Comment: Surprise!
“Conservative” “American” – don’t you love how he had the American flag flying in the background of his cover photo – compares Trump to … wait for it…. Hitler. https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2016/01/25/the-resistible-rise-of-donald-trump/This was a tribal conservatism, one that had very little to do with ideas, and everything to do with nationalism and a sense of us-versus-them.
To put it mildly, Goldman celebrates the nationalism and tribal conservatism of the people and country he actually cares about. Hint: it’s not Americans.
We’re a long way from Germany in the late 1920s, to be sure, but the parallels are disturbing. The Republican Establishment shouts from the rooftops that it prefers Hitl–, er, Trump to the horrible Ted Cruz. As Bob Dole put it, Trump could “probably work with Congress, because he’s, you know, he’s got the right personality and he’s kind of a deal-maker.” Robert Costa at the Washington Post, David French at National Review, Paul Mirengoff at Powerline, and other commentators too numerous to mention have weighed in on the same theme.
A real whos-who of American First Conservatives. I’ll definitely listen to them. Thanks for the “tip”, Dave.
Without a return to entrepreneurship, America’s economy will stagnate and America’s middle class will continue to lose ground. Donald Trump represents the triumph of resentment over hope. I don’t know what American voters will do. But I’m frightened.
Oh no, Heaven forbid, Dave is “frightened”! What about the actual Americans who’ve suffered 50 years of open borders and open anti-white animosity from their “leaders” and your fellow “experts”? Do they have the right to feel frightened, knowing there is nowhere to run – unlike you?
As with other “Respectable Conservatives” like Ben Shapiro, Fox New, National Review, etc. the mask has come off. The comments section is the best part. Some pile on, openly celebrating the demise of gentiles. Others point out how stupid his article is and how slimy his motives are.* This author lost his aura of “one of the smartest political commentators” by talking at the end of this piece as unhinged hack at the service of this or that wing of RINO political machine, calling itself Republican Party. Same thing happened of late with articles by editorial board of Commentary and “smartest” authors, who supposedly know better than us. All these smart people spent too much time in respected circles, got too much vested into their “smart” status, that it shows in any smart hit piece that they can write. Usually in the last couple of paragraphs.
His smartness is of the artificial kind that lacks integrity. This article is sum of its parts; it doesn’t compute.
This is the same kind of smartness that causes Likud establishment to promote Peace Racket that rules Israel since mid-1990s, no matter which party wins in elections. It must be made irrelevant together with destruction of organized political racket that it obediently serves.
What is happening now is Great Middle Class revolution. We should be grateful to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz for giving it a voice. And to people like Mark Levin. In spite of Mr. Goldman.
* Donald Trump VS the Davos Man
The pundit and activist class can’t seem to figure Donald Trump out, but as I have attempted to argue elsewhere, Trump’s politics are not really as inscrutable as all that. Trump is that guy at the barbershop who says “We need to run the US more like a business. What America needs is a CEO, not another President.” Trump just happens to have a lot of money and the credentials to be that CEO himself. The theme that the US is getting out negotiated on the international stage and we should start acting more in our own economic best interests have been there since Trump first became a public figure in the 1980’s. Trump, for example, opposed NAFTA before opposing trade deals was the cool thing to do on the right. The consistency of this message suggests that it is sincere, regardless of whatever one might think about the Trump phenomenon that has erupted since he announced his campaign. This economic nationalist message is the key to understanding Trump’s politics.
Trump’s opposition to “free trade” deals and open borders and unabashed advocacy of economic nationalism directly challenges the Establishment consensus in a way that no other candidate dose. All the major candidates in both parties with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders actually take Establishment neoliberal presumptions for granted.
I wince a little when I hear Trump says that America’s leaders are “stupid” and are being out negotiated by the more clever leaders of Mexico, Japan, China, etc. This is grating and potentially unhelpful. What is really the issue here is not smarts but priorities. The leaders of these other nations negotiate with the economic interests of their own countries in mind, while the US negotiates on the basis of fidelity to some imagined set of international rules of fair play, which just so happen to perpetuate the current system that enriches the global elite at the expense of national integrity. But regardless of Trump’s less than ideal formulation, who else is saying this?
Trump is ultimately a patriot who loves his country and wants to restore it to its former glory, as suggested by his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.” Imagine that. But this chauvinistic attitude is contrary to the rootless cosmopolitanism of the global elite. If you’re still struggling with Trump’s place in relation to the Establishment, ask yourself this: “Would Trump fit in at the World Economic Forum?” Trump is not Davos Man described in the introductory quote. He is the antithesis of Davos Man. He is a red-blooded American patriot from Queens, New York who just happens to have a really big bank account. Criticize Trump’s policies and ways if you must, but let’s not have any more of this nonsense that he is just another member of the Establishment. If you don’t see the fallacy of this claim, you don’t get why Trump’s rise represents such a fundamental challenge to the ruling order.
* We’ve been through three election cycles now where constitutionalists have done their damnedest to get people to wake the h3ll up, only to have their candidates sabotaged or, with but a couple of exceptions – Cruz being one, co-opted by TPTB.
The wrecking ball known as Donald Trump will finally put paid to the constitutionalists this cycle, and helped by the very people angry at the system he helped to create and has no intention of reforming.
The very enemy Trump’s backers say they are rebelling against are laughing their a$$es off.
Thank-you, sirs! May we have another?
* I love the power of the media. It must be intoxicating and exhilarating to make baseless allegations about the rich and powerful especially when they happen to be men who have achieved more and lived more in one life than media hacks will in nine.
So, I’ll try my hand at it, though I am attacking a man who is obviously of perverse and unsatisfied sexual needs who is in the pay of a foreign power. I would also like to add that this very same person is responsible for material omissions regarding the eligibility of his favorite presidential candidate – candidate no doubt in the pay of the author’s foreign masters.
How does that feel? I thought Spengler was a dignified deep-thinker. Comparing Trump to Hitler is beyond infantile. First of all, Hitler was monomaniacally fixated on Jews – Trump shows no such obsession with Mexicans or any group or issue.
Could it be that Spengler – like his coreligionists – favors a dull and virtually impotent White, Western world with such aggression as is permitted to be devoted either to fighting Russians or Muslims in far away nations that cannot hurt us as long as we keep them there.
It is manifestly obvious that Spengler and his ilk fear the slightest awareness of racial and ethnic interests on the part of whites whereas his ilk form private and public policy based on the first test of ethane-centrism: “is it good for the Spenglers, Cohen, Goldberg, etc. of the world?”
Please take your football and go home. Not to America, but to the city where the bank your checks are written on is based.
I ask again – how does that feel? Cuz I gotta tell you, I love this! I haven’t done a thing but hack away and somehow I feel like I achieved something!
* Your comments are way out of bounds- I am no fan of Trump (I tell people I already lost this election). This country used to produce people of genuine substance as our leaders. Do you see George Washington running around, I don’t? The Dems have completely lost touch with the people and the Republicans have become equally out of touch. Every thinking Jew knows that the survival of the Jewish people requires a strong robust United States led by people of ability and character. Lastly, America is deeply divided politically but you better wake up to the idea that an effective sustainable modern society needs healthy debate and no one has a monopoly on wisdom.
* This is a bit shallow. The author tries to paint the white working class as a bunch of whining bigots. In point of fact, Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, and others, tried to warn Americans 20 years ago that the American plutocracy was about to betray them. You might want to read this and learn something, instead of writing the usual Jewish tripe about all those Nazis waiting around in Middle America to throw you out…
* When Middle Class people are tired of being kicked around, that’s an “ugly mood.” Only to the elites who continue to benefit from how things are. When Trump speaks to these concerns, he’s Hitler. He’s not. He is not espousing a view of mystical racial superiority – only speaking some truths that media can’t handle, because they are the poodle of a system that is getting rich from these facts, and they don’t want anyone upsetting the gravy train.
* Where I do object to your essay is invoking Hitler in your unashamed attempt in deconstructing Donald Trump while enthusiastically waving your Ted Cruz inspired pom-poms. Your support for Cuz is your business but it becomes my business when the horrors of Nazism and Adolph Hitler are so cavalierly and dishonorably used to malign someone, anyone in fact. It goes to sensationalism, intellectual dishonesty, and a mitigating of the unspeakable crimes of that era. Mike Goodwin would be proud.
* It’s not clear whether you are trying to attack Trump or not but even without Ivanka’s marriage, one does not make it in the New York business world if he is anti-Semitic.
* I wonder if the author has any qualms with Israel’s immigration policy?
* And here we see illustrated yet again an age old observation: that no matter what superficial form or ideology they adopt (capitalist/socialist, liberal/conservative, atheist/religious, etc.), at the end of the day, JEWS ARE JEWS, and will always circle the wagons to propagandize against any leader who demonstrates an ability to unite the goyim and who doesn’t submit to the Judaic will. And this is precisely why Amerika so desperately needs a leader like Trump: to BREAK this REAL CONSPIRACY and FIGHT for OUR PEOPLE!
Study who is propagandizing against Trump (and Putin) most militantly — see any patterns? Trump has the potential to be an American Putin: strong, popular, Christian, and most importantly, SOVEREIGN. The last thing the West needs is more WEAK TRAITORS AND SHILLS like the ZOG/NWO tool MERKEL! European peoples everywhere are UNDER ASSAULT and need STRONG NEW LEADERSHIP, because our societies have been subverted by people who FEAR and DESPISE us!
* David P. Goldman: “Ivanka Trump converted to Judaism with her father’s blessing (my rabbi instructed her). It was a serious conversion; Ivanka knows Jewish law in great detail and is very observant. Trump–as I said in the first line–likes Jews. He is pro-Israel. As president he would be a strong supporter of Israel.”
* Trump is not Hitler. There is a large space between Hitler and what I said, believe it or not. It’s called normal nationalist/racial leadership, before the West was subverted by globalist shills and cultural marxists. My kind are in a dark mood because we haven’t had any strong leaders advocating for us in decades; just an endless parade of hostile shills, tools and non-useful idiots. White people literally have no homeland, and no strong leaders willing to defend us, under the post-1945 Pax Amerikana regime. Clearly, this situation is going to change one way or another, because there is something very big stirring throughout the West. My advice to hostiles: get the fuck out of the way!
* America was smarter in 1980 than it is now. In fact, it’s not even remotely close. That is what diversity and multi-culturalism have brought America – abject stupidity and the rise of Progressive politic. The Republican Party has followed suit.
I think what people are failing to recognize about the Trump mantra, is when it’s all said and done, little or nothing will really change unless we elect Trump as dictator. I don’t trust the man enough to do that.
When the election is over, Trump should he win, will swing the art of the deal.
That’s no more than a continuation of what’s been transpiring for 25 years. Trump is the continuation of Hope & Change with promises of a wall and harsh talk of Islam.
* David Goldman: The Weimar government printed money to buy foreign currency to pay reparations when it had no money to do so. The Versailles Treaty was at fault. Hitler “told the truth” about Versailles when a lot of German politicians temporized. In fact, he was a lot more accurate concerning the facts of Germany’s economic problems than Trump is about the US.
* Until recently, Spengler has displayed a Spengler-esque pessimism about the decline of the West in general, but he has tended to make an exception for the exceptional US, on the Bismarkian grounds that “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America.”
Readers of Spengler know that he links this “special providence,” and the American exceptionalism which it at once reflected and furthered–to the Protestant roots of America’s founding political theology. Those roots have now withered, and their fruit of a unique blend of individual initiative and a communal spirit quite distinct from tribalism (but classically evinced in the “civil society” that Tocqueville found so characteristically America) has consequently shriveled on the vine.
Americans are isolated, atomized, linked perhaps by Internet smarm and Kardashian gossip, but sharing neither the “mystic chords of memory” of a collective past nor the spiritual bonds enjoyed by those who regard themselves as part of a pilgrim body whose defining essence is found not in the blood and soil of the here and now, but in a transcendent eschatological destination. In short, constitutional patriotism is dead, and orthodox Protestantism has declined–perhaps fatally. Indeed, part of our “Weimar moment” is reflected in the cultural decadence and spiritual vacuum that have accompanied this decline. In Germany, the same vacuum that birthed cabaret culture also helped called forth You Know Who, who obligingly filled the spiritual emptiness with demonic brio.
What to do? We can seek provisional unity in a tribalism that pits in-groups against out-groups: This is the way of progressive multiculturalism and identity politics. Or we can seek unity in a Leader who seems to embody the now-absent spirit of the people, of the Volk, such that when they behold him on the stage, they seem to behold themselves–healed, united, restored–in a magic mirror. How can mere reason and the graphic presentation of employment statistics avail against such a “vision”?
We have, then, a party already committed to Balkanization, and another one heading down the path towards mystical authoritarianism. This won’t end happily.
Welcome to the Pessimists Club, Mr. Goldman.
* David Goldman: I’m worried. Our predicament reminds me of the conversation between the optimist and the pessimist. The pessimist says, “Things are so bad they can’t possibly get worse.” Says the optimist: “Don’t worry. They will.”
* Adolf was a one-off, a singular response to the unique situation and distinctive cultural history of Germany. My point was that nature abhors a spiritual vacuum just as much as a physical one, and thus such vacuums will be filled–generally, by a malevolent force.
There is a segment of the American public that is responding to that vacuum by hungering for a nationalistic strong man to respond to the mess created by the progressive, internationalistic messiah-figure that the left sold its soul to in 2008. This hunger is evident in the authoritarian character of their attacks on those who dare to disagree with them. Trump didn’t create this hunger, but his entry into the race brought it to the surface and gave it focus.
I believe that Trump is a mildly demagogic narcissist who bumptiousness in office could deeply harm American national interests . . . but I don’t think he has the right stuff–either in inclination or capacity–to be an American version of You Know Who (just as Obama lacked the right stuff to be an American Lenin or Stalin). What scares me more is After Trump: Obama the thesis, Trump the antithesis . . . and then something or someone very, very bad as the “synthesis” to clean up the mess. I think a similar pattern is afoot in Europe.
* Comparing Trump to Hitler or any other tinpot dictator is the last refuge of second rate, derivative intellectuals. Before taking over Germany Hitler, the bitter corporal, the failed artist, had no real accomplishments. He had no real family beyond a mistress. He was an angry, dysfunctional neurotic, a borderline psychopath who passed deep into the hinterland as he began loosing his war. Trump is a largely self made billionaire and media celebrity, neither feats are highly admirable, nor are they common or easy achievements. As for stability, Trump is by all accounts an excellent father of four exemplary children, apparently liked by all his successive wives and has few complaints from his many well paid employees. Such cannot be said of Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, Peron, Castro or even American wannabees like Huey Long or George Wallace. Spengler, awaken from your ideological slumbers! The key to Trump’s appeal is the courage to take a stand for the long ignored and always bypassed and snubbed desires of the majority on Americans on the crucial subject of immigration.
Americans rightly feel they have been tricked, lied to and disrespected on immigration. But to turn those angry feelings into reasons, here is why we are turning to Trump: 1) Our current immigration policies discriminate de facto in favor of those who can readily violate our southern border and against nearly everyone else across the planet. 2) Most Americans feel there are only two legitimate reasons for allowing new immigrants in: they should either provide skills and talents our economy can use or present a strong case for compassion, and our compassion should never favor one ethnicity over others. 3) Most people in the top 10% financially are seldom affected by immigrant crime, school and safety net strain, and neighborhood deterioration, many benefit by the access to cheap labor—all of this is even more true for the top 1%. 4) It is the bottom 90% who must bear the negative impact of uncontrolled illegal immigration. 5) In the last 45 years voters have been ignored on how many immigrants they want admitted and from where—you can bet that at no time would the majority favor immigration policies that allowed 60+% of all new immigrants to be underskilled and undereducated laborers from Mexico and the northern triangle countries. 6) Most suspect that US immigration policies and practices are crafted to benefit the wishes of special interests, especially those seeking cheap labor or bloc voters. 7) Few Americans want the USA to become a bilingual country like Canada or worse Belgium, yet they are increasingly confronted by Spanish everywhere, when it was almost nowhere 50 years ago. 8) Most Americans favor assimilation and the melting pot of which most are products. 9) Americans increasingly resent the intellectual arrogance and presumption of moral superiority displayed by those who try to dictate what we all should be allowed to say and and dare to think about immigration. A viable democracy requires that all citizens be entitled to respect as individuals, and neither the government nor self serving elites should be allowed to manipulate thought and suppress dissent. Americans see in Trump a leader who can bring us democratic, rather than elitist and oligarchic, immigration policies.
* David Goldman: I would vote for Trump against Hillary. Trump to my knowledge is not a criminal. The Clintons are a criminal enterprise.
