, skimming and flipping. He is mocked by the press for not having better market timing, where, had he been better, that too would have been held against him for being a shrewd, unforgiving operator and taker of advantage. As real estate magnates go, his hands are rather clean.
Hillary, by contrast, is the quintessence of the corrupt politician, the dirty insider, the political hustler. She and Bill have made an art out of it. They’ve taken everything that was sleazy in politics and put it in stark relief, magnified to excess, and made it shamelessly blatant, so that covering up for them really strains their friends in the media, despite their deftness and agility with wielding words to make black seem white and white black.
Hillary is the archetypal crooked insider, the apotheosis of the establishment. She is a sign of real rot and real overreaching by our power elite. If on November 9th they awake victorious, they’re going to have a hard realization that they bought it, and they own it.
Trump is a public figure who’s been sparring with the media for 45 years and under its unsparing spotlight. The desperation of last week’s effort at pinning sexual impropriety on him with accusations suspiciously following the pattern laid out by Anderson Cooper’s particular interpretation of Trump’s words in an old tape are belied by the prior 50 years of newsprint and oral legend (a different sort than Bill and Hill’s).
What Washington needs now is an outsider to come in and look at the books, in every sense. To check the spread of bureaucratic inefficiency, of self-dealing, of pay for play that has been engulfing government since long before the Clintons perfected it and made it stink with arrogant flaunting. To check the proliferation of policies drawing their purpose solely from the interests of tenured, comfy sinecure positions of policy making, rather than any sort of rational, national policy goals arrived at by the public and its elected representatives.
When such malignancy crosses even into the foreign policy establishment of our country, so that cold war retreads who know nothing other than ringing Russia with missiles and can protect their policy turf only by offering the same stale policy advice that no longer serves our interests, an outsider is needed to shake things up.
When failed neocons not eight years out from their ignominious expulsion from government can re-invent themselves, and barnacle-like attach themselves to the slow moving, bloated barge that is Hillary Clinton’s policy Comintern, and hawk their old worn out wares all over again – the mad dream of converting tribal, consanguineous state-lets and would-be theocracies into liberal western democracies – it’s past time for an outsider with common sense to enter the lists.
Who has been warning for decades about American decline in trade and world standing? Who has been the embryonic nationalist, not falling for the siren song of globalism? Trump.
The fever dream of globalism–for some, a naive ideal, for others, the way to a fast buck—has failed. It has been shown up as a one sided transfer of wealth and capital to mercantilist powers that have no interest in the Anglo-American elite’s one world dream. It has impoverished and divided America, enriched its corporate elite and concentrated its wealth, spawning dangerous currents of nationalism and socialism in reaction that are the antithesis of individualism and classical liberalism.
Our one true, pressing security interest–the long term manufacturing and technological edge of America–has been sold out to a behemoth called China with upward of a billion people which can have its way in a world where America is torn into balkanized factions that do not recognize each other as countrymen and do not recognize the legitimacy of our ruling elite, and which has sought to corrupt elements of that elite with illegal, under the table campaign contributions. To whom? The Clintons. For decades.
So where does that lead us in a century or more?
What ought to have been a Pax Americana after the sacrifices of World War Two now more and more looks like a smoking heap, lost by a series of epic blunders, and Uncle Sam stumbling on the world stage to the alarmed amusement of half the world.
America needs a set of policies for the 21st century, comprising industrial policy, border control, healthcare, real security against rising Islamic radicalism, and continued technological superiority.
The elite need to start bargaining with the people, and stop disdaining them, or none of us are going to get along good in the next century, which most assuredly will not be an “American century.