Fewer items today, addressing these themes: Who is Donald Trump? Is he who he says he is? Are his critics missing the point entirely? Especially those content to call him a fascist and assuming that namecalling will suffice?
One may disdain Donald Trump. But whether we look at the neocons in the GOP or the politically correct intellectual fascists of the left, are we seeing anything other than rank hypocrisy of the worst sort?
Last Friday night (after I'd posted that day's Daily Donald), a friend of mine — someone I’ve known for years and whose judgment I tend to trust — sent me this:
http://www.targetliberty.com/2016/03/trump-names-president-of-council-on.html
Unfortunately, I’d turned off the Thursday debate. It wasn’t that I couldn’t take any more of the Jerry Springer type stuff, although others told me they’d stopped watching for that reason. The debates did not start until 11 pm in my time zone. So I missed the crucial moment. It would have leaped out at me: a definite red flag. My friend is attempting to pursue it through her contacts. No one else I know of is. It needs to be pursued.
Who is Richard N. Haass? He has been the president of the superelite Council on Foreign Relations since 2003. He has authored articles defending globalism intelligently. One of most widely read is here:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/print/2006/02/21/2003294021
It is short and to the point: sovereignty as traditionally understood is history, in Haass’s considered view. The claim, anyway, is that when Trump was asked who he looked to for advice on foreign affairs, Richard Haass was the first name he mentioned. I have posted this elsewhere. No one has told me my friend was wrong.
So is Donald Trump who he says he is? Is he really anti-Establishment? Or is all this just show, just another means of leading the masses down a primrose path in a direction where they can’t do any real damage? If it is, heads will roll. Should Trump both get the nomination and win the presidency; and immediately begins to cotton to the Establishment, things might get very ugly, very fast!
There is another possibility, of course. Trump’s being an outsider may make it possible that he simply doesn’t know about Haass’s position. Haass may simply be a guy who has written on foreign policy in a way that makes sense to Trump. Both, after all, are pragmatists. In that case, again, however, Trump is vulnerable to being led down that same primrose path, right back to globalism and the Bush-Clinton abyss.
Critics of “Trumpism” appear aware of none of this. Two recent articles focus on the attacks the Establishment has mounted against Trump. Both are by fairly prominent (on the Internet, anyway) authors: Christopher Hedges and Glenn Greenwald.
Hedges’ article is here:
Note the insinuation that only the “lower classes” are drawn to Trump (untrue), and that as an unintelligent mass looking for a “strongman,” they are vulnerable to the fascism Trump allegedly represents. He is, of course, correct in noting that these “lower classes” are rebelling against what has been done to them by the elites over the past 30 years. Like most left wing intellectuals he attacks them mercilessly as
want[ing] a kind of freedom—a freedom to hate. They want the freedom to use words like “nigger,” “kike,” “spic,” “chink,” “raghead” and “fag.” They want the freedom to idealize violence and the gun culture. They want the freedom to have enemies, to physically assault Muslims, undocumented workers, African-Americans, homosexuals and anyone who dares criticize their cryptofascism. They want the freedom to celebrate historical movements and figures that the college-educated elites condemn, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederacy. They want the freedom to ridicule and dismiss intellectuals, ideas, science and culture. They want the freedom to silence those who have been telling them how to behave. And they want the freedom to revel in hypermasculinity, racism, sexism and white patriarchy. These are the core sentiments of fascism. These sentiments are engendered by the collapse of the liberal state.
I submit that this is ad hominem stuff, and that the truth is somewhat different (to say the least). While of course there are pro-South whites who question that the War for Southern Independence was fought exclusively over slavery, and there are also people of various ethnicities that question the normalcy of homosexuality, by and large we are talking about people who just want to be left alone, and not be rendered vulnerable to political agendas and economic forces they have no legal defenses against.
The “lower classes” have the same access to the Internet that Hedges does, are more than capable of educating themselves outside the approved channels, and reaching conclusions reasonable to them despite their dismissal by said elites as “conspiratorial.” And yes, they will rally around someone who speaks their language and claims to be the only person defending their interests. In that case, the incessant attacks from mainstream media and from members of the Establishment (Mitt Romney being the obvious case, from last week) only reinforce their conviction that their class interests are under sustained assault from an elite interested only in increasing its wealth and power — at their expense (i.e., at the expense of their jobs and general well-being).
I am still looking around for someone able to argue that this is wrong, without the juvenile namecalling (“fascist”), etc.
Peggy Noonan has written an intelligent take on this:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-the-rise-of-the-unprotected-1456448550
Unfortunately the bulk of it is behind a paywall. The gist: there have been two classes, which she calls the “protected” and the “unprotected” which are fairly neutral terms and therefore safe in a mainstream business publication like the Wall Street Journal. There is one set of rules for the “protected” and a different set of rules for the “unprotected”; one of the consequences is that Wall Street bankers not only get away with nearly wrecking the economy a decade ago but get bonuses; you or I would be thrown in prison for a very long time, because we’re “unprotected.” (The entire piece is on my Facebook page.) Noonan is correct as far as she goes. I tend to think there are three classes, however, not two. There are those I would call the politically correct (PC) class: not elite but with their own set of protections (e.g., by campus speech codes, official or not): minorities, feminists, homosexuals, etc. White men clearly do not have their protections. (My article on this subject should appear on NewsWithViews.com in a few days; this site is a hotbed of Trump support, incidentally.)
Finally, Glenn Greenwald sees Trump as far more reflective of the Establishment than its denizens would ever care to admit. There are a lot of criticisms of Trump that are nothing more than hypocrisy and pretense, as when they condemn Trump for his sanctioning an “expansive” use of torture which they themselves sanctioned during the Bush II years. Or their striking a pose of horror at the idea of Trump using the military to take out terrorists’ family members when they themselves have been doing the same thing, which include military strikes on funerals and include Obama’s ordering the taking out of two U.S. citizens unilaterally (they had Arab names), without benefit of a trial and conviction in a court of law. These people, Greenwald notes with ironic disbelief, express affected outrage at Trump’s contention that he would order military officials to commit what would be deemed war crimes. But could Donald Trump conceivably design a worse or more bloodthirsty foreign policy for the Empire than the neocons of Bush II and Obama have furthered during the past 15 years?
Coming full circle, one can only hope that Donald Trump is what he claims to be. Because the reactions to him are possibly more significant than he is, by himself. He has galvanized a movement, and that movement isn’t going anywhere any more than the Establishment is going anywhere. The fact that the latter certainly seems to be in panic mode is at least some evidence of his sincerity, and that he may not know of Haass's upper-echelon affiliations. Some advisor needs to inform him, in this case! If Trump loses to a member of the Establishment, either at the GOP convention or in the general election, it is not hard to envision major confrontations ahead, now that more of the “unprotected” are awake and have decided they have had enough.
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