* Was all this David-Duke-KKK stuff the ‘atomic bomb’ meant for Trump?
* … and all it took was a savvy and quick-witted, independently wealthy, independently famous, uninhibited billionaire reality TV star willing to finance his own campaign and with a gift for using the new media to thwart the old one. Who says the system’s rigged?
The Aryan Vulgarian is forcing the mainstream political class to finally have to take some shots a little bit rather than assume they get to just dish them out for decade after decade. This is happening now because of Trump but it’s much bigger than just the Republican Party in the US or even the whole of counterfeit conservatism throughout the Anglosphere.
I almost feel sorry for these pundits and consultants who were sure they were famous because they were the smartest people in the country, rather than because they worked for the guys with a media network and knew how to play the game of kiss up and kick down on TV.
These guys have had a scare put into them so, if Trump’s campaign fails, these mainstream conservatives will join with the social justice warriors to crack down on so-called internet hate and domestic terrorism. Their Trotskyite side will be turned on the rest of us, rather than just on people in faraway countries. That’s why Trump has to go all the way now.
* Drudge and Breitbart are nearly single issue now. Trump has shown that being right on immigration means you can be wrong from their perspective on everything else. It’s an open question where this all goes from here.
* I used to think that I was a Republican and a conservative. No longer. This election season made me realize I’m neither. Maybe just an American realist. I’m embarrassed when I think that I once had subscriptions to TNR, First Things, et al., and used to give money to conservative groups. Fuck that, I now hate the conservative establishment with a red-hot passion and want nothing but doom upon them. For me it’s Trump or nothing. Never, ever again.
President Calvin Coolidge: “The business of America is business.”
Marco Rubio: “Donald Trump is a con-man.”
Robert Kraft, billionaire owner of the Patriots: “Donald Trump is a financial genius.” (7/20/2015, TMZ)
Marco Rubio: “Donald Trump’s not a good businessman.”
Billionaire business titans who have known Trump for decades, have spoken to Trump’s business acumen, and support Trump for President:
Carl Icahn
Steve Wynn
Phil Ruffin
Elie Hirschfeld
* I can’t help recommending Anne Applebaum’s Twitter feed as a great source of just this sort of impotent rage and hand flapping. Because she and her husband have their thumbs in pies on both sides of the Atlantic, her tweets are a one-stop shop for those of us looking for news on the collapse of this lousy “end of history” era.
* Trump derangement syndrome. Half this self-important loon’s tweets are about Trump being a Brownshirt.
* David Frum writes: As the governor of Florida, Bush had cut taxes and balanced budgets. He’d challenged unions and championed charter schools. At the same time, Bush passionately supported immigration liberalization. The central event in his life history was his reinvention as an honorary Latino American when he married a Mexican woman, Columba Garnica de Gallo. He spoke Spanish at home. He converted to Catholicism. He sought his fortune with a Cuban American business partner. In his most quotable phrase, he described illegal immigration as an “act of love.”
Bush’s update of Conservatism Classic had made him a hit with the party’s big donors. He had won accolades from Karl Rove (“the deepest thinker on our side”) and Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute (“a top-drawer intellect”). Yet within five weeks of his formal declaration of candidacy on June 15, Bush’s campaign had been brutally rejected by the GOP rank and file.
Something has changed in American politics since the Great Recession. The old slogans ring hollow. The insurgent candidates are less absurd, the orthodox candidates more vulnerable. The GOP donor elite planned a dynastic restoration in 2016. Instead, it triggered an internal class war.
The premise of the past few thousand words is that the Republican donor elite failed to impose its preferred candidate on an unwilling base in 2015 for big and important reasons. But maybe that premise is wrong. Maybe Jeb Bush has just been a bad candidate with a radioactive last name. Maybe the same message and platform would have worked fine if espoused by a fresher and livelier candidate. Such is the theory of Marco Rubio’s campaign. Or—even if the donor message and platform have troubles—maybe $100 million in negative ads can scorch any potential alternative, enabling the donor-backed candidate to win by default.
Perhaps some concession to the disgruntled base is needed. That’s the theory of the Cruz campaign and—after a course correction—also of the Christie campaign. Instead of 2013’s “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Liberalization,” Cruz and Christie are urging “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Enforcement.” True, Cruz’s carefully selected words on immigration leave open the possibility of guest-worker programs or other pro-employer reforms after a burst of border enforcement. But Cruz and Christie have seen the reaction to Donald Trump’s message, and appear to appreciate the need to at least seem to do something to redress the grievances of the Republican base.
Yet a narrow focus on immigration populism alone seems insufficient to raise Republican hopes. Trump shrewdly joins his immigration populism to trade populism. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders’s opposition to open borders is logically connected to his hopes for a Democratic Socialist future: His admired Denmark upholds high labor standards along with some of the world’s toughest immigration rules. Severed from a larger agenda, however—as Mitt Romney tried to sever the issue in 2012—immigration populism looks at best like pandering, and at worst like identity politics for white voters. In a society that is and always has been multiethnic and polyglot, any national party must compete more broadly than that.
Which brings us to …
Option 3: True Reform
Admittedly, this may be the most uncongenial thought of them all, but party elites could try to open more ideological space for the economic interests of the middle class. Make peace with universal health-insurance coverage: Mend Obamacare rather than end it. Cut taxes less at the top, and use the money to deliver more benefits to working families in the middle. Devise immigration policy to support wages, not undercut them. Worry more about regulations that artificially transfer wealth upward, and less about regulations that constrain financial speculation. Take seriously issues such as the length of commutes, nursing-home costs, and the anticompetitive practices that inflate college tuition. Remember that Republican voters care more about aligning government with their values of work and family than they care about cutting the size of government as an end in itself. Recognize that the gimmick of mobilizing the base with culture-war outrages stopped working at least a decade ago.
Such a party would cut health-care costs by squeezing providers, not young beneficiaries. It would boost productivity by investing in hard infrastructure—bridges, airports, water-treatment plants. It would restore Dwight Eisenhower to the Republican pantheon alongside Ronald Reagan and emphasize the center in center-right.
* Well it’s about time we turn our back on Frum and the rest of his “Unpatriotic Conservatives.” Thanks to them we’re bankrupt and the Middle East is burning. And he wonders why his ilk is so hated.
* When is Frum going to denounce the mainstream republicans as unpatriotic? Recall his denunciation of Patrick Buchanan and others who did not support the Iraq War as the unpatriotic conservatives. I would like to see him write something similar about these GOP turncoats.
* Time to get over Frum’s nasty 2003 article in National Review [on unpatriotic conservatives who oppose the invasion of Iraq]. For the past 5 years or more, his has undertaken the difficult and thankless task of selling immigration restriction to elite centrist types.
His Twitter feed is full of him hitting back on attacks on Trump:
And he’s a top main-streamer of HBDsphere ideas, for example:
Frum.
* Trump’s rise would not have been possible without the visibly inept and corrupt GOP elites. They spent much of their credibility on neocon foreign policy and donor-friendly domestic policy, and turned our to have nothing to offer most of their voters besides ineffectual rage about social policies like gay marriage and abortion. (Their opposition hasn’t been effective enough to stop either of those things, but has done well at raising money and keeping religious in line when it came to support for bombing more peasants or bailouts for the banks or lowering taxes at the top.
