A brokered convention is a convention in which none of the candidates has a sufficient number of delegates to clinch the nomination following the first vote to be taken. The 2016 GOP convention will be a brokered (or contested) convention if the expenditures the GOP corporate donor class is making are able to turn crucial states such as Ohio and California away from Donald Trump, probably in favor of Ted Cruz, or win Florida for Marco Rubio although that seems quixotic at this point.
Prospects for a brokered convention this year are discussed here:
If Trump has won, let us say, 50 delegates in South Carolina, what this means is that those 50 delegates are pledged to vote for Trump on the first ballot. If Trump does not win enough delegates on that first vote, the deal making begins, and the 50 delegates are then free to vote for whomever they choose. The floor is open, including for ballots cast for candidates who did not enter the primaries (Mitt Romney being a conceivable example). Negotiations will take place and continue until one candidate has a sufficient number of delegates to be nominated, whoever it might be!
This is how the GOP elites hope to seize the nomination from Donald Trump at the last possible minute from the electorate. Mitt Romney denies that his speech last week was the opening gambit of a new campaign in a brokered convention; but does anyone really believe it’s not in the back of his mind, especially if Rubio’s credibility is gone and Cruz remains hardly their favorite alternative to Trump.
The GOP Establishment, which I maintain is working for higher-order globalists, will do what its minions believe they have to in order to maintain power, both for themselves and those they work for — even if this means the GOP goes down in flames after this election!
It is very conceivable that Trump will go into the July convention with more delegates than his opponents, with the number not being sufficient to clinch the nomination. If the nomination is then taken from him, (at least) two things are likely to ensue.
(1) Those down in the trenches and from the grassroots who have supported him from the get-go, and who probably suspected all along that the U.S. became an oligarchy decades ago, will simply walk out so far as supporting the GOP nominee goes. They will either stay home on Election Day or vote third party. Some will probably never support the GOP again as long as they live. The GOP elites are assuming that the rest either have short memories or will continue to support the GOP because “conservatives have nowhere else to go.” Which they don’t, in the absence of a genuine conservative political party. Which brings me to
(2) Trump can still mount an independent candidacy. He has said, quite credibly, that if he leaves the GOP he will take his supporters with him. It could be the start of a genuine right-populist party that would be alone in defending the interests of white working and former middle class people, that Country Class Angelo Codevilla wrote about in his The Ruling Class (see also my “The Real Class War” when it appears). Ross Perot got 19 million votes back in 1992 but was unable to make a dent in the Electoral College. Trump will get more than 19 million votes, and will make a dent in the Electoral College. He would be the first independent presidential candidate to win several states. Perot was the anti-NAFTA candidate. Everything he said about NAFTA came true. Trump, whatever other plusses and negatives he carries around, is the only candidate who has mentioned the Trans-Pacific Partnership openly in the debates. Last Thursday he called it a “disaster.” He is right. It has the potential to be the biggest job killer since NAFTA. This time the jobs won't go to China for cheap labor. They will go to Vietnam for even cheaper labor.
Realistically, however, the result of an independent Trump candidacy would be to divide the former GOP vote and give Hillary Clinton a landslide victory. I am still assuming she won’t be forced to end her candidacy to face indictment — quite a set of prospects we have in the Land of the Free these days! Conservatives, moreover, would remain divided possibly for the next several election cycles, assuming the country is able to continue to hold elections as it has in the past. Democrats, who already have demography on their side, would hold onto power indefinitely, especially if more and more aging conservatives simply gave up politics. They, too, serve the global elites. Anyone who thinks Hillary Clinton does not is kidding himself. If she escapes indictment, this is the reason. The Democrats, as many of us have noted, have their own “populist” problem in Bernie Sanders, but Sanders does not have Donald Trump’s assertiveness nor his resources. Nor does he have Hillary’s resources. He will eventually be forced to concede the nomination to her. Yet again there is a movement there that I do not think will go away.
One of the biggest issues of our time: is it possible to turn back the rapidly consolidating global elite rule — global oligarchy, that is? Sanders has used this term openly. Trump has not (to my knowledge) but his very candidacy presupposes it.
The policies of global elites, after all, operating primarily through central banks and investment banks, as well as through other corporations, business environments including Silicon Valley despite its pretenses of libertarianism, bear primary responsibility for the growing inequality seen all over the planet. They are also responsible for the gathering financial instability discussed here:
G. Edward Griffin, best known for his The Creature from Jekyll Island (the one book on the Federal Reserve you should read), recently pondered the tendencies toward and nature of elite rule. His point of departure was a statement by William Fulbright (founder of the Fulbright Scholarship program) made in 1963 which he says infuriated him. In his contribution to a symposium on The Elite and the Electorate Fulbright stated simply: “The case for government by elites is irrefutable.”
A reasonable person has to wonder, to what extent was Fulbright right? To what extent has our evolution toward a technocratic, technofeudalist globe directed by elites a natural process, created not just by the fact that a few are drawn to power as by the fact that the rest are incapable of the combination of education, moral principles, and vigilance necessary to maintain freedom?
We’ve all seen the videos and data showing how poorly public (government) schools have done, and how abysmally ignorant many people are of how “their” government operates. University students cannot name the three branches of government much less describe the assigned Constitutional role of each. I had entire classes of over 30 students in introductory level philosophy courses who could not name a single right enumerated in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; some could state (without much confidence, I might note) that it had something to do with free speech.
The fastest way a people loses their rights to that minority that is fascinated by power is not to know the rights their Constitution was written to protect!
G. Edward Griffin put the obvious follow-up question this way: Wouldn’t it be better if these people did not vote at all? The question I thought of, which doubtless would be denounced as “racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., etc., ad nauseum” were I to put it forth seriously: Wouldn’t it be best if voting were limited to those who had scored at least 60% on a political literacy test showing that they had mastered the basic tenets of representative government, including basic knowledge of what is in the Constitution?
The question before us, in other words — the one Fulbright stirred up in his lecture — is “government by the people” possible at all, or is rule by a privileged elite the natural state of affairs, with the structural features of vast, expansive civilizations making elite rule even more inevitable?
What makes it inevitable is what H.L. Mencken noticed over a hundred years ago: the tendency in mass civilization toward dumbing down, which leads to indifference to matters of state. This might seem unfair, so let’s moderate it: the tendency towards ever higher degrees of specialization in one’s work as a condition of success in it, and towards a narrowing of the ordinary person’s field of consciousness to within a range of activities circumscribed by work, family, church perhaps, neighbors perhaps, a hobby or two, with everything going on outside, including larger matters of governance that affect ordinary persons whether they like it or not, made almost impossible to attend to beyond following the evening news (and assuming that it tells the truth).
Today, that is, the problem of self-rule is compounded by the frenetic daily activities of many of us that render gathering the information we need to keep our rulers in check almost impossible except for hobbyists and activists who can be kept in check because of their invariably limited resources. This is true even given the huge quantity of information at our fingertips via the Internet.
Representative government was supposed to ensure that common people don’t need to worry about keeping the ship of state on course, because they can elect representatives to oversee it for them. The very idea assumes that these representatives can be kept free from the corruption likely to result when the “haves,” those who are most successful at any enterprise, decide that buying favors from what then becomes a protected political class is easier than competing against the constant stream of newcomers in a free market, all the while keeping what they are doing under the wraps to the greatest extent possible so that the rest continue to believe they are choosing their representatives. Power tends to corrupt, of course; but wealth can corrupt as well, in the hands either of the unprincipled or those unschooled in the principles of a free society.
One of the reasons we got into this mess was our allowing education to go into decline. Among other things, we decided that subjects like history and political philosophy were “unmarketable” and so should be ratcheted down in favor of what sold to the masses. Yes, to an extent, we said “let the market decide” while losing sight of the fact that this is a metaphor: in reality, markets don’t decide anything. People make decisions within markets. Some of those decisions are intelligent, but without education, many of them will be unintelligent. It sounds blunt to say it, but intelligent people will make intelligent marketplace decisions and stupid people will make stupid marketplace decisions. If people are uneducated, abstract defenses of free markets (such as those you’ll see in libertarian writings) will encourage just those things that take a society downhill, jeopardizing basic freedoms. In today’s world, the preference of the masses for entertainment over education assures this.
Behind the Trumpite revolution are masses — that “unprotected” class that has grown fed up with being lied to, put down, and sometimes demonized (as “racists,” etc., etc.). But if the above thoughts have anything to them, a successful Trumpite revolution which once again “empowered the people against the elites” would last a generation or two. It would last until a generation came along that once again collectively forgot the struggles that made its freedoms possible, handing them over to the next group of privileged elites.
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