Posted on 08/01/2016 10:56:39 AM PDT by COUNTrecount
First of Three Parts
1. Populists vs. Elitists
Something big is happening in American politics—bigger than this election. And so even if we can’t precisely predict the winner this November, we can know the general contours of American politics in the decades to come: populists on one side, elitists on the other. But first, let’s start by thinking about what we’ve seen at the party conventions in the last two weeks: the Republicans nominating Donald Trump and the Democrats nominating Hillary Clinton. And maybe it’s best if we’re sitting down, because the changes are such that we could get dizzy.
Here’s the July 28 headline in The Washington Post: “We are witnessing a visceral shift in the way the parties speak to the country.” The story continued, “The country’s two major political parties, emerging from their conventions to square off in the general election, are speaking to Americas unrecognizable to each other in voices that sound like a political and ideological role reversal.”
“Role reversal”? Well, actually, that’s overstated: The Republicans are still on the right, and the Democrats are still on the left. In Trump’s Cleveland, for example, the police were the heroes, frequently applauded by GOP delegates, as well as by speakers; yet in Hillary’s Philadelphia, the cops were regarded with stony silence.
Nevertheless, the Post story on the parties’ reversals, datelined Philadelphia, was onto something: “For Republicans, the country is a place of near-apocalyptic gloom whose best days are fast receding. … The nation of the Democrats . . . meanwhile, is a vibrant and diverse place.
atmospherics and rhetoric. Trump has, to be sure, changed the GOP: It is now the populist party. Meanwhile, under Hillary Clinton, the Democrats are now the elitist establishment party.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Turning into Europe faster than anticipated.
Elitists are, by definition, in the minority.
Bidding fair for this, but the USA isn’t quite ready to be Europe. Donald Trump is the evidence for that.
“Trumpian majority.”
Well I certainly hope not.
Every time someone starts declaring a “Whatever Majority” this or “Whatever Majority” that, it is almost always wrong and usually means the majority is going to swing back the other way - hard.
Can we just won this one election please before we begin declaring enduring “majorities” and “landslides”?
Then there are the absolute morons. Like the apostate kaytholyks at the apostate parish where Tim Kaine goes to Mass, where they gave him a standing ovation last Sunday.
We had two elitist parties. Now we have one elitist socialist party and another semi elitist party, soon to be a nationalist populist party (Patriots).
Riiiiight.
After all, look at all those Congresscritters and Senators with Rs after thier names coming out and singing the praises of Trump....defending him against the lies of the RATS and the MSM.
Why, it's a tsunami of support I tell ya!
So-called "progressives" of both Parties in recent times, portray themselves as the "intellectual" elite, although they may be totally bereft of any real knowledge or understanding of the great ideas which were the seedbed of Ameria's successful 200-year experiment in liberty.
Today's so-called "progressives," with all of their domination of academia and Far Left politics, seem to fit into a category described in an essay by T.S. Eliot on Virgil:
"In our time, when men seem more than ever to confuse wisdom with knowledge and knowledge with information and to try to solve the problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is a provincialism not of space but of time--one for which history is merely a chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and have been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no share."(Bold added for emphasis)
Without intellectual anchoring in the enduring ideas which provided the philosophical foundation of America's Declaration of Independence and Constitution, their vain imaginations of superiority only expose their limited world view.
Yet, the America which rose from obscurity to greatness, from crude hoes and axes to putting a man on the moon, and from oppression by King George to a symbol of liberty for millions all over the world--that America provides shelter for them, even as they attempt to "change" her into something unimagined by the Founders, and ungrounded in Constitutional principles.
If they are allowed to succeed in their own little provincial experiment, their posterity never will know the "blessings of Liberty" proclaimed by the Preamble to America's Constitution.
Now might be a good time for conservatives to read Dr. Russell Kirk's "The Conservative Mind, which can be read online, by the way.
In Kirk's last chapter he reviews the works of poets and writers, quoting lines which now seem to bear a striking resemblance to the players on stage in American politics today.
For instance, in Robert Frost's "A Case for Jefferson," Frost writes of the character Harrison:
"Harrison loves my country too
But wants it all made over new.
. . . .
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens.
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it made over new."
Yes, the pseudointellectuals who occupy the White House, the media, and much of Congress fancy themselves "intellectuals."
By their words and actions, however, they display that provinciality Dr. Kirk recalls as having been described by T. S. Eliot (see above) as being one of time and place, having no intellectual grounding in ideas older than their own little experience in dabbling and discussing Mao, Marx, and other theoreticians.
America's written Constitution deserves protectors whose minds are out of their "teens" in terms of their understanding of civilization's long struggle for individual liberty.
It certainly deserves protectors who do not consider it a "flawed" document because that Constitution does not permit the government it structures to run rough shod over the rights of its "only KEEPERS, the People" (Justice Story).
Blasting it "all to smithereens" seems to be the goal of the Far Left and its power-hungry leaders.
Those who have found ways to bypass the Constitution's limits on their power rely on what they believe to be the ignorance of the American people when they assert extra-Constitutional powers. They have been outwitted, however, by an increasingly knowledgeable citizenry who are using the miracles of technology to study for themselves ancient and modern writings on the ideas of liberty versus those of tyranny. As Jefferson wisely observed:
"History, by apprising the people of the past, will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views."
bflr
“Vote Trump”
Thanks for all that. And I’m gonna do it too.
“Get the blowhard OFF of twitter and make him stop rolling around in the dirt with the little people.”
Spoken like a liberal Democrat that thinks voters are “little people” and Trump is just a blowhard.
Idiot...Why is he wasting time with the parents of a mooselimb soldier? Name me ONE president in American history that has engaged in twitter feuds. STOP IT. Get Ol Stubby Fingers focused on preparing for the debates, boning up on The Constitution and appointing people who can WIN a campaign.
Ironic that you call the man that trumped 16 other contenders, including the anointed Bush, as someone who needs your ignorant advice.
Blow it out your poop chute.
If your advice were worth anything, one of the other *16* Republican contenders would be the nominee.
The banking system is nothing but a redistribution center, for the ones chosen and money for the super rich. Its against the common man. A serious change needs to come. Hopefully Glass and Steagall, if that isn’t enough do more. The present system is against growth and the achievers.
Yes, the system is against growth and achievers. Anything that earns money, immediately gets a new tax. Same with the old video game arcades that were put out of business by politicians who taxed the cash cow. Now they’re going after streaming services in Pennsylvania (Netflix and Hulu). People don’t go out to movie theaters as much because the prices keep going up. They stream films in their homes. Bureaucrats want to tax the one little bit of entertainment that the peasants can afford.
Those congress critters, many of them, simply can not believe that a neophyte non-politician can win more votes in primaries than Ronald Reagan or Bush-43. It is completely out of their realm of reality consisting of MSM, cocktail party chatter, and their colleagues in congress with whom they have lunch everyday in the tax payer paid dining room.
Trump has awakened the schlonged hard working middle class whose jobs have been either exported to cheaper labor countries or taken up by cheaper foreign workers on H1-B visa. After observing the American political scene since 1960, when I first arrived in this country as a graduate student, and watched the JFK-Nixon debates from the basement TV room in my Quadrangle dorm in Iowa city, I am fascinated by the seismic shift towards nationalism in American politics. The Trump effect will be greater than Bradley effect in CA, and that is something which is impossible to show up in polls, except large on-line polls such as Drudge.
Correct, the banking system is anti-thesis of Robin Hood. It takes from the lower 90% and distributes to the top 10%.
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